Lying is the Root of Evil...
The most important ingredient to building a moral society is truth, both inside and outside a courtroom. The prohibition against "bearing false witness" does not only demand that truth reign supreme in a trial, but that it is a societal value throughout the culture. Bad things happen when people believe lies. With truth, we can build a decent society. Without it, even the other nine commandments won't help.
There are many important values in society, but truth is probably the most important. Goodness and compassion may be the most important values in the micro, or personal, realm. But in the macro, or societal, realm, truth is even more important than compassion or kindness. Virtually all the great societal evils, such as African slavery, Nazism and Communism, have been based on lies.
There were slave traders, Nazis and Communists who were compassionate in their personal lives, but all of them told, and most of them believed, some great lie that enabled them to participate in a great evil. Black slavery was made possible in large measure by the lie that blacks were innately inferior to whites. The Holocaust would have been impossible without tens of millions of people believing the lie that Jews were inherently inferior to so-called Aryans. And Communist totalitarianism was entirely based on lies. That’s why the Soviet Union’s Communist Party newspaper was named Pravda, the Russian word for “Truth" -- because the Party, not objective reality, was the source of truth.
Complete transcript: https://www.prageru.com/file/844/download?token=cNHUCBJu
Prager says that a decent society depends on truth. Can you think of examples where lying is helpful?
