In PART 2, we discuss what is a lie and what is not, and how Kant argue about it, and how far are we from actual truthfullness.

After understanding who lies bigger and why, we must face an uncomfortable truth that sits underneath all of our narratives: Most lies are not spoken. Most lies do not require a false sentence. Most lies do not even feel like lies when we tell them.

We lie by shaping the world around us in a way that makes others reach the conclusion we prefer. We lie by saying half of the truth, knowing that the missing half changes everything. We lie by choosing which facts to highlight and which to bury. We lie by controlling the flow of information, not by fabricating it.

This is the deception that society rewards. These are the lies that make us seem honest. These are the lies that need no courage, no creativity, no risk. These are the lies that are woven into polite conversation, relationships, careers, politics, and even love.

Kant believed that a lie begins the moment you shape another person’s belief in a direction you know is false, even if every word you speak is technically true. Your intention is the lie. The false belief you hope they form is the lie. The silence you weaponize is the lie. The truth you give without the truth you hide is the lie.

We rarely tell direct falsehoods because they feel heavy and dangerous. Direct lies break trust openly. But selective truth preserves the mask of honesty while still bending another person’s perception. This is why society forgives these lies so easily. Courts, markets, and politics can punish a false statement, but they cannot punish the shape of a narrative, they cannot punish omissions, they cannot punish a truth offered at the wrong moment or a silence offered at the right one.

So we grow up in a world where the greatest deception is the illusion that truth exists only in sentences. We think we are honest as long as our words are accurate, even when our intentions are not. We think morality is satisfied as long as we do not fabricate, even when we manipulate. We think we are good because we do not lie, while we quietly train ourselves in every possible way to deceive without ever uttering a false sentence.

Society encourages this because it needs fluid deception to function. Markets need persuasion. Politics needs framing. Relationships need selective softness. Institutions need plausible deniability. Families need delicate omissions to survive tension. Friendships need small protections of the truth to maintain harmony. Even love often requires illusions to keep it alive.

We call these acts kindness, diplomacy, strategy, marketing, professionalism, social intelligence. But underneath all these names is the same mechanism: A story crafted to control what others think.

This is why we judge lies harshly but accept deception. Lies break the agreed boundary of communication. Deception hides inside it.

The difference is not moral. The difference is practical. Lies are easy to detect. Deception is hard to prove. Lies attack the social fabric directly. Deception preserves the surface, which society prefers.

So the honest person, the truly honest person, is not the one who avoids false sentences. The honest person is the one who refuses to manipulate another person’s understanding, even when they could get away with it. Even when others accuse them for being too sincere. Even when society tells them that the clever thing is to hide, soften, omit, or distort.

But that level of honesty is painful. It is costly. It can even be dangerous. People resent the kind of honesty that removes their illusions. People cling to the stories that protect them. And any truth that threatens those stories becomes an attack.

That is why almost no one lives with Kant’s version of honesty. It demands that if we speak, we must speak in a way that cannot deceive. It demands that we stop using omissions and selective truths as a shield. It demands that we give up the safety net of silence when our silence is meant to mislead.

For most of us, this is impossible. We need to survive. We need to negotiate advantages. We need to keep relationships intact. We need to protect our ego. We need to maintain our place in society, even if that means bending someone’s perception just a little.

So we do what humans evolved to do. We avoid direct lies, and we embrace every other form of deception that does not expose us. We maintain our moral identity while distorting reality in ways that benefit us. We judge others harshly for lying, while building entire lives on carefully crafted illusions. We convince ourselves that honesty is in our words, when in truth honesty lies in the intention behind them, the intention we deliberately ignore.

This is the greatest lie of all: The lie that we are not lying.

Truth is not a Right, Truthfullness is a Duty!

At first glance, we are tempted to look for a clever compromise. We want a rule that lets us keep our advantages, protect our ego, and still feel moral. We want a principle that says:

“It is a duty to tell the truth, but only to those who deserve it. Only to those who have a right to it.”

This is exactly what the French philosopher Benjamin Constant tried to do. He argued that telling the truth is a duty only toward someone who has a right to the truth. If a murderer asks whether your friend is in your house, he has no right to that truth. So you may lie.

It sounds intuitive and very human. We like this rule because it justifies what we already do. We tell ourselves that we are honest, but only with the right people, in the right situations, when it feels safe or fair. In every other case, we claim that others do not have a right to the truth, so we can shape their perception however we want.

Kant rejected this completely. He said the phrase “a right to truth” is meaningless. No one owns the truth. What we actually have is not a right to receive truth, but a duty to be truthful. Truthfulness is not something we owe to specific people based on whether we like them or think they deserve it. It is a commitment to the very possibility of trust, contracts, promises, and any shared reality.

For Kant, once you start saying “I will be truthful only to those who deserve it,” you destroy the universality of truthfulness. You turn honesty into a tool that serves your story, instead of a principle that limits your story. You make morality subordinate to strategy. You become the final judge of who deserves reality.

That is exactly what our stories already do.

We decide who deserves our honesty based on how they fit into our narrative of deserving more. We are honest to those who support our story. We are vague, selective, distant, or deceptive with those who threaten it. We hide behind the same excuse Constant proposed: “They have no right to this truth.”

The painful part is that Kant is right about something deeper here. The moment we make honesty conditional, we return to the same logic of survival, where every story competes against every other, and reality is just a resource to be shaped in our favor. We are back to the minimum viable lie.

If we truly want to regulate our stories, not just optimize them, we need something closer to Kant than to Constant. Not perfect Kantian honesty, because that might be impossible for most of us, and maybe even dangerous in some environments. But at least an inner direction:

Act less like the French philosopher who decides who deserves truth. Act more like the person who accepts that their story is not above reality.

Regulating our story is not about becoming pure and harmless. It is about moving the center of gravity from “What can I get away with?” to “What am I becoming when I do this?” It is about placing some principles above the story of deserving more, even when it hurts.

Regulating our stories to minimize harm while ensuring survival still requires self-awareness, empathy, and ethics. We should be deeply aware of our own evil triad traits and actively work to counteract them. We should also be honest that even these attempts can turn into a new form of self-deception, a new story of “I am more moral than others.”

The challenge is not to become perfectly truthful. The challenge is to stop using truth itself as a weapon in our story of deserving more. To accept that sometimes reality defeats our narrative, and that this defeat is not an injustice, but a chance to grow.

Only then we move a little closer to living by principles instead of bending principles to fit our story.