Why Do People Lie? The Philosophy Behind Deception | Ilana McBain
The Philosophy Behind a Lie: Why We Learn to Deceive Before We Learn to Love Ourselves
There’s a moment most of us can remember — or if we can’t, it’s probably because we buried it rather well.
We were small. Something went wrong. And instead of saying the truth, we said something else. Something easier. Something that felt, in that tiny chest of ours, like the only safe option.
That was the beginning.
Not the beginning of us becoming bad people. The beginning of us learning that the world sometimes rewards a carefully shaped version of the truth over the raw, messy, inconvenient real thing.
I’ve been sitting with this question for a long time — as an artist, as a writer, as someone who has spent years looking honestly at human behaviour. And what I keep coming back to is this: **a lie is rarely just a lie.** It’s a philosophy. A strategy. A tiny act of self-preservation that, over time, can quietly become a way of living.
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We Didn’t Learn to Lie From Nothing
Children are not born liars. They’re born radically, beautifully honest — sometimes embarrassingly so, as any parent at a school pickup will confirm.
The shift happens gradually, and it happens because they’re watching us.
Around the age of two or three, children begin to understand that their inner world and their outer expression of it can be *different things*. Developmental psychologists call this the emergence of “theory of mind” — the ability to understand that other people have thoughts and feelings separate from your own. It’s a profound cognitive leap, and deception rides in on its coattails.
Because once a child understands that *you don’t know what they know*, they also understand that they can shape what you believe.
And then comes the crucial part: they test it. They say the biscuit wasn’t them. They say they didn’t hit their brother. They say they already brushed their teeth.
If those small untruths are met with punishment and shame — if the child learns that being honest about a mistake brings pain — the lesson is very quickly absorbed: *truth carries risk. A well-placed lie offers protection.*
That’s not a character flaw. That’s a child adapting intelligently to the environment they’re in.
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The Stories We Told to Survive
Here’s what I find both fascinating and heartbreaking about this: most of us carried those early survival strategies forward long past the point where we needed them.
The child who learned that admitting fear meant being mocked becomes the adult who performs confidence they don’t feel. The child who discovered that agreeing was easier than disagreeing becomes the adult who says *yes* when every part of them means *no*. The child who learned that their honest emotional expression was “too much” becomes the adult who hides the depth of what they feel behind a curated version of themselves.
We didn’t mean for this to happen. We were just doing what made sense at the time.
The philosopher Sartre wrote about what he called *bad faith* — the tendency humans have to deceive themselves about their own freedom, to pretend they have no choice when they do, to hide behind roles and routines and socially acceptable stories rather than face the full weight of who they are. He wasn’t moralising. He was observing something deeply human: **self-deception is often the blueprint before external deception even begins.**
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When Childhood Scripts Run Adult Relationships
This is where it gets tender, and I ask you to stay with me here.
So many of the relationship patterns that cause us pain in adulthood — the lying, the cheating, the half-truths, the emotional withholding — are not random cruelty. They are old, old scripts playing out in new settings.
The person who cheats and lies about it is often not, at their core, a malicious person. They may be someone who learned very early that their authentic desires and needs were unacceptable — dangerous, even — and so they developed a split: a public self that performs appropriateness, and a private self that acts out the needs that were never allowed to surface honestly.
That doesn’t excuse the harm caused. The people on the receiving end of those lies are real, and their pain is real. I wrote *Why Partners Cheat* partly because I needed to understand this pattern myself — not to excuse the behaviour, but to understand it deeply enough that I could stop making decisions from confusion and start making them from clarity.
What I found, over and over, was this: the lie in a relationship is almost never the beginning of the story. It’s somewhere in the middle. The beginning is almost always a child — or an adult in a moment of profound vulnerability — who didn’t feel safe enough to tell the truth.
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The Cost of a Lifetime of Safe Lies
There’s a quieter kind of dishonesty I want to talk about too — not the dramatic infidelity or the cover-up, but the daily soft lies that most of us participate in without much thought.
*I’m fine.*
*It doesn’t bother me.*
*No, really, I’m over it.*
*I’m not angry.*
These feel like social lubricant. They feel like kindness, even. And sometimes they are. But over years, over a lifetime, the accumulation of small untruths creates a kind of interior static. You lose track of what you actually think, feel, want. You become a stranger to your own interior landscape.
The philosopher Nietzsche argued that the most pernicious lies are not the ones we tell others — they are the ones we tell ourselves. The stories that protect our ego at the expense of our growth. The convictions we hold not because they’re true, but because we’re not yet brave enough to live without them.
I think about this in my own work — both as an artist and as a writer in the relationship space. Creativity requires a particular kind of honesty. The willingness to look at something directly and say *this is what I see.* Not what I wish were there. Not what’s safer to paint or write or say. What’s actually, honestly, there.
The art that moves people is almost always the art that tells some kind of truth.
And so are the relationships.
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Coming Home to Honesty
None of this is easy. I’m not here to tell you that you should blurt every unfiltered thought you’ve ever had or that radical honesty means saying every unkind thing that crosses your mind.
But I do believe — genuinely, from a lot of living — that the journey toward a more truthful life is one of the most worthwhile things a person can undertake.
It starts with noticing. Noticing when you say *fine* and mean *I’m really not.* Noticing when you agree to keep the peace and feel something die a little inside. Noticing when you tell a story about someone else’s behaviour that conveniently skips the part you played.
It continues with curiosity rather than judgment. The question is never *what’s wrong with me?* It’s *when did I learn that the truth wasn’t safe?* And then, with gentleness: *is that still true? Or is it just old?*
The lie that begins in childhood is, in many ways, a love story — a child’s attempt to stay connected, to stay safe, to stay loved. Understanding it that way makes it possible to release it without shame.
And that, I think, is where freedom begins.
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If this resonates with you and you’re ready to look more honestly at the patterns playing out in your closest relationships, my book* **[Why Partners Cheat](https://ilanamcbain.com)** *and the companion workshop are a gentle but unflinching place to start.*
Read the Book - Why Partners cheat
Get the book & the Workshop - Bundle
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is lying a natural part of human development?
Yes — and understanding this can take a lot of shame out of the conversation. Children develop the cognitive ability to deceive around the age of two to three, as part of normal brain development. The ability to understand that others hold different beliefs and information is a sophisticated mental leap. Whether lying becomes a habitual pattern depends largely on the environment and emotional safety available to the child.
Q: Why do some people lie more than others as adults?
The frequency and habitual nature of adult deception is usually tied to early experiences of safety and consequence. People who grew up in environments where honesty was punished, shamed, or ignored often develop stronger reflexes toward protective dishonesty. People with secure attachment and emotionally responsive caregivers tend to develop a stronger tolerance for vulnerability and truth-telling.
Q: Is there a difference between lying to others and lying to yourself?
Philosophically and psychologically, yes — and many thinkers argue that self-deception is the more dangerous form. We lie to ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance, to protect our self-image, or to avoid confronting choices we don’t feel ready to make. External lying is often downstream of internal lying — we usually have to convince ourselves of something before we can convincingly present it to others.
Q: Can someone who lies habitually in relationships change?
Yes, with genuine awareness and willingness. Habitual deception in adult relationships is almost always a learned pattern, not a fixed character trait. It requires the person to develop enough self-awareness to see the pattern, enough emotional safety to examine it without collapse, and enough motivation to do the work of change. It is possible — but it requires the person themselves to want it, not just to want the consequences of lying to stop.
Q: How do I know if I’m lying to myself about my relationship?
Some honest signals: you find yourself editing your experience when you describe it to close friends. You feel a persistent low-level anxiety or numbness that doesn’t match the story you’re telling. You work hard to talk yourself out of feelings that keep returning. You find yourself defending your partner’s behaviour to yourself more than you find yourself genuinely at ease with it. These aren’t definitive diagnoses — but they are worth sitting with honestly.
Q: Does understanding why someone lies make it okay to accept the behaviour?
Understanding and accepting are different things. Understanding why someone developed a pattern of deception can reduce the personal sting and help you respond thoughtfully rather than reactively — but it doesn’t obligate you to remain in a harmful situation. You can hold compassion for a person’s history and still hold a clear boundary about what you’re willing to experience. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Q: Where can I explore this further?
Ilana’s book *Why Partners Cheat* and the accompanying self-guided workshop explore the deeper psychology of deception in intimate relationships — why it happens, what it reveals, and how to move forward with clarity rather than confusion. Available at [ilanamcbain.com](https://ilanamcbain.com).
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Ilana McBain is an Australian artist, author and philosopher based on the Sunshine Coast.
She writes and creates at the intersection of beauty, honesty, and what it means to live a full human life. Her art prints are available at ilanamcbain.com.