PEOPLE lie.
Everybody does. For one to say that he never lies and has never lied before has already lied.
In my efforts to come up with a topic that is not related to the love month, I tried to concentrate on the things happening around me.
It then came to me that for the past few days, months even, people have developed a certain taste for lying.
Suddenly, I developed a certain curiosity as to whether why people lie, what are the circumstances that force people to lie, and of course, the origin of the “lie”.
In my search for answers to these lingering questions, I turned to the Internet and voila! I came across an interesting piece by Mark Twain.
In his argument “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” Twain describes the lie as “a Virtue, a Principle, is eternal… as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth…”
When I was a child, my parents introduced me to what they termed as “white lies” – lies that needed to be said sometimes for the sake of others.
At first I didn’t understand what they meant by it, even arguing with them that it “just wasn’t right.” But no explanation was given.
I have come to accept the fact that lies are a part of reality.
Anyway, my only qualm is that people do not seem to know how powerful a lie is. It can both be useful, at certain instances that is, and it can be very harmful too.
To lie in a wise manner is to lie judiciously but to lie without scientific reasoning is to lie injudiciously.
One should only lie for the sake of others and not for the sake of oneself.
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And since we’re on the topic of lying, I wonder why the Philippine Basketball Association Press Corps (PBAPC) lied to us when we inquired about the annual sportswriting contest?
Every October, the PBAPC invites students from different schools in Manila to join in the contest where the participants are given the opportunity to watch a live PBA game then write a story about it afterward.
The three best written stories, based on the judges’ taste, win cash price and plaques.
For the past three years, Varsitarian staffers have always made it as finalists in the contest.
When we called the PBAPC office last October, we were told that the contest had not started yet and that they would just call our office to inform us of the schedule.
But as the months dragged by, we still hadn’t received a call from the PBAPC and just this month, we were surprised to see in the sports pages of the dailies that there were sportswriting contest winners already. Bummer. Liar, liar.
