“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies”

This is from one of my favourite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. I agree with the idea but we being creatures who think might interpret it differently. You know I am(was) of the opinion that sometimes you need to lie to make the other person feel good. But are we not giving false hopes to that person? Today something made me questions this.

What’s better, to be honest even if it might hurt someone or to play it around, wrap your lie around excuses and give that person false hope?

If we think about it, the second thing feels almost torturous. While I agree there might be cases where there might be hope and I think lying seems to be the morally correct thing to do but when you know that there isn’t and you don’t want to upset the person with the truth, even though what you are lying about won’t ever be true, that the action/thing is inevitable, lying seems to prolong the pain and in some cases the pain might be much greater than what they would have experienced if the truth was served instead. While at the moment you might have decided to be a “better” person by comforting the other person, it doesn’t really matter when that someone else realises what the truth is. The truth will be out sometime in the future. In fact, you might even unknowingly address it when you feel the issue has been resolved and other person is over it but can we? What makes us think we can decide if the other person is over it, that maybe he/she won’t mind the truth. That’s paternalistic and that’s wrong. No one is ever over things. Truth almost always inevitably hurts. And when it does, it might destroy relationships.

Don’t always try to be the person who feels he/she needs to comfort others even if it means serving them with the lie. Don’t give them false hope when you know there isn’t. People aren’t stupid, we remember things and no one gets to decide what’s good for someone else. People need to be served hard cold truth sometimes, even if it might break their hearts. They can’t always be told that things will work out, they need to be smacked on the head and they need to be advised: to get their shit together. I feel if one does this to people, in the end, will only be thankful.

Hope is a good thing, I agree. It’s the only thing which makes us go on despite all hardships. When shit hits the fan, people need to given the hope that there is light at the end of tunnel, but they also need to be shaken with the truth that things won’t work out if they don’t work towards them, they need to see the reality. Comforting them won’t always help them, at least giving false hope won’t.