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We all wind up encountering people in our lives who feel their goals and ambitions should not be hampered by such a minor obstacle as the truth. Those who feel entitled, for whatever reason, to have everything they want without being bogged down by the boring, time-consuming, and potentially exhausting process of trying to earn them legitimately. Whether it is financial wealth, public status, power, influence, or merely the emotional pay-off of feeling they have the upper hand sadly there are plenty of people who become addicted to false immediate-gratification or the ‘liar’s shortcut’.
Sometimes the consequences of those lies are as minor as convincing people to see a movie which doesn’t measure up to its hype, trying a new brand of soup which ends up tasting awful, getting caught doing something a sibling claimed your parents had given the okay. But the consequences can also be far more devastating. Destruction of relationships, crippling financial losses, horrendous erosion of personal freedoms, and yes even death. The lie itself is not particularly destructive but the consequences of the actions taken based upon believing the lie can be enormously so, whether at the personal or the nationally political level.