I found the different types of lies to be extremely interesting from this week’s reading. While I do not consider myself a liar I could identify several occasions where I have used gray, colorless, red, and blue lies. We unknowingly lie to ourselves and others on a daily basis. When I ask someone how they are doing and they answer with either “good” or “great” a lot of the times I follow up my question with “how are you really doing.” I am surprised that the majority of the time people elaborate on their original answer and even sometimes change their original response. What’s even more fascinating is that when I ask the follow-up question the person never admits they lied. They simply brush their original answer to the side for an honest one.
I think everyone experiences gray lies on a daily basis, especially when you do not want to answer a question honestly or even at all. I like the description that colorless lies are often “self-deception” (Pg. 25). I really resonated with this in my everyday life. An example being when someone asks me how much work I have for that day or week. As students, we often tend to downplay the amount of work we have for an assignment or class. This “self-deception” allows us to be more at ease when taking a break or choosing to do something else instead of work. I think that blue lies appear most often in everyday life, especially within the classroom. An example being when a professor asks if the class has any questions and two things happen. One, no one says anything because it might be the end of class and they are trying to leave as fast as possible. Or two, students may feel that even though they have a question that the best answer to give is “no further questions” because that is deemed to be the best answer. All in all, I am more aware of how often I lie and how often others lie on a daily basis. Taking this a step forward, how exactly do you think we can prevent various forms of lying moving forward?
I like your end-of-class example, because it illustrates the various levels of communication that exist in our everyday interactions. The words we choose to say are just the tip of the iceberg. Lying has been deemed immoral in our society, so most people associate red lies with the word “lying”. In the classroom example, however, telling a gray or blue lie might hurt the lier, but it doesn’t necessarily have a negative impact on anyone else. The question is, is this type of lie necessarily immoral?
To an extent I think that white lies and some grey (or blue and even red) have a place in society. I agree that, yes, these little lies are definitely able to get out of control. But at the end of the day I wonder if us telling everyone the exact and total truth would be a bad thing or a good thing. Yes, obviously some people would rather not hear about the bad day we are having or the fact that the shirt theyre wearing actually looks horrible. On the other hand, though, wouldn’t it also mean that when someone is having a good day it means they are actually having a good day? It was so interesting for me to read this for tomorrow’s class, and try to decide for myself which types of these lies are good and bad. I thought you did a great job expressing some of the thoughts I had too!