Deception can never be justified. It can hurt and even destroy relationships forever. The main reason for this is that lies can often have unforeseen results. People lie or practice deception for a variety of reasons. At times it may be to convey a false impression or it may be to avoid hurting the feelings of a person. However, even lies that may be deemed harmless may have devastating results due to its unexpected repercussions. Students, especially adolescents practise deception to escape punishment. The unforeseen result of this is that deception becomes a habit with them. They probably had to lie to hide some shortcoming in their assignments, or to cover some breach in discipline they had unwittingly committed.
Their success in the first attempt to deceive encourages them to continue their deception. This in turn leads to negligence of schoolwork and rules. Moreover, to support their original untruth they have to lie many times over. This inevitably has an adverse affect on their characters. They see deception as the only way to achieve success and in the extreme cases they may go on to become serious criminals. Some time back Readers Digest published an article featuring a high school student Heather Brooke’s fight against drug addiction.
She was an exemplary student till she started hanging out with her seniors at school many of whom were deep into drugs. She was introduced to drugs by a schoolmate Some people consider some lies harmless as they categorize them as small social untruths meant to pretend that they like someone or something more than they actually do. The draw back in this situation is that one has to continue to maintain this false impression with repeated lies. At unguarded moments we may unknowingly reveal our true opinions and thereby hurt people’s feelings. People would then never value our pinions. Thus small lies may lead to our own social suicide. Airing honest opinions and practicing sincerity in all fields is the trademark of a good character. Honesty is the most important virtue and even small seemingly harmless lies can undermine a person’s good intentions.
