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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a Baptist. Or any stripe of Christian. Or Jew. Or some other checkbox on the list of tolerable beliefs. I live in Alabama. There's a price.

Impeded relationships. Reduced opportunity.

Yet, the emotional harm of lying about who am is significantly greater than what one person can inflict upon another. Because like truth, that harm is permanent.

People inclined to fuck up someone because they are different, don't deserve a free pass. It is their fucking up which is uncivil, not my choice to abstain from praising Jesus before eating chicken fingers at a business lunch.

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>Yet, the emotional harm of lying about who am is significantly greater than what one person can inflict upon another. Because like truth, that harm is permanent.

What about if there's no harm? What if you ENJOY lying about who you are?

Or, in another twist, what if lying about who you are opens a new world to you, and makes you a different person, perhaps even who you lied about being in the first place? (In the sense that you invent a new identity for yourself, like a Nothern Jewish family boy like Robert Zimmerman emerged into scene as the "wretched hobo poet" Bob Dylan).

If you enjoy lying about anything, that's a serious red flag regarding you as a person.

Poker, anyone?

The OP didn't say lying about his hand, he said lying about who he is, which is what I'm responding to.

[Flat Analytical Level]

An actor might be described as "a person who enjoys lying about who they are." The reference to Dylan is indexical.

[Deeper] Who the hell knows who they are in any sense other than who they choose to be? Am I the teenager who didn't understand the harm of casual racist behavior or participation in high school homophobia?

No. I am the adult who regrets those things and has chosen learn from the experience.

But I am also on the slippery slope to lying with the qualifiers "casual" and "high school."

The author faces a situation where telling the truth causes suffering.

The identity of his situation with that of a person who enjoys lying is premised upon pleasure being nothing more than the absence of suffering.

This reduces the enjoyment of a person who enjoys lying to an absence of suffering. Belief systems which might take this approach to pleasure tend to treat trying to avoid suffering as suffering - i.e. all the way down, turtles suffer.

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