The Adoption Of Slavery Eats At The Soul
When a person reaches for some form of slavery as the engine for building a fortune and ruling over others, something inside goes missing. Pulling it off requires lying, to yourself or to the people around you. And the saddest version is the one where you lie to yourself about what you're actually doing until the lie becomes what you believe. Of everyone you could deceive, you are the worst target. One lie needs the next to hold it up.
Think about the film 12 Years A Slave. The plantation owner's wife deceived in order to hold onto her husband and the land she lived on. The owner lied to himself about the way he treated the enslaved woman he kept as his mistress. That woman, in turn, hid her true feelings from the owner and from everyone else on the plantation, concealing that she was there against her will. Because no one knew the truth, she suffered cruelty from the owner's wife, from the other enslaved people, and from the owner himself.
What a tangled life we build the first time we decide to deceive. Does the end really justify the means? Ask yourself how often you bend the truth, to yourself or to someone else, just to sidestep guilt or shame. The pull gets stronger when we feel exposed to other people's judgment. Rationalizing is handing over a respectable-sounding reason for something, a reason people will accept without pushing back. Call it justifying, if you prefer that word.
Confession does the soul good, and the first room to walk into is your own conscience. Take an honest look at yourself. Are there lies of omission hiding in there, or lies you spoke outright? Only a fool swallows his own lies and lets them harden into his reality. If you've decided you can't forgive yourself for something you did or said, the real obstacle is usually that you can't admit, even privately, how much you've been rationalizing and justifying it. Those justifications, once you see them plainly, show their true nature. They're lies.
Do you quietly let yourself forget the things you've done that make you squirm? Do you repeat an invented reason for an action so many times, chasing a little comfort, that the actual reason has slipped away from you?
Grown-ups find it simple to fool children, to get them believing something false, and then we laugh at the way they react. Sometimes they cry, and we still laugh. Lying to a child, or to anyone who lacks what we know, is easy. The ease of it is not the question; the question is whether we should. Stripping a child of innocence through lies and trickery is a form of theft. There's a reason we call children innocent.
Con artists and psychopaths know perfectly well when they're lying. They simply don't care whether what comes out of their mouth is true. Do you care? Get the thing the honest way or go without it. Every time you lie, respect drains away, other people's and, eventually, your own.