He said Walter Benjamin that “who cares for manners but rejects lies, resembles someone who, although he dresses fashionably, does not wear a shirt”.
For this reason, in complex societies it is very difficult not to lie. Because if you always tell the truth, you go naked. And that is precisely why it is so difficult to know what is normal.
Because what we consider normal is what we identify as habitual, but our perception is not always capable of capturing all of reality, much less the one that remains in the shadows, the one that others hide from themselves. For this reason, behaviors become more habitual as they become more and more public.
Lying as a way to grease society
Erving Goffmann He was a Canadian sociologist and anthropologist who developed the so-called theory of management or control of impressions, that is, dramatized realizations of being social in order to control the impressions of others. As he himself said:
It is probably no mere historical accident that the original meaning of the word person is mask. It is rather an acknowledgment of the fact that, more or less consciously, always and everywhere, each of us plays a role… It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.
In the end, it turns out that lying is wrong, but not always, and we can lie and even lie to ourselves if it is not noticed, if it goes unnoticed. This escalation of the sophistication of sincerity and lying is the result of an increasingly complex interaction with other people, with the community. You can abound in all this in the following video: