The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com

What about Little White Lies? Are they permissible or not? You know, we tell people things such as, I love your new hairstyle, when someone says, “What do you think of it?” and you don't feel like you love their new hairstyle. Or if someone says, “Here's a T-shirt I brought you from my trip,” and you look at it—it's a black T-shirt with a skull on it—and you just say, “Oh, thank you so much. This is really nice. I'll enjoy wearing it,” when you hate the T-shirt. Or what I talked about earlier in the show, we tell little kids things like, “Go tell grandpa how much you love him. It'll make him feel good.” Well, what if it makes you feel awful because you hate grandpa, and you can't tell him you love him, and he's mean, and he yells at you, and besides that, he's stinky—he smells like cigar smoke.

So how do you deal with those situations, and is it proper or not to tell a little white lie? Well, the first thing we need to talk about is: What is a white lie? I mean, I gave you some examples right now—just things that seem to be trivial, you know, they're pretty minimal. We're just talking about small issues. “Do you like the food I cooked for you?” “Do you like my haircut?” “Do you like the gift I gave you?” “Can you come fishing with me today?” And you want to say, “No, Mom and Dad, we're too busy tonight. I wish we could be at your barbecue, but we're too busy,” when that's not the case at all—you’re just sick of being with your parents and you want a night off. Those types of things. We think of them as small issues, and when you think of a white lie, that's what most people think of. However, some people stretch that. They talk about, “You know, I had to stay late at work tonight,” when you were really at the bar with friends. But you're telling that to your wife because you're afraid to hurt her feelings, and you just brush it off as a little white lie. Or your husband may say, “Did you ever have sex before you were married?” and you say, “No, I never did,” and you tell yourself it's a little white lie.

So one of the problems with little white lies is that it's a vague concept. What does it refer to? People use it under all different sorts of circumstances, although we typically think of it as a minimal problem, a minimal issue.

Now, there is a fabulous section on white lies in a book by Dr. Tara Smith, and the book is Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, and it's by Cambridge University Press. She mentions three reasons that we typically give ourselves and other people as justifications for telling little white lies. And again, she talks about the fact that there's no real definition—white lies swim all over the place.

So the first one is that there's not much harm in it. It’s just a small issue. And she said not in morality. In morality, when you lie, even though you do it on something seemingly small, it's big because in your own mind, you're giving yourself a contradiction. You're saying, “You know, I want to be an honest person. I want to be a fact-focused person. I want to be upfront with people. And yet, under some situations, it's good to lie,” and so you have a contradiction: don't lie, tell the truth, and sometimes lie. And so there's no cleanliness there. And again, that can swim all over the place.

The second justification is not just that it’s small issues—there’s minimal harm done. And we all know that lies grow. But the second reason people give for it being okay to lie is that it's socially accepted. Everybody does it. This is the polite form. We all do it. You know, nobody's going to say, “The steak is rubbery,” which my husband said to me when we were first married, and I wish he had lied to me for a split second. And then I appreciated his telling the truth. Or, as my uncle once said to me, “That dress you made is ugly. It's a tent dress, and you look pregnant in it, and you're such a cute little kid.” This is when I was a teenager. “I will give you money not to wear that dress and to buy a better dress.”

Now, in the moment, were my feelings hurt? Well, it was a mixed bag. I trusted my uncle—that didn’t hurt. He also viewed me as capable of dealing with that truth, so I valued that in myself, and I still liked the dress. I know he didn't like it, so I was disappointed that he didn't like the dress, but it wasn’t crushing to me.

So we usually teach kids, “You have to write the thank-you note and tell them how much you loved it,” when you didn’t love something someone gave you as a gift, or maybe you went on vacation and had a lousy time. But you have to thank someone, write them a note, and say that they were the best hostess. And you do a lot of damage to your own mind when you do that. So the second reason is that we say that there are socially accepted conventions. It’s just good manners to do this, and you don’t have to be frank. You can—we all do this, you know, it’s kind of just accepted. But think of yourself on the receiving end. Do you want your husband, your coworkers, your best friends, your parents, your kids, to tell you white lies? I don’t.

The third reason that we give for justification of white lies, and this again is from Dr. Tara Smith’s book, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, is that we say it because—

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The third reason that we give for justification of white lies, and this again is from Dr. Tara Smith’s book Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, is that we say it because we want to spare the other person’s feelings. We don’t want to hurt them. You know, this is like the “good intentions” reason—that, you know, when you tell someone something that could hurt their feelings. I had a neighbor once that asked me—she was an elderly Italian woman. She would make me cookies for Christmas, a whole big tray of them, and they all had anise in them, that flavoring that I don’t like. It’s like a licorice flavoring. I like licorice, but I don’t like this flavoring, and I don’t like it in cookies. She asked me what I thought of the cookies, and I said, “They were fabulous. Thank you so much. That was really special.” Big fat white lie there.

Well, guess what happened? She was so enthused with my excitement that she went ahead and made me a second batch, and she was so happy that I liked them that, you know, the following year I got the cookies. She’s no longer around now, but I learned my lesson: people might act on your—or people are more likely to act on the information you give them in the future. So not only did I breach her trust, but the good intentions—I was trying to do something good, and it backfired in my face.

So none of those work. Those three reasons: that it’s just minimal harm, these are small issues, or everyone does it, or that you’ve got to spare people's feelings. Now let's take a closer look at that one, because when you say you have to spare someone’s feelings, all of us get hurt by some truths. When I get evaluated at work, I get information that I may not like, but the only way I’m going to improve is to get that information. If someone gives me feedback—you know, “I didn’t like the way you handled this situation”—if my kids give me that feedback, I get data that helps me become a better parent. So we’re constantly getting information that we don’t like, and we can repair ourselves so we can deal with the issues. So you're really treating someone as if they’re incapable of handling the truth, and it's a very demeaning, very degrading view of a person when you tell a white lie.

So let's go back to this little kid now, this little kid that I talked about earlier, where the parent’s saying, parent’s thinking, “I’ve got to teach my kid to be polite. Go tell your grandpa how much you like him. It will make him feel good. Give him a big kiss.” And the kid’s thinking, “I don’t want to kiss grandpa. I’ve got to do this because Mom will be really upset with me.” Well, what if the child knew enough to say, “Mom, I wish for your sake that I felt closer to grandpa, but I don’t. He yells at me. He smells of cigar. I’ve never felt close with him. He doesn’t play with me like my other grandpa. And I don’t feel that way, and I can’t force myself to fake it.” And if Mom says, “Well, it will make him feel good,” then, as you wish the little kid had the knowledge to say, “But it’s not true, Mom. I want to stick to the truth, and it will make me feel lousy.”

Now, you don’t have to go up to grandpa and be a brute and say, “You stink.” You know there’s social tact. You need to learn tact, but you want to be able to not tell white lies and enjoy your own life.

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You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com and buy it at Amazon.com.