Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
"Lies beget lies beget lies." It's an idiom which seemed to me annoying in a preachy way when I was younger, but it's one that has proved itself over and again. This week at work I dealt with a truly tremendous episode which proves the case. Of course I shant go into details, but this young lad had dug himself so deep into a pit of lies all to prove some offhand comment he made months ago, that it has ended in his firing and probable arrest. To hear the story unfold and to trace it back to its psychological roots, was like peeling back the many pearled layers of defence a mollusc has developed over its years, leaving behind a weak and pathetic base creature writhing helplessly before baying seagulls. A bizarre task that was quite emotionally difficult to manage I suppose.
The series of events had played in my mind as a creeping tale of horror. Lying is a very personal endeavour, and because a good lie will forever go unknown it's very hard to say how much anyone lies but yourself. But I'm sure that everyone does it to differing degrees. The impending doom I feel when I get away with a lie is suffocating to me, my mind automatically schemes up several new potential lies to tell to cover up the first one and I end up spending far too much time worrying about it for it to be worth it. To watch that house of cards collapse is truly terrifying.
The problem is that lying is sometimes the best course of action. Or if not the best, at least the path of least resistance towards a goal. Man is a creature that can wield logic, and so when the best path towards a goal seems to be a lie, we are inclined to take it. Of course man is equally a creature that is wielded by morality (we do not "wield morality", ethics aren't real), and so we usually want to avoid it, but when in high stakes or under stress (ie when it matters most) we usually yield to logic. And unlike other sins, it's difficult to qualify why lying is bad, we just know it to be. There's nothing inherently evil about giving someone an incorrect piece of information, it's the consequences of the lie which can lead to it. Of course it can often indirectly lead to harm to others, like it would have for my case this week, but such extrapolations can be beyond many people to make, especially when they don't understand the full context which they are trying to exploit.
The very boundaries of what is and what isn't a lie are also murky. The concept of a "white lie" was introduced to me as a child when my elder sister "forgot to bring my birthday present with her" when she came to visit, and I remember struggling to figure out what exactly was "white" about it, it certainly looked more black to me. But we all accept little lies as part of daily life: a courteous "nice to meet you" here or a "see you later" when you have no intention of such a thing. Even further we have the lies we like to instead define as "fiction". What is a story but a fabricated lie told with an expectation of disbelief?
Although it seems pretty obvious, I don't think the idea of "fiction" is as old as it seems. The further you go back in time the fewer stories of pure fiction you find, they are usually couched in a mythos which maintains a guise of truth. Homer wrote what we recognize as fiction, but it wasn't defined as such until much later and was contemporaneously regarded as much a history as a work of fiction. Those who worked in fiction like actors were often denegrated, with the falsehoods they portrayed on stage being equivocated to the false love of a prostitute. These days the opposite is true and we regard actors or artists as the elite of society in celebrity.
Society's relationship with lies is parallel to our relationship with truth. In a time of one truth we degrade lies, but in a multi-truth world we can't help but let lies run rampant as it becomes impossible to justify their eradication.
