Various Kinds of Liars by Orison Swett Marden

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 20.

Various Kinds of Liars

By Orison Swett Marden

MARK TWAIN, in one of his stories, says of a character, that whatever statement he chose to make was entitled to prompt and unquestioning acceptance as a lie.

There are a great many kinds of liars and a great many ways of lying. Mrs. Opie once undertook to classify lies as: lies of vanity, lies of flattery, lies of convenience, lies of interest, lies of fear, lies of malignity, lies of malevolence, and lies of wantonness. Mark Twain, in taking account of stock, counts eight hundred and sixty-nine varieties of lies.

We all know the foolish liars who lie without motive, from force of habit. We can understand a person's lying who has a strong motive for it, but to lie without any purpose whatever seems to be to the normal mind an unintelligible thing.

One very large class of liars are liars of carelessness, thoughtlessness; people who do not mean to lie, who are honest enough, but who are slipshod in their mental processes. Their observation is faulty; they do not see or hear things with exactitude, do not see or hear them as they are. This comes from not taking pains to get the exact facts about anything into their heads.

One of the most pernicious liars is the flatterer, the one who can not bear to wound you on your weak point. Then there is the polite liar, who prevaricates and deceives in order to be courteous. He wants you to think well of him and wants to make you feel good. He would rather deceive you than tell you unwelcome truths. Vanity liars can not bear to tell the truth when it reflects upon themselves or does not flatter their vanity. These liars may be believed in what does not reflect on themselves or put them in an unfavorable light.

The so-called benevolent liars often escape condemnation because their motives are good. A good-natured man or woman, compelled to dismiss an employee, will sometimes give an undeserved recommendation, quite unconscious of the injury thus done a later employer.

Slander, the blackest of all the falsehood family, does not always require a lying tongue. There are a thousand ways of lying. A person may lie by his silence, by not telling the truth when it is his duty to speak. A man may lie by telling a part of the truth. He may lie by his manner, by insinuations, by inference, by a shrug of the shoulders or a glance of the eye.

One of the most pitiable of all liars is the weak liar, who has not moral stamina enough to tell the truth when it is disagreeable. Liars of this brand do not want to argue or defend their position; they go along the line of least resistance, prevaricate and deceive, because there is not lime enough in the backbone to enable them to stand straight and look a man in the face and tell him unpleasant truths. They would rather make him feel good at the time, and prefer that he find out the truth when they do not have to meet his gaze. I know people who mean to be absolutely honest who can never tell the exact truth when it requires a little moral courage, and cowards are always liars. They do not lie because they are bad, but because they are weak.

It takes courage to tell the truth when you know it may place you in an unfortunate light before the world, and that a little prevarication or a little innuendo may save you pain. It takes courage and character to tell the truth when to do so will be a temporary loss to you. It takes courage and manliness, womanliness, to tell the truth when it gives a decided advantage to a rival. It takes courage to stand up squarely, with an unflinching eye, to look the world in the face and tell the straight, unvarnished truth, regardless of consequences.

The reputation of being beyond price, of being unshaken by any selfish motive; the reputation of always, everywhere, under all circumstances, telling the truth—not pretty nearly, but the exact truth—is worth a thousand times more to one than any temporary gain from deceit.

One of the most unfortunate phases of modern journalism is the temptation to tamper with truth, color it, distort, misrepresent it, to make a great thing out of a little thing. The reputation of a newspaper is like that of an individual. The newspaper which constantly, knowingly deceives, very soon gets the same kind of reputation as a consummate liar. There are few newspapers in the world which refuse to color the truth, to tamper with facts in order to make a sensation, and these few are the solid pillars of journalism. They stand for infinitely more in their community than some other papers with a hundred times more circulation.

One of the most dangerous characters in the business world is the man who has no vigor or integrity, who is indifferently honest, who prefers to be on the side of the right, but who will quibble, will tamper with the truth, will not tell quite the whole truth if his interests are jeopardized.

He may not lie outright, but he may leave untold a truth which he should tell, and which a gentleman would tell; but in the end, what such a man gains can not be compared with what he loses. He does not realize that altho he may make a little more money, he is less of a man every time he misrepresents; that while he may be adding something to his pocket, he is taking something away from his manhood.

How often, too, the crooked, lying man or institution finds that crooked methods do not pay, and that even as a working principle honesty is the best policy! Look at the history of business concerns in this country, and see how very few of those which were doing a great business fifty years ago are even in existence to-day. Many of them sprung up like mushrooms, made a good deal of noise in the business world, did lots of faking, deceptive advertising, and flourished for a while, attracting a great deal of attention, but they did not last long, because there was no character back of them. They were not reliable, and after successfully deceiving their customers for a time, they were found out. Then they began to shrink and shrivel, and ultimately went to the wall.

Still, a great many people believe in the expediency of the lie as a policy. They believe that it pays to deceive. Many business houses which are regarded as pretty honest cover up defects in goods and write misleading advertisements. There are many men who think that deception in business is just about as necessary as money capital. They believe that it is very difficult, practically impossible, for any man to succeed in a large way and always tell the exact truth about everything.

Not long ago a superintendent in a large dry-goods house said that he had been busy all the previous day cutting up whole bolts of cloth for remnants. He said that people would willingly pay more for these “remnants” when advertised as such because of the deceptive suggestion that they were cheap, than they would to buy by the yard from the piece. Now, how long will the public continue to patronize such a house after once discovering this deception? The same principle is true of the bargain sales. Merchants often sell inferior goods at more than their regular price during these sales, because they know the power of suggestion in advertising to deceive.

There is a great deal of the Indian in all of us. We do not forget favors, kindnesses, or injuries. On the ground of the weakness of all human nature, we may often forgive things which still sting; but when we have once been deceived by a business house, a traveling salesman, a solicitor, or a clerk, we do not forget it, and that house or clerk loses our confidence forever.

Most young men overestimate the value of mere shrewdness, cunning, long-headedness, smartness, keenness. They seem to think that if they are going to get ahead rapidly they must not be too scrupulous about the exact truth; that a little deception, a little cunning, will help them along faster; that if they veer this way and that from the truth—just enough to avoid disagreeable experiences—to make themselves popular, to make everybody feel good, they will be all right. There could not be a greater mistake; for if there is anything weak and doomed to failure by the very laws of the universe, it is misrepresentation. It never yet has won in the long run, and real success is as impossible by it as is the reversal of the law of gravitation.

Misrepresentation in any form is the shortest-sighted policy in the world. No man ever built up a permanent position or institution upon it, or ever will, for the man who gets a temporary advantage by misrepresentation makes everybody who finds it out his enemy ever after. It is human nature never to trust a person fully again who has once deceived us.

Is there any power in cunning, in shrewd, long-headed, deceptive methods, that can for a moment compare with the truth, with absolute integrity? There is no advertisement

in the world, in the long run, that can compare with that which comes from the reputation of always and everywhere telling the exact truth, of being absolutely reliable. This reputation alone has made the names of some of the great business houses in this country worth millions of dollars.

Every time a man deceives, he knows that he has to cover his tracks. He is always on thorns for fear of discovery, for everything in his own nature is trying to betray him; but when he tells the truth, because he is built on the truth plan, he has all the universe sustaining, supporting, backing him.

What a difference there is between the power of a man who is telling the truth and is conscious that he is backed by the eternal principle of right and justice, and the man who is lying and is conscious of it!

One can look the world in the face without wincing, because he feels that he is backed by eternal principle. There is victory in his eye, assurance in his very bearing, while there is something within the other man which says: “I am a liar; I am not a man. I know I am not a man, but a sneak, a make-believe.”

Is there anything on this earth in quite so bad a plight as the liar, as the man despised, socially ostracized by all decent people and exiled from his own self-respect?

For the protection of the innocent, what a blessing it would be if all business, professional, political, and social liars of to-day were labeled and tagged, and were compelled, as was the leper of old, when any one came near him, to cry, “Unclean, unclean,” so that all decent people could be warned of their approach, and shun them as they would a deadly contagion! — Orison Swett Marden.