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byrnema comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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I think I used to experience something like this when I was a teenager. I'd reflexively assume whatever identity was needed for rapport, not necessarily always with skill, and this seemed like lying only afterwards when I realized I had gone too far and would probably get caught. This was annoying because I didn't really have control over my lying. At some point in my early 20s this spontaneously stopped happening. I wonder if this simply had something to with my brain maturing and whatever represents the relevant parts of my identity solidifying.
Do you think your family has anything to do with your curious cognition? In my paternal family, lying seems more like a sport than anything morally reprehensible and successful deception is considered something to be proud of. I don't agree with them but can't say I hate them either.
I also discovered I was like this as a teenager -- that I had an extremely malleable identity. I think it was related to being very empathetic -- I just accepted whichever world view the person I was speaking with came with, and I think in my case this might have been related to reading a lot growing up, so that it seemed that a large fraction of my total life experience were the different voices of the different authors that I had read. (Reading seems to require quickly assimilating the world view of whomever is first person.)
I also didn't make much distinction between something that could be true and something that was true. I don't know why this was. or if it is related to the first thing. But if I thought about a fact, and it didn't feel currently jarring with anything else readily in mind, it seemed just as true as anything else and I was likely to speak it. So a few times after a conversation, I would shake my head and wonder why I had just said something so absurdly untrue, as though I had believed it.
In my early twenties, I found I needed to create a fixed world view -- in fact, I felt like I was going crazy. Maybe I was, because different world views were colliding and I couldn't hold them separate when action was required (like choosing an actual job) rather than just idle conversation.
That's why I gravitated towards physical materialism. I needed something fixed, a territory behind all of these crazy maps. I think that the map that I have now is pretty good, and well-integrated with the territory, but it took 3-5 years. I'm still flexible with understanding other world views. For example, I was in a workshop a few days ago where we needed to defend different views, and I received one that was marginally morally reprehensible. I was the only one in my group able to defend it. (It wasn't such a useful skill there, I think most people just assumed I had that view, which is unfortunate, but I didn't mind -- if it was important to signal correctly at this workshop I would have lied and said I couldn't relate.)
This is interesting, particularly in connection with your grativation towards materialism - thanks for sharing.