Lying Cheating Also Deception

The word “lying” originates from the Latin word “lectus”, which means “bed”. However, the modern-day definition pertains to speaking falsely, misleading others or telling untruths with the purpose of deceiving someone or something. The term made its entrance into the English vernacular around the end of the twelfth century, originally as the word “licgan”. Lying has been prevalent throughout the entire span of human history. It has been seen in the Bible, in medieval times, and has even been the cause of wars.

Deception has also made its appearance in academic and professional worlds as a means to further personal ambitions. Studies on lying have been conducted by college students, psychologists, and curious people everywhere. Everyone in this world has been affected by a lie as everyone has, at some point, told a lie—even Honest Abe, legend has it, told a fib or two. So let’s delve deeper into this complex issue!

“Your tongue devises destruction, like a sharp razor, O worker of deceit. You love evil more than good, falsehood more than speaking what is right. Selah. You love all devouring words, O deceitful tongue. But God will break you down forever; He will snatch you up and tear you away from your tent, And uproot you from the land of the living. Selah.” – Psalms chapter fifty-two, verses two through five. What this quote implies is that we should be mindful of our words and how we say them because we can cause harm, even if we think our lies won’t affect anyone. To illustrate this point, let’s examine the case of our unfortunate acquaintance, Private First Class Elijah Milton of Personnel Administration School Platoon Nine, Tac Nineteen.

To frame our discussion, let’s provide a little background about Milton. This Marines member used a word he should not have said, regardless of his skin color. As punishment, he was required to write a three thousand word essay due for submission in a week. Not an unreasonable punishment, in my opinion. However, Milton decided to pass off work that wasn’t his. Given the repetitive nature and limited scope of his essay, it was easy to see that this wasn’t truly his own work. Staff Sergeant Hughes caught onto this and instructed Milton to rewrite his presumably plagiarized essay after the winter break when classes resumed. Essentially, Milton was granted a generous two-week extension to write an improved version of his essay.

When Faculty Advisors or other students inquired about his essay, Milton would assure them saying, “I’m working on it. I will have it done, you don’t have to worry about me.” However, when staff Sergeant Pheeney asked for the final copy of his essay, Milton confessed that he hadn’t really attempted to complete his assignment. This lead to us having to write this subpar essay.

I got another example of our friend the green weenie, Private First Class Elijah Milton. This was on fire watch in the middle of the night and Gunnery Sergeant Willoughby was the Duty of the day. Gunnery Sergeant Willoughby was doing his routine checks on the decks of buildings 446 and 447, and he made it over to building 446 to make sure the fire watches in that building were doing their jobs. Not too long before Gunnery Sergeant made it over, Milton came down to use the head and realized there was no toilet paper. He told me, the phone watch, that he is going “to hold” and I believed him. Not even 5 minutes later, Gunnery Sergeant comes in and checks the deck Milton was on, which was the third deck. He came back down and asked me where the rover was and I told him he was roving his deck like I believed. well, I was wrong. Gunnery Sergeant came back ten minutes later, Milton was still not found. So he had me wake up my class leader, Private First Class Brown. As I got him, the Gunnery Sergeant came back twenty minutes later, there was still no sign of Milton. Brown and I put our heads together and knocked on his boy Marcellus’s door and there he was. Three seconds after we got down knocking on the door, Milton himself answers and I quote, “Gunnery Sergeant, I was taking a shit and there was no toilet paper downstairs.” Gunnery Sergeant replied, “So you were shitting for twenty minutes?” He said “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant”. As right then and there, Gunnery Sergeant Willoughby knew Milton had lied straight to his face and called Milton an integrity violator. After Milton’s shift was over, I said to him, “I know you were not taking a dump for twenty minutes.” I said, “I took a dump but I was also chilling in there.”

My next example is Private First Class Clark he would constantly lie to me and consistently be the green weenie in my behind. So I and Clark our first few field days went good as they should minimal hits and we passed as each field day would come each time Clark would be face timing some chick longer and longer each time and he would clean less and less so the last time we passed as a room he was face timing way too long and I said screw I will clean your side for you too and we passed that field day with no hits like we should of but honestly I got tired of his games and we went back to cleaning the like we originally planned the last two field days I and Clark were together he would face time all night like previously stated before. But now when he would get off the phone at zero hundred in the morning he would start cleaning but he only cleaned for about ten minutes and he would hit me with one of the trustworthy lines and it was my fault I trusted I was going to treat him like a man even though he did not deserve the respect but when said I will wake at zero four-thirty i am like you probably will not but prove me wrong each time he said he woke up at zero five-thirty and we would always end up at each other’s throats yelling and screaming and cursing each other like some fifth-grade sissies who just heard their first curse words in their lives and thought that kind thing was cool. Clark is a lying cheating scumbag who has the main goal in life of taking advantage of women for his own sexual pleasure. It is sickening and repulsing how he feels no problem banging four girls on recruiters’ assistance when he has a whole girlfriend waiting back here in Jacksonville North Carolina.

Now to go more historical into lies he is one of the biggest lies you were told in elementary school Abraham lincoln was pro no slaves actually it was contrary to what you were taught in school Abraham lincoln yes did eradicate and abolish slavery in America but that was not without many attempts to set up alternate slave lands just outside the Americas or even set up said lands in the Caribbean and back in Africa the motherland herself which set uplands such as Liberia. The Honorable Mr. Lincoln realized all these plans did not make economic or political sense do the fact all he wanted was to reunite the union and the confederate states back together.

Now, to talk about lies and deception in war. Some would call the title of this post the “most quoted” quote of Sun Tzu’s entire book. However, I dislike the emphasis many places on learning “The Art of War” through disjointed quotations. Chapter I has a significant section on deception, but readers of this isolated quote might never learn the context associated with it. Allow me to explain. When Sun Tzu elaborates on deception, he begins: “Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; When using our forces, we must seem inactive; When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; When far away, we must make him believe we are near.” A reader might glance over this and be tempted to remark, “Well, that sounds easy.” It most assuredly is not. When in a conflict against fellow human beings, the opponent is a man; being a man, he is familiar with the patterns that accompany readiness to attack, signs of inactivity, and indications of proximity or lack thereof. These are signs that armies and other large organizations give off without conscious thought or effort. While not every leader or strategist is well versed with the subtleties that accompany them, they are all familiar with the bold strokes that accompany an armored cavalry thrust from a General Patton, as one example. These are things that are hard to conceal, yet easy to detect. Thus, something more is required. This is the role of deception. Unable to simply show the enemy nothing, the strategist instead shows his opponent something that the opponent wishes to see and wishes to believe. Having shown something, but having shown this something in a way that creates a false impression, the enemy is seduced into deceiving himself.

I should point out right now that Sun Tzu, a man who strenuously preached the importance of benevolence and sincerity in a commander’s dealings – not only with his peers and his sovereign, but spies and others in uniquely vulnerable positions where trust is a greater commodity than money – in no way supported deception as a way of life in general. He supported the use of deception in war. This is a critical distinction. Sun Tzu continued, “Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.” Why feign disorder? Feigning disorder works because of a simple, time-honored principle: if you look like a sucker, someone is going to try and “sucker punch” you. This is also true in martial arts. A skilled martial artist who deliberately puts up a false front, pretending to be “slow” – mentally as well as physically – and to be quiet and passive, can lure an aggressive, careless opponent into making the first move in a careless manner that leads to a thorough beating. Such things have been known to happen. This reaction – seeing weakness, and pouncing on it – is deeply ingrained “alpha male” behavior. If the opponent attempts to exploit a false opening, it is he who becomes exposed.

“If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is superior in strength, evade him.” Against an opponent who is secure in defense, the best strategy may well be to await the opponent’s attack. When the opponent leaves his secure position to do battle, he may then be assaulted. However, if the opponent is superior in strength to you, you are not obligated to do him any favors and fight him on terms favorable to him; indeed, much of Sun Tzu’s strategy is devoted to not fighting on terms favorable to the enemy but to fight on terms favorable to you. Thus, an enemy superior in strength can be evaded. As we can see, Sun Tzu constantly sees delivering value to his stakeholders as the objective of his strategy. Sun Tzu does not seek fame or fortune via courage that brings battlefield defeat. Every thought and every action is devoted to fighting a war in the most efficient, effective manner possible, seeking to bring it to an end as quickly as possible.

“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.” Another deeply ingrained alpha male behavior is to take advantage of the weak. If an opponent is weak, he may be treated lightly and with arrogance. Like a cat playing with a mouse, the man in a position of advantage may seek to not only defeat his opponent but to thoroughly humiliate his enemy in every respect. This search for a more satisfying victory leads directly to carelessness.

Humans naturally carry out a sort of triage when dealing with threats. If one opponent appears weak, that opponent is set aside while measures are targeted against the stronger opponent. (This is a strategy made famous on the reality television series “Survivor.”) When the only opponent on a battlefield seems weak, an overtly prideful man often boasts, “I have no enemy here! I am peerless! This foe is no match for mine! I can defeat him whenever I wish!”

On the same note, a man who is trying to behave rationally but is prone to bursts of anger can be forced into highly aggressive actions (which meet his core nature), should he be sufficiently provoked. Not everyone with a temper can be lured in quite so effortlessly, but those who can often make careless mistakes.

“If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.” In the final stages of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, commanders were forced to make critical decisions after remaining awake for three consecutive days. Fatigue, both individual and organizational, is one of the main causes of critical mistakes. Affording the enemy any unnecessary chance to rest and recover mental strength is unwise. When it’s possible to deny the enemy rest, one should do so. Fatigue only makes his job significantly harder.

“Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected.” Now we arrive at the crux of the matter. Someone studying “The Art of War” through a collection of isolated quotations and passages might read this and think it stands on its own, but it does not. Your opponent is unprepared because you have deceived him. He does not expect you because you have aggravated him, made him arrogant, and deprived him of necessary rest to recoup his senses and reevaluate his vulnerable position. During warfare, every large deception you undertake is built on smaller deceptions already carried out. Having lured the enemy into deceiving himself about your strength, disposition, intentions, activities, and location, you can lead him around effortlessly, as if leading a donkey with a dangling carrot. You show your opponent what he wishes to see, and he alone decides that it is so; in this way, you deceive without ever having spoken a word to him or having lied in the conventional sense. You have assisted him in lying to himself. Thus, consumed by his own overconfidence, he is entirely at your mercy.

This can lead to a superior opponent in numbers and other measurements of strength being brought low, purely due to understanding that an army is led by a fallible human being. Lastly, “These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.” I summarize this passage with a simple quote from Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”: “Do not tip your hand.” After going to all this trouble to deceive one’s opponent, to tip one’s hand and reveal one’s tactics to the enemy through word, action, or spy is not only deadly to the deception but also ruinous as it allows the enemy to devise successful countermeasures. One does not have to lie to conceal one’s plans; a leader merely requires discipline to keep his strategies close to the chest rather than display them for all to see. In this way, secrecy is maintained, and the victory is won where defeat would otherwise be certain.
By the same measure, this is a crushing victory won, routing the enemy with less loss to one’s own side, rather than a narrow, hard-fought victory that could have been obtained through brute force alone. This is how maximum value is delivered to stakeholders via the most efficient use of resources possible.

Not all lies are actually bad. Some lies actually help balance the yin and the yang in this world. No lie: There are times when not telling the truth is a good thing. That’s according to a new study about the ethics of lying released today by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“We say lying is wrong in our personal and professional lives, but we often catch ourselves feeling very uncomfortable when we have to tell the truth. For instance, when we deliver critical feedback or when we tell grandpa that we don’t like the oranges he sends us every year as a birthday present,” says Emma Levine, a doctoral candidate at Wharton, who co-authored the study. “We lie all the time and we see other people doing it, so we get very mixed messages.”

Levine and her co-author, Wharton professor Maurice Schweitzer, delve into these issues, showing that lies come in many forms: well-intentioned lies are considered moral, while selfish or meaningless lies are considered immoral. We should think critically about when lying might be the right thing to do. The truth is that we all lie–but sometimes it’s to spare the feelings of others or prevent others from experiencing psychological harm.

The new Wharton paper points to many examples of this: We might tell our host that their meatloaf is delicious or tell a colleague that their work makes a valuable contribution when we don’t believe these things to be true. In everyday speech, we sometimes call these statements “white lies,” but this phrase gives the impression that these deceptions are inconsequential. Yet, people lie in high-stakes scenarios all the time: Parents might deceive their children about the state of their marriage or doctors might lie to their patients about exactly how terrible their diagnosis is to help them recover better.

“We are often very conflicted when we lie and we spend a lot of energy wrestling with our decision to lie,” Levine says. Levine and Schweitzer wanted to scientifically identify exact instances when lying is considered immoral. To do this, they put hundreds of subjects through scenarios involving deception to see whether they judged particular forms of lying to be good or bad. For example, in some cases, lying to someone might result in giving the recipient of the lie a few dollars; in other cases, lying to someone might result in taking a few dollars away from the recipient of the lie.

The results were unanimous: Lying to help another person was consistently perceived to be good, while lying that had no effect on the other person, or that harmed them, was perceived to be wrong. In the paper, Levine and Schweitzer write, “Individuals with altruistic intentions are perceived to be more moral, more benevolent, and more honest, even when they lie.” This is a major development in ethical research because until now, lies have been studied as a single category of selfish, wrongheaded behavior. Levine and Schweitzer make it possible to think critically about lying and to consider instances when it might be productive and healthy. “There might be interpersonal benefits that help others that require lying,” Levine says. “It’s important to move the conversation in that direction.”

So, what can we do with this information? As a first step, we can stop feeling guilty about every lie we utter. This sinking feeling prevents us from thinking rationally about our objectives and intentions. In some cases, benevolent lies may be the kindest and most reasonable course of action.

“From a business perspective, most managers feel very conflicted about lying to their employees,” Levine says. “Most companies say that they value honesty and integrity, but every day managers are not sharing complete information for the sake of protecting employees’ feelings or privacy. The advice on the table is that rather than saying something is worse than doing it anyway, we should be thinking critically about when lying might be the right thing to do.”

She hopes that this research allows people to have a more nuanced and open discussion about their behavior and motivations.

However, Levine makes it clear that not all lies are good: Many lies are harmful, self-interested, and just plain wrong. “I want to reiterate that people tell lies that are selfish and lies that don’t help anyone,” she says. “The point of our study is that helping others is often more important than honesty.” to go more in-depth into examples of white lies or beneficial lists here we go. Like some lies are actually are somewhat beneficial such as when you are a little kid and your momma or poppa realizes your dog is getting sick, old, or decrepit and realizes living is more harmful to the dog than death so they get your dog euthanized and tell you that they sent your dog upstate to live on a wide-open farm with the pastures and toys it wants. Lying has also hurt me very bad due to the fact of how many times I lied to my mom or dad telling them oh I am going to school today. Oh yeah if I went to school like I was supposed I would of never joined the marine corps or another lie I told when I actually went to school I told the teachers to give me the work I will do it at home. Maybe yeah I actually did the work but I didn’t do it myself and my teachers eventually caught me. He finally picked one of my outlines up with a few weeks left in school and read. He realized all i did was arrange the paragraphs of an old outline i found on line well another example was tenth science class i caught on to a trick my teacher did not know and that was she whited out the answers to the work sheet before she converted it over to a pdf and she did not know i knew so i was turning my work in to her way before everyone else so one day we were taking a test in that class i finished the test legitimately for once no i dont cheat in personnel administration school but i was shady in high school so when we finished the test i started the worksheet and highlighting everything she had previously whited i did not know she had walked behind me well that was not a good surprise to say the least never had to visit the principal’s office did get a lunch detention so honestly that was not too bad see in high school i was never the academic kind of type the only time i did show up to school was football season and my attendance still was shotty due to injuries and the lack of care for school at the time which haunts me now.

As a high school I missed over two hundred and fifty days of school and still passed so yeah it is not a lack of intelligence like the crappy platoon would say. I missed two hundred and fifty days of school and still graduated with a 2.4 weighted grade point average honestly may not be great but it is a million times better than half this platoon would have if they were put in this same situation and no I did not cheat my way through high school I just cheated sporadically mainly between two classes that honestly did not matter to what I plan on majoring or focusing on when I go to college so yes lying and cheating has helped and has also hurt me do the fact me lying and not going to school I ended up enlisting into biggest sham and collection of lies and shitbags I have ever met. There is a recruit I may or may not know from Bootcamp who told me a story about how he ended up shipping to Bootcamp. So this involved a pool and a gunnery sergeant Schmuckatelli both of them are from a Detroit RSS but this guy all he had was an expired driver’s permit and he was told he could not ship top to boot camp cause he would need a valid identification card to ship to Bootcamp well this kid and gunnery sergeant Schmuckatelli made a trip down to Ohio after they forged a fake Ohio address and forged his bank statements to the Ohio address. So well this kid shipped hence me meeting him but somehow the marine corps found out before the crucible and ended up sending him to the recruit separation platoon well for gunnery sergeant Schmuckatelli I heard he got sent to the brig for fraud. So the moral of that story is not to cheat yourself into this sham life. The biggest lie I was ever told to be honest was to join the marine corps. That is bogus as bogus can I have barely any fun since joining this god-forsaken gun club. The only saying that I heard about the marine corps before that I have found true is that it is brotherhood through misery. Bootcamp was the most miserable three months of my life but I honestly respect the three legends that made me into the man I am today. Mct was slightly better it was still miserable and not fun at all. And personnel administration is an unneeded hell hole in which the faculty advisors are way too extra for no reason. This essay was unneeded you know that but the marine corps tells you the lie that mass punishment actually works but it does not what works is making an example of someone as Master Gunnery Sergeant say in quote “Ima max him the fuck out” that is honestly what needs to happen as you stand there and fulfill his other famous quote “Stand there and take it like a motherfucking champ.

So, in summary, don’t lie; it’s not worth it. Here’s why: thinking about how we erode trust through white lies told in front of other people can be particularly interesting. Lying, even over the smallest reasons, needlessly damages personal relations and public trust. In many cases, false encouragement can harm the other person. Telling a heavyset person they’re thin, telling a poor writer they’re doing great, or telling a slovenly individual they’re attractive — all of these actions hold them back from addressing their problems. We do it because we’re scared of hurting their feelings, but we do more damage in the long run. The solution isn’t to be rude, but to find ways to deliver the truth objectively. If your friends know you will tell them the truth, they’ll turn to you more often. You’ll be a welcome change because they know you won’t just coddle them. How would your relationships change if you started being honest? What kind of person would you become and what would you learn about yourself? Consider being more truthful and not telling these little white lies, except when you absolutely have no other choice.

Bibliography

1. “All Warfare Is Based Upon Deception.” Sun Tzu and The Art of War. December 17, 2009. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://suntzublog.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/all-warfare-is-based-upon-deception/.”All Warfare Is Based Upon Deception.” Sun Tzu and The Art of War. December 17, 2009. Accessed January 10, 2019″
2. “Lying Quotes (490 Quotes).” Goodreads. Accessed January 10, 2019. “Lying Quotes (490 Quotes).” Goodreads. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lying.
3. Segran, Elizabeth. “When Lying Is Good.” Fast Company. September 17, 2014. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://www.fastcompany.com/3035863/when-lying-is-good.

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