Lying (Kindle Single)

By Sam Harris
Format: Kindle eBook

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Book Description
As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption—even murder and genocide—generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie. He focuses on “white” lies—those lies we tell for the purpose of sparing people discomfort—for these are the lies that most often tempt us. And they tend to be the only lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1248 in eBooks
• Published on: 2011-09-13
• Released on: 2011-09-13
• Format: Kindle eBook
• Number of items: 1

 Albeit with tongue in cheek, Mark Twain once wrote: "No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstance--the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying." Well, Sam Harris begs to differ. And differ he does, with an impassioned, straight-shooting argument not only that lies are "the social equivalent of toxic waste," but also that each of us is capable of, and would benefit from, a life led free of the lie.

Harris takes his time defining and stratifying types of lies--from adultery to government cover-ups to the seemingly innocuous little white lie--but insists that at any scale, a lie "condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act." Worse, the gravest danger is the liar's inability to contain its effects; when we gamble on deception, we can't anticipate how far the lie will spread, and thus we limit the informed decision-making of who knows how many others. Conversely, Harris argues, even if we're motivated only selfishly, lying less frees us to trust others more. And that's the truth.

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over fifteen languages.

He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Mr. Harris is a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He regularly blogs on his website: www.samharris.org