In between the Battles of Issus and Guagamela, after the successful siege of Tyre, Alexander of Macedon went and took a trip into the remote desert of Egypt to go to a heathen temple where he was proclaimed as the son of a god and not his brilliant but prosaic father Philip. Philip and Alexander had been estranged, despite their shared goals to increase Macedonian power and defeat the Persian Empire, because of Alexander’s ambition and impatience as well as Philip’s estrangement from Alexander’s mother, a princess from the remote and backwards region of Epirus (which, as the borderlands between Greece and Albania, is still a backwards place even now). In order to glorify himself as being more than human, and therefore not an equal to the fiercely egalitarian Greek mindset of many of Alexander’s associates (it seems wrong to call them friends, since he was such an egotistical person), it was easier for Alexander to believe his life was a lie rather than to openly accept the truth that he simply wished to be seen as more than a man, a wish that the dishonest priests of Amun-Re were all too willing to grant through their lies.

In the 1980’s, a male diva named Luther Vandross developed a certain amount of fame as a singer of romantic ballads especially popular with urban women despite the fact that he was never known to pursue a relationship with women at all. Despite singing passionate and clearly evocative odes to “secret love,” he was entirely unwilling to be open about his own personal life and expressed no longing whatsoever for marriage and family. Rather than be open about his own genuine longings, he couched them in a way that would be popularly accepted as well as lucrative for his own career, but was unable to entirely avoid talking about the subject, as his songs dealt with his personal life in rather oblique and coded ways because of the continual tension between his private life and his public image, which was based on a lie that he was singing his love songs to the women who adored his voice and eagerly bought record after record of his smooth singing, up to his last album [1].

As a teenager, I was a bit mystified that the belief that the present world was an illusion fostered by a computer-dominated society was so readily thought of as sensible and reasonable. As abhorrent as the belief that human beings were simply batteries kept in embryo for computers is, from an engineering standpoint it is also infeasible, as human beings are exceptionally inefficient producers of electrical energy. With so many more efficient converters of energy in existence, human beings would not be kept alive simply to serve as batteries in a state of permanent virtual reality. Yet it was far more easy for people to think, or at least to bandy about as a possibility, that our life was a lie rather than to accept the truths of our prosaic existence and to take responsibility and make the best of our lives and of the situations in them. To be sure, there is much about our lives and our situation in this age that is not particularly enjoyable, but all the same it is what we have to work with.

Lives may be built on lies for a great variety of reasons, but two larger motives loom large above them all. One of the most common reasons for living a lie is because the truth is seen as so destructive that it is intolerable. Perhaps, being a largely open person, I have a hard time understanding how this could be the case. To be sure, not all of the truths about my own life are particularly pleasant (far from it), but I don’t think there are any truths of my existence that make it impossible to have a happy and successful life, even if those truths do mean that I wish for an indulgent and sympathetic hearing from others rather than a harsh and judgmental one. Nevertheless, that is true about all of our lives. I have never met anyone that did not have some truth of their life that did not require sympathy from others, and generally speaking I am sympathetic to the plight of others in this fallen world given the knowledge I have about my own life and that of others. Yet there are some people who believe that the truths about their existence that they foreclose all admission of their secret sins, and yet cannot help but hint about the existence of those sins because of their underlying desires to come clean and face the truth. This was clearly the case for Luther Vandross, for example.

The other overarching reason why many people live a lie is because the truth is too mundane too prosaic for their purposes. Some people have invented elaborate hoaxes about their own origins because it was far more glamorous to be seen as Princess Anastasia Romanova rather than some ordinary girl. Likewise, it was far more glamorous for Alexander of Macedon to believe himself of divine origin than to admit his rather prosaic human origin. For similar reasons it is very common these days to believe in elaborate hoaxes and conspiracies as a way of reducing one’s responsibility in the world (for it is easier to believe that one has failed in some ambition or goal because of an elaborate and large and powerful conspiracy hostile to one’s own interests than to accept the more mundane reality that human beings have an extremely difficult time effectively cooperating). Even the fictional worldview of the Matrix, for example, would be a type of conspiracy of robots and computers, if not of human beings.

Rather than trying to convince ourselves and others that our lives are a lie, it’s a far better thing to accept such agency as we have, to admit that our own capacity to influence the world around us depends on others and not merely on ourselves. We might then not blame our problems either entirely on ourselves or entirely on others, but might accept that some people are not going to understand us correctly, that some people may have their own experiences and their own sensitivities that make them rather sensitive to us, and that others have to be persuaded of the rightness of our views rather than being bludgeoned into submission. We are all people who would prefer to believe some lies rather than some truths, or at least we would all rather wish to be something rather than to be as we now are. This is not necessarily a blameworthy thing, but starting with a firm knowledge of reality and the truth is the best way to make the best of that reality, to help improve it so that it is not such a disappointing truth.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/dance-with-my-father/