Let your only "enemy" be lies and deceit

Have you noticed how people™ love fighting with imaginary enemies? It's as if we need villains for our daily mental movie. In this desperate quest, let's crown deceit as public enemy number one.

In 1970, a Japanese man named Masahiro Mori gave us a concept you've probably heard of: the uncanny valley. That strange feeling you get when something looks almost human but isn't quite there. Like the robots from Boston Dynamics or the metaverse avatars that nobody uses.

But you know what? We no longer need robots to feel that discomfort. The uncanny valley now lives in every social media profile. Those people who are almost authentic, almost real, almost themselves. And they deeply annoy us.

Why? Because our brain is programmed to detect inconsistencies. It's a survival mechanism that activates whenever we see someone flaunting their "perfect life" while knowing they're living with their parents and have been making minimum credit card payments for months.

But there's something worse than the uncanny valley of filters: the uncanny valley of cynicism. That visceral disgust you feel when you see a politician smiling while admitting to corruption. When a CEO lays off thousands while boosting their own bonus. When someone tells you "that's how the world works, get used to it" with a smirk of superiority.

Real deceit vs. everyday masks

Not all "deceit" is the same. There's a stark difference between putting your best face forward for a job interview and building an entire false identity to emotionally scam people.

The true deceit, the one that really deserves to be our only enemy, is the one that manipulates, exploits, and harms. It's the guru who sells you a crypto course knowing you'll lose everything. The influencer promoting products they'd never use. The politician making promises they know they'll break. The tarot reader exploiting your desperation to blame your emotional immaturity on the moon.

This toxic deceit is different from the small social performances we all engage in. Self-deception has an adaptive effect. Sometimes we need to believe our own fibs just to move forward.

Up to 70% of the world's population has been exposed to fake news, or rather, misinformation. And here, we have a real problem.

The real fakers aren't the lady who says she's 45 when she's 52. They are the architects of mass misinformation. The ones who create deepfakes to destroy reputations. The ones who manipulate algorithms to radicalize people. Those who monetize hate and fear.

These are real enemies. Not because they are "different" or "strange," but because their deceit has measurable consequences: weakened democracies, destroyed families, and teenagers with eating disorders chasing impossible bodies.

Cynicism as a weapon of mass destruction

But there’s an even more poisonous form of deceit: cynicism. And here is where all alarms should ring.

The cynical politician is not just the one who lies. It's the one who knows they lie, knows you know they lie, and still does it with a smile. It's the one who tells you to your face "yeah, I stole, so what?" The one who turns corruption into a joke, injustice into a meme, and others' suffering into a photo opportunity.

You know what's most disturbing? Cynicism is contagious. When a politician brazenly says "everyone steals," they're not just justifying their corruption. They're inoculating cynicism into the whole society. They're telling you that being honest is being a fool, having principles is naive, and the only way to survive is to be just as rotten as they are.

And that's where they got us. Because mass cynicism is the terminal cancer of any society. When we all assume everyone lies, everything is rigged, nothing is worth fighting for, we stop fighting. We become NPCs of our own lives, repeating "it is what it is" while the world rots around us.

The professional cynic—be it a politician, entrepreneur, or influencer—not only lies. They celebrate lying. They turn it into strategy. They sell it to you as "realism" or "maturity". They tell you that if you're not cynical, you're a fool. That if you believe in something, you're dumb. That if you have hope, you don't understand how the world works.

Those are the real enemies. Not because they're liars, but because they capitalize on cynicism to justify the unjustifiable. To normalize the unacceptable. To turn our rightful outrage into chronic resignation.

The fight against fake news has become a billion-dollar industry. We have fact-checkers, anti-deepfake algorithms, and experts in detecting lies.

But beware: even the fact-checkers can have biases. Sometimes the witch hunt becomes more dangerous than the witches themselves. When we start seeing deceit everywhere, we end up paranoid, unable to trust anything or anyone.

The beauty of recognizing the right enemy

And here's the important part: when you correctly identify the toxic deceit, you begin to see the beauty in normal human imperfections.

That friend who exaggerates stories but does so to entertain you, not to manipulate you. The neighbor who masks her problems but still supports you when you need her. The street vendor who adds theatrics to his pitch but truly believes in his product.

There's a fundamental difference between performing (we all do it) and falsifying with the intent to harm. Between using a TikTok filter and creating a completely fake identity to scam old people online.

The deceit worth combating has specific characteristics:

• Intent to harm: Lying about your age on Tinder is one thing; creating a fake profile to extort is another.

• Scale of deceit: Saying "I'm fine" when you're not is different from pretending to have cancer to raise funds.

• Asymmetrical benefit: When someone gains a lot from lying, while others lose everything by believing.

• Cynicism as a weapon: When someone not only lies but boasts about lying and makes you feel stupid for believing the truth.

Cognitive dissonance makes us minimize our lies and magnify those of others. But if we're honest, we know the difference between a white lie and emotional fraud.

The hack: everything’s a lie until you can see and touch it

In this survival guide for the Anthropocene, the hack is not to become an absolute truth detective. It's developing discernment to distinguish between:

1. Toxic deceit that destroys lives, democracies, and futures.

2. Social masks that we all wear to navigate the world.

3. Personal narratives we tell ourselves to survive.

The solution is not to eliminate all deceit (impossible) or embrace it all (dangerous). It's developing tolerance for ambiguity while maintaining zero tolerance for those who make deceit a way of life.

Because yes, in a world full of imaginary enemies—the immigrants, the millennials, the boomers, or whatever group is trendy to hate—manipulative deceit and institutionalized cynicism are the only enemies worth fighting.

Not the lady with dog filters. Not the guy who says he went to the gym when he went to McDonald's. The real threats are the professionals of deceit, the designers of misinformation, the cynics who normalize crime, or politicians who turn lying into business and cynicism into a national culture.

Those are the enemy. And recognizing them is the first step in not becoming them. Because the only way to combat cynicism is not with more cynicism, but with the radical decision to keep believing that things can be different. Even if they call you naive. Or rather, especially if they call you naive.