檳榔嶼

- The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be.
  - In recent years sociologists and psychologists have documented the fact that we live in a nation where people are lying more and more each day.
  - Harriet Lerner : "women are encouraged by sexist socialization to pretend and manipulate, to lie as a way to please. constant pretense and lying alienate women from their true feelings, how it leads to depression and loss of self-awareness."
- Lies are told about the most insignificant aspects of daily life.
  - When many of us are asked basic questions, like How are you today? a lie is substituted for the truth.
  - Much of the lying people do in everyday life is done either to avoid conflict or to spare someone's feelings. 
  - Lots of people learn how to lie in childhood. Usually thy begin to lie to avoid punishment or to avoid disappointing or hurting an adult.
    - The honesty we had been taught to value by our parents, only to find that they did not really mean for us to tell the truth all the time.
  - People learned how to tell polite lies or say what grown-ups wanted to hear were always more popular and more rewarded than those of us who told the truth.
- Sometimes children are fascinated by lying because they see the power it gives them over adults.
- Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.
- Dory Hollander, <<101 Lies Men Tell Women>> : 
  - men tend to lie more and with more devastating consequences.
  - Often, men who would never think of lying in the workplace lie constantly in intimate relationships.
  - To understand why male lying is more accepted in our lives we have to understand they way in which power and priviledge are accorded men simply because they are males within a patriarchal culture.
    - The very concept of "being a man" and a "real man" has always implied that when necessary men can take action that breaks the rules, that is above the law.
    - Patriarchy tells us daily through movies, televisions, and magazines that men of power can do whatever they want, that it's this freedom that makes them men.
    - The message given males is that to be honest is to be "soft". The ability to be dishonest and indifferent to the consequences makes a male hard, separates the men from the boys.
- John Stoltenberg, <<The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience>> :
  - From the moment little boys are taught, that they must be tough,  they are learning how to mask true feelings.
  - In worst-case scenarios they are learning how to not feel anything ever. They may end up choosing patriarchal masculinity to be accepted by other boys and affirmed by male authority figures.
  - Justice between people is perhaps the most important connection people can have.
- Victor Seidler, <<Rediscovering Masculinity>> :
  - When we learn to use language as boys, we very quickly learn how to conceal ourselves through language. We learn to 'master' language so that we can control the world around us... Even though we learn to blame others for our unhappiness and misery in relationships we also know at some unspoken level how our masculinity has been limited an injured as we touch the hurt and pain of realizing how little we seem to feel about anything...
- This inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing pain. This denial is most evident in cases where men seek to justify extreme violence toward those less powerful, usually women, by suggesting they are the ones are really victimized by females.
- Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position.
  - To embrace patriarchy, they must actively surrender of longing to love.
  - This is one of the reasons men, more so than women, use lying as a means of gaining power in relationships.
  - A commonly accepted assumption in a patriarchal culture is that love can be present in a situation where one group or individual dominates another. Many people belive men can dominate women and children yet still be loving.
- After women's earning power has greatly increased, and women are more economically independent, men who want to maintain dominance must deploy subtler strategies to colonize and disempower them. To the degree that she trusts her male companion, lying and other forms of betrayal will most likely shatter her self-confidence and self-esteem.
  - Most men use psychological terrorism as a way to subordinate women. This is a socially acceptable form of coercion.
- Since the values and behavior of men are usually the standards by which everyone in our culture determines what is acceptable, it is important to understand that condoning lying is an essential component of patriarchal thinking for everyone. 
- Women are often comfortable lying to men in order to manipulate them to give us things we feel we want or deserve.
  - Women may lie to bolster a male's self-esteem. 
- Men who accept being lied to and manipulated are not only abdicating their power, they are setting up a situation where they can "blame" women or justify woman-hating.
- Harriet Lerner : 
  - Honesty is only one aspect of truth telling - that it is equated with "moral excellence: an absence of deception or fraud."
  - we do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed.
- Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.
- Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth when the core of one's being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies.
  - More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling. Such a commitment is difficult when lying is deemed more acceptable than telling the truth.
  - Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life, then constant drag of being seen as a "freak" for telling the truth.
- In today's world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers.
  - Consumer culture in particular encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying.
    - Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthen the marketplace economy. 
    - Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.
- Commitment to knowing love can protect us by keeping us wedded to a life of truth, willing to share ourselves openly and fully in both private and public life.
- To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and others.
  - Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to be honest and clear.
  - Lies and secrets burden us and cause stress.
- The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.
- Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.