The Lying Plants
LIE [ lahy ]
noun
a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.
— Dictionary.com
To lie is human.
Or to only tell the truth is inhuman. Any persons that can read and comprehend this post has at least lied a few times in their lifetime. Lying is a defence mechanism because even if people are lying to hurt somebody, they are doing it for their interest. It’s a common trend in people, and it can range from white lies to most evil intentions of hiding the truth or mislead.
Although no one will ever put forward a no-lie record, it is still an activity that is despised by society. The parents do their best to educate their children to be truthful because that is the way. Lying is embedded in the core of the society from the beginnings, which brings the question of how would the human civilization look like if the lie was not present?
We can’t design such social experiments, but we can explore the idea through art, such as the 1997 movie Liar Liar starring Jim Carrey. He plays a successful lawyer who builds up his career on lies but doesn’t stop at the professional life. He takes it up to his family lying that he will miss his son’s birthday because of work. But the little boy uses his birthday wish to make his father incapable of telling lies. From the next day, the whole life of Jim Carrey’s character turns upside down with him telling only things that cross his mind, without the filter of fibbing. The movie aims to show how a foundation of lies is destructive and how truth can win, but it also depicts the chaos a no-lie society will bring.
Another form of lying that often comes as a more positive alternative that makes the liar feel less guilty is not saying anything. This option seems more passive, which shows no evil intention from the deceiver. If asked about hiding something, the escape plan is to say I did not intend to do that. It was just not brought in the discussion.
Nowadays lying is capitalized by media which rings the alarm on all the post-truth dominating fields like politics, banking, big corporations and many more. The end is nigh if we take their frightening outcry as truthful.
To be solely truthful is …to be a plant?
As before I am looking at the Plantae world to see how lying embeds in its structure or it is something that can be found only in the human toolbox?
The full story can be found here: https://www.phytosopher.com/blog/the-lying-plants
Phytosophy is an anthology of thought experiments that explore the intrinsic human condition through the lenses of the plants.Are plants courageous, lazy, or humble? Do they procrastinate, cheat or sacrifice? What lessons can we learn from the nature in order to make our lives more meaningful?
