I think we’ve all told our fair share of white lies.

 
“Does my butt look big?” Answer: Yes, in a good way.

 
“Do you think Bush did 9/11?” Answer: I don’t follow politics.

 
Once we tell them, it’s like poof! Problematic conversation solved!

 
Now you can keep on believing in your falsified reality and I won’t lose a twitter follower.

 
I remember talking about similar human interactions in my Interpersonal Communications class. It seemed to me that these little white lies had become virtually unnoticed in the 21st century.

 
While everyone was so preoccupied with maintaining “face” (social status) and being polite, lying had become a necessity to our social communities.

 
Looks like the whole world is going to Hell. Thou shall not bear false witness.

 
Think about it.

 
How many times at your future job, the future job four years of college required, will you kiss the boss’s butt?

 
“Yes sir, your tie looks marvelous!”

 
“No I would not mind working this Saturday at 6 a.m.”

 
“You go-getter, the world has big plans for you!”

 
But do any of us want to live in a world where everyone else is just a yes-man?

 
And what of the reverse?

 
Could you go a full day being completely honest?

 
“No sir, I think your tie looks stupid, and that you should work the weekend shift instead of me.”

 
Yeah, good luck fulfilling your ultimately meaningless dreams of corporate advancement like that.

 
There’s another thing that troubles me about white-lying. Maybe the lies we tell other people shape who we are subconsciously.

 
For example, what if when you tell your boss you won’t mind working on Saturday, you begin convincing yourself that you don’t actually mind? That maybe the hard work will be good for you.

That maybe you’re the kind of person who likes working hard.

 
Human opinion is already an unstable thing, perhaps even the slightest nudge could have such a drastic effect.

 
Regardless, I believe the fact remains that if you change a person’s perspective, you’ve changed the person.

 
Now this last paragraph might have put me in the tinfoil-hat camp (with the guy who thought Bush did 9/11), but our communities are places of social compromise. We’ve all agreed to limit our own individual freedoms so that anarchy cannot reign.

 
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anarchy is the answer. I just feel like maybe the mountains of white lies we tell daily are accumulating in our mind’s recycling bin, but aren’t getting recycled.

So, to sum up, everyone needs to keep lying. Or maybe a little less than you do on average. As a society we might be straying a little too far into the compromise extreme on the anarchy scale to “my favorite color is gray.”

 
What I’m really saying is don’t lie to ME so much. I can take it. I’m a Huggies-approved big boy now.

 
You don’t need to tell me my poems are orgasmic (I wish) or that Pre-calc will be important later in my life (it’s just a requirement, I know it, you know it, but neither of us will be honest about that).

 
What a weird, fabricated place we live in where so much of our existence depends on lying.