Journal 53: Slanted Truth

Slanted truth. Honesty is not the best policy. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, it's never definite. There are times when honesty is required and highly respected but there are also times when honesty would be totally disastrous and even more misleading than a white lie. Adults lie all the time to avoid hurting kids, unnecessary arguments, and misunderstanding. For example, a adults lie about Santa distributing presents. This obviously is a straight up lie. However, some might still regard it as a slanted truth because the essence of Santa distributing gifts, for a kid, is mainly that a good kid will be given a present on Christmas. This technique is for adults to provide an incentive for the kid but instead of just listing a rule that if you do good you get a gift on a certain day, they add a little flower and butterfly on the incentive just for fun. This could be seen more as a slanted truth because it's a slight distortion of incentive policy however it is also just a big fat lie. Another reason people lie is to avoid stuff. For example, people lie all the time about not having enough time when the truth is they have a lot more than enough to do the homework 4, 5 times with the given amount of time. Also, when asked to go to prom, the most frequent answer that means no is they already have a prom date and a lot of times it's false.