Suppose for a moment that you have a society in which people are physically incapable of lying or of deception, and that the only two things they can say are either (1) The truth, or (2) “I don’t want to say (“no comment,” etc.)”
So, for instance, when asked why a company hires almost all white people and very few minority employees, the recruiters/employers would have to confess to racism, or if someone asked “Do I look fat?” people would have to say, “Yes” (if so,) or spouses could never conceal extramarital affairs from each other, or politicians would be telling the truth 100% of the time in all speeches, debates, media press conferences etc.
What would be the implications for society? There would be far more information to scandalize people, but then again so many people would be guilty of scandalous behavior that such behavior would be considered unremarkable. There would be no more financial scams and no more deception. There would also be no more undercover police officers or spies, since they’d blow their cover immediately - but then again, criminals couldn’t conceal their criminal activities very well, either, so the police would have no problem busting their gang.
Nifty premise! It would probably lead to a better world.
(There’s a chance it would be a nastier world, because bad guys would just be up-front about it. “Yeah, I’m gonna hit you in the face and take your wallet.”)
There was a nifty science fiction story that approached this idea kind of peripherally: mankind made contact with an alien race that had a giveaway, a “tell,” by which we could always see when they were lying. They, themselves, were evolutionarily blind to this. They just didn’t see it, and didn’t know they were giving themselves away with every lie.
(An alien race that could micro-monitor human blood pressure or body temperature might have a similar advantage over humans.)
The story was “If the Stars are Gods” by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund. (I see, on searching, it’s been expanded to novel-length.)
I’m reminded of the story *Omnilingual, *in which a subliminal technique was secretly used by someone unknown to make humanity truthful.
The result was the collapse of human civilization. Fiction of all kinds died out since it’s just complex lying. People couldn’t stand each other enough to form romantic relationships, nor convince themselves that having children was worth the sacrifices. People in general grew to hate one another without the social lubricant of the “little white lie”.
Well in every day interactions and relationships I think this would be like the whole what if you could read everyone’s mind type of thing, you may think you want to know what people are thinking, but I imagine after a couple days after that ability you might feel very dejected by what goes on in people’s minds. I would imagine the same thing for people with an inability to lie. You might better think long and hard before you ask certain questions of people for instance, the truth sometimes hurts.
I’ve watched that, and it differs from the OP in one crucial way: that society was–apparently–utterly incapable of silence, or anything other than the whole truth. There were at least a couple scenes where something like “no comment” or “I don’t want to tell you” would have been vastly better, from a social point of view, than what was actually said.
I don’t think you mean “Omnilingual” - I think you mean Joe Delaney’s “And Nothing But the Truth,” in which a computer virus (intended for one particular person/company) escapes and spreads a subliminal command to tell only the truth.
Also of note is Spider Robinson’s “Satan’s Children” (a story about a drug that gives a high and requires truth-telling).
“Omnilingual” (by H. Beam Piper) is the one about using scientific info as an universal Rosetta stone.
If I tell you “the hit-and-run car was red” because that’s what I honestly recall as being the case but I’m misremembering and the car was actually blue, then I have A) not lied, and B) provided factually inaccurate information. How different are those two things from the listener’s point of view? Either way the cops will be looking for the wrong car.
And then of course there’s the issue of questions which aren’t quite so factual: “Its too hot in here.”
Truth, lie, or matter of opinion? How do we know which is which? If we magically remove the option of “lie”, we still have the matter of opinion. How well-founded does my opinion have to be before it’s true? How unfounded does my opinion have to be before it’s a lie?
Yes, because In a world where questions are always interpreted and answered literally and honestly, “do I look fat” would never develop as a stand in for “am I attractive?” or “tell me you find me desirable” or “reinforce my sense of self-worth.”
There’s a Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story “When I Was a Witch” in which a woman makes a wish so that every truth, lie, uninformed opinion or informed/intelligent opinion, and so forth, is clearly labelled as such in print (this story was written before the internet, but I assume if it was updated, web sites would also be so labelled).
It’s not quite the same as the OP, but it has huge impact on, say, elections and scams.
You can still tell ‘social white lies’ in speech, though, in this story.
She makes several other “what if I were god for a day” type wishes too.
Significant plot point for Harry Harrison’s “West of Eden” alternative evolution story where stone age humanoids and more advanced dinosaur descended lizard people are sharing the earth. Humans can lie and lizard people cannot. They can keep quiet and plot schemes but are not wired mentally or physiologically to be able to lie verbally. Whatever they say has to be fact.
“If you really believe that honesty is always the best policy, try telling your friends the unvarnished truth about what you think of their offspring.”—Robert Heinlein, in Time Enough for Love.
What if the employer works in an area and field where there are very few minority employees, and are actually hiring as many as they can? What if the employer believes they are not using racist criteria, but actually are? Or if the people don’t think they’re racist, but are actually ditching any resumes with names like LaQuanda for what they think is a good reason? This kind of thing happens today.
Bigger problem, what happens when someone has a mental disorder that distorts their perception of the truth? Some of the harder to treat mental disorders cause the person to believe things that aren’t really real - for example, someone with Borderline Personality Disorder will feel extreme emotion over something minor, but because the emotion was so strong will ‘know’ there must have been something major, and will then remember that the other person did something major.
IMO it can be a fun premise for a story, but the idea doesn’t really hold up to a whole lot of scrutiny, and exactly what is ‘the truth’ is pretty complicated.
Yep, society would evolve so that people don’t ask social questions like that. Wow, this is actually seeming more appealing now that I think of it that way.