Against Lie Inflation

[Related to: The Whole City Is Center]

I.

I got into an argument recently with somebody who used the word “lie” to refer to a person honestly reporting their unconsciously biased beliefs – her example was a tech entrepreneur so caught up in an atmosphere of hype that he makes absurdly optimistic predictions. I promised a post explaining why I don’t like that use of “lie”. This is that post.

A few months ago, a friend confessed that she had abused her boyfriend. I was shocked, because this friend is one of the kindest and gentlest people I know. I probed for details. She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad. She counted this as abuse, because her definition of “abuse” is “something that makes your partner feel bad about setting boundaries”. And when she cried, that made her boyfriend feel guilty about his boundary that he wasn’t going to do the favor.

We argued for a while about whether this was a good definition of abuse (it isn’t). But I had a bigger objection: this definition was so broad that everyone has committed abuse at some point.

My friend could have countered that this was a feature, not a bug. Standards have been (and should be) getting stricter. A thousand years ago, beating your wife wasn’t considered abuse as long as you didn’t maim her or something. A hundred years ago, you could bully and belittle someone all you wanted, but as long as there was no physical violence it wasn’t abuse. As society gets better and better at dealing with these issues, the definition of abuse gets broader. Maybe we should end up with a definition where basically everyone is an abuser.