Why do people want to hear beautiful lies over truth?

Question

When it comes to exposing the truth to others , people are very generous but they don't want to take it themselves

normalice · Accepted Answer

My guess is because it doesn't serve any purpose to believe the truth. There are a lot of aspects to navigating human civilization that can be faked with a lie, and the more people who sign on tomthat lie the easier it becomes. The only thing that can truly discourage lies is a reckoning. Jumping off a cliff and telling ourselves we are flying works out just fine until we are forced to reckon with the location of the ground. That might demonstrate to people who are still thinking about jumping that it really was a lie and all the people who insisted otherwise were only grifters selling glitter wings.

So that's tidy for that analogy but of course the scale and scope of civilization has put the ground very hard to identify, so even watching people crash into it isn't alarming in the ways it should be, giving the grifters an opportunity to come up with their own explanations for why that happened. Climate change is probably the most ominous reckoning, in this way. We can keep telling ourselves it isn't happening and that the predictable consequences of climate change are actually the result of something unrelated, but the longer we stay in free fall the harder the inevitable crash will be.

KittyKatLady · Accepted Answer

I mean, if you believe that there's such a thing as an "objective truth", that's one thing... If you're not that naive, you'll see that sometimes lies are more comfortable; people may have all sorts of reasons why they would prefer a lie over the 'truth'. It's never as simple as passing moral judgments on what you believe to be the correct course of action. Plus, everybody lies; it's a communication mechanism at this point.

menina · Accepted Answer

Sometimes truth hurts. No one wants to get hurt. Plus, it's easier to live with other people's truths than with our own. So beautiful lies sound better in some cases.