The Loneliness of Lying

The Toast is in the middle of an ongoing, very funny series of reimagining the Harry Potter books as written by Ayn Rand.  I chortled my way through their take on Sorcerer’s Stone (I think this was my favorite line):

“Malfoy bought the whole team brand-new Nimbus Cleansweeps!” Ron said, like a poor person. “That’s not fair!”

“Everything that is possible is fair,” Harry reminded him gently. “If he is able to purchase better equipment, that is his right as an individual. How is Draco’s superior purchasing ability qualitatively different from my superior Snitch-catching ability?”

“I guess it isn’t,” Ron said crossly.

Harry laughed, cool and remote, like if a mountain were to laugh. “Someday you’ll understand, Ron.”

But the Randian Chamber of Secrets gave Harry a speech I think I wholeheartedly agree with:

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim,” Harry continued. “What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on. There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

Lying is tiring and isolating.  In order to deceive someone, I need to build him a little pocket universe, and police its boundaries to keep any inconvenient facts from freeing him.  That means taking on an ongoing commitment that drains my time and energy.

But, worse than that, every moment spent maintaining the deception is another moment spent digging and contemplating the chasm I willingly placed between myself and another human being. My victim falsely believes that we’re still simpatico, but I’m forced to be aware of the wound that separated us, that I inflicted and am actively preventing from closing and healing.