7:49pm May 8, 2014

➸ It is sometimes okay to lie.

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

It is okay to lie to someone who clearly wants information about you that you’re not willing to give, or who will use that information in a negative or even abusive way. If you can’t simply say “I won’t tell you”, there is nothing wrong at all with coming…

I completely agree with all of this, but I don’t think this contradicts with the fact that at least some (probably not all) autistic people find it very difficult to lie, some quite possibly to the point of being effectively unable to lie at all.

I, for example, find it almost impossible to lie in most circumstances - the only 2 ways that I actually can lie are:

a) by managing to convince myself that the lie is actually true, or at least constructing an alternate persona for myself, for whom the lie is true. This can result in me doing what George Orwell (in Nineteen Eighty-Four) called “doublethink”, i.e. believing two mutually contradictory things simultaneously, which can cause me a lot of trouble later in terms of trying to unpick which is the truth and which is the lie, or it can cause me to actually forget that I was lying in the first place and actually believe the thing (although later, sometimes years later, I can sometimes remember that I was lying, but that much later I can be genuinely unsure whether the thing I now believe/”remember” was actually true or not), or other kinds of cognitive fuckery that I can’t fully describe but that are potentially seriously detrimental to me, or…

b) I can, sometimes, more “casually” lie, while fully aware that I am lying, if I am speaking to someone who I can convince myself isn’t really a person, or at least isn’t a person I have any sort of obligation to treat as a person - e.g. this can work with officials acting an official capacity that is designed to deny their basic human autonomy, such as police or workers in the jobcentre/benefits system, but it can only work for relatively small and simple lies (mostly negative statements, e.g. that I didn’t see or do something that I actually did see or do).

I absolutely can’t lie if the person I’m talking to is someone I have a genuine human-to-human relationship with, and if the thing I’m talking about is important enough that I’m not willing to convince myself that something other than the reality of it is true. I can omit true information (which some people might consider a form of lying), but I can’t fabricate untrue information, and usually it’s pretty obvious that I’m omitting stuff, because I’m not really capable of being subtle about it, especially when asked a direct question.

What this isn’t is any sort of moral superiority. I’m not an inherently “more honest” or “more ethical” or whatever person than people who can easily and comfortably lie, I just lack a cognitive ability that they have (which is useful in some situations, and possibly counter-useful in others). Not being good at lying might (for example) make a person easier to trust for some people, but it might also (for example) make a person less good at advocating for others in useful ways - it’s nothing more and nothing less than the absence of a particular ability/skill. And I don’t believe that the presence or absence of particular abilities or skills is ever (in itself) morally good or bad (or indeed morally anything).

Oh yeah I don’t doubt that some autistic people are terrible liars. I’m not the best liar myself, and for a long time I pretty much couldn’t at all. The problem is when some autistic people do assume a moral superiority about it, or say that anyone who has ever lied about anything is a Bad Person.

Notes: