Need To Deal With The Culture Of Lies And Falsehood Pervading Our Society -By Edwin Alivionote

Edwin Alivionote

The need for truth has never been in high demand as is the case with our present age. The social trend has made a lifestyle out of lies and falsehood. Our society has little or no value for truth in its day to day dealings because truth by convention of the times is not marketable. The reward for truth has made lies more profitable at least in the short and medium term. We see more need to lie in relationships, businesses and in our profession because; society has some motivational incentives to support falsehood. To avoid a generalised statement on how society encourage and support lies, I will paint out some vivid cases using practical examples that I witnessed, using Nigeria, where I reside as a case study:

CASE ONE: most often we find ourselves in places where people make phone calls to our hearing. The person on phone conversation makes comments that are obviously false with total disregard to the listening ears; we all seem to be normal with this trend. There is a sense of levity from the public concerning phone lies. We give the speaker a sense of relief, that the discuss is his/her own business and with our disposition, we approve the act as a normal acceptable way of living. The freedom to say whatever we want should not be over estimated to devalue our image in the public domain. The ease with which we say falsehood with total disregard to the immediate listeners is bleaching our value for truth. The subliminal message we pass with this is; we are at liberty to lie so long our faces are unseen by the listener. Whatever we tolerate is what we approve and, this is what will be propagated with time to bring about the collapse of society.

CASE TWO: The prevailing modern times has been engaged with the activities of social media clouded with all sorts of electronic communication competing for attention. Social media which is meant to bridge the communication inadequacies inherent in our time, with the coming of globalization, has birthed so much propagation of falsehood from one end user to the world and vice versa. People sell out their fantasy to others as their reality. So much of fake and unrealistic lifestyle are posted and chatted on these media platforms with many persons realising the obvious (that is the untrue nature of affairs) but, they seem to play along calmly with it. The real impact of this acceptance of vile norms is affecting our trust culture. There seem to be a huge need for trustworthy personalities with trust as the main issue that cannot be earned by many.

CASE THREE: the business of trade and our corporate world has not escaped from the ills of falsehood and lies too. The clients and consumers pay the price of this gross deceit. There are institutions and organizations that are supposed to be custodians of trust for the public but have loss all to thin air due to the inability of the top management to see to the entrenchment of trust in their policy. The documents of most of the businesses to start with are forged and, the products and services rendered are marketed on falsehood with inflation of value, to earn more money. The world of business, now pride her gains on the capacity to deceive the public into accepting what they have packaged with false information. The ignorance of the customers are exploited in most cases as we are more often exposed to in the Nigerian business environment.

We are building a system in time to come where there will be so much lies that, the truth will go extinct and hard to recover, as it may have been deleted from even the archives of history. We owe our posterity a duty to address the excesses arising from the proliferation of falsehood in our time.