Our culture is in trouble. We all sense it, even if we struggle to put our finger on exactly why. Explanations abound. It’s politics, media, technology. We’ve lost faith. The core family structure is eroding. None of these explanations is entirely wrong. And none of them gets to the root.
At bottom, the problem is simple: Fearful people lie. Most do not lie out of immorality or malice, but because fear changes how human beings perceive risk, consequence, and survival. This has less to do with ideology than with human biology.
The Unexpected Finding
A 2012 controlled experiment produced a result that ran against expectation: Men given testosterone were less likely to lie.
In a double-blind study, participants received either testosterone or a placebo in patch form and then completed a simple task. They rolled a die in private and reported the outcome for money. Higher numbers meant higher payoffs. Individual honesty could not be verified by the experimenters. The setup invited small, self-serving distortions of the truth.
Men who received testosterone reported significantly lower dice rolls overall than those in the placebo group. In practical terms, they chose honesty more often, even when lying would have been easy, undetectable, and profitable. What makes this result especially striking is how little pressure was involved. There was no threat of punishment or personal loss, only a private opportunity for minor gain. Testosterone alone shifted behavior.
The study does not suggest that testosterone makes people virtuous. It suggests something more basic: The impulse to lie is sensitive to internal states that govern how tolerable consequences feel.
Lying as a Fear Response
Lying is usually treated as a moral failure. It is more accurately understood as a response to threat. When people lie, they are rarely trying to deceive for its own sake. They are trying to avoid something: punishment, loss, shame, conflict, exposure. The lie is not the goal. Relief is.
This is why most deception, at least in the beginning, is small and situational. People shade the truth, omit details, soften facts, or tell themselves a story that makes an outcome easier to bear. These are not acts of grand fraud. They are acts of avoidance, little white lies that are often more social lubrication than moral failing.
Fear alters the calculus. Immediate discomfort looms larger than future cost. Short-term relief outweighs long-term coherence. If telling the truth feels risky and lying feels safe, many people will lie, even when the stakes are low and the gain is trivial.
Over time, this pattern turns inward. Sustained fear not only increases deception toward others. It increases self-deception as well. Believing the distortion becomes easier than maintaining it consciously.
Seen this way, lying is not best explained by bad character. It is explained by conditions that make truth feel unsafe.
What Fear Does to Cognition
Fear does not simply make people emotional. It changes how they think.
Under fear, attention narrows. Time horizons shorten. What matters most is getting through now. The long-term benefits of honesty fade, while the short-term comfort of deception grows.
Fear also reduces perceived agency. When people feel acted upon rather than acting, they become less willing to accept responsibility for outcomes. Lying begins to feel less like a choice and more like a defensive reflex.
This does not require extreme danger. Chronic low-grade stress is enough. Uncertainty, instability, and the sense that mistakes will be punished disproportionately all push cognition in the same direction. Avoidance replaces confrontation. Narrative replaces clarity.
Once fear becomes ambient rather than episodic, deception stops feeling exceptional. It becomes normal. Truth is not rejected outright; it is quietly set aside whenever it threatens equilibrium.
Cortisol and Chronic Fear
Fear has a physiological signature. One of its primary markers is the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is part of the body’s stress response system, designed to help organisms survive threat. In short bursts, it sharpens attention and mobilizes energy. Over time, it does something else.
When cortisol remains elevated, the body behaves as though danger is constant. Threat sensitivity increases. Vigilance becomes the default. Ambiguity is interpreted as risk. Exposure feels unsafe.
Under these conditions, truth-telling becomes a gamble even when no explicit punishment is present. This helps explain why deception increases in environments that are not overtly coercive. People may not be threatened directly, but they operate within systems that they perceive as unstable or unforgiving. The body responds accordingly.
Over time, this has a further consequence. Sustained deception is cognitively expensive. Under chronic stress, many people resolve that cost by internalizing the lie. They stop merely repeating a distortion and begin to believe it. At that point, sincerity no longer guarantees accuracy. People are not necessarily lying in bad faith. They are adapting to conditions that make unfiltered truth feel dangerous.
This is also why Scripture is so insistent about truth-telling. The admonition to speak the truth is not naïve about human weakness; it is realistic about it. We are embodied creatures, subject to hormones and physical weaknesses, and what we practice physiologically shapes what we come to believe. The warning is practical as much as it is moral.
Testosterone as a Counterweight to Fear
If cortisol reflects sustained threat, testosterone reflects tolerance.
Testosterone is often misunderstood as a driver of aggression or dominance; it’s frequently been maligned in modern media as toxic or dangerous. In reality, it lowers sensitivity to threat and increases tolerance for consequence. It shifts behavior away from avoidance and toward approach, hence aggression rather than compliance.
This matters because fear-driven deception depends on the perception that consequences are unbearable. When consequences feel survivable, the incentive to lie weakens.
This makes the earlier study intelligible. Testosterone did not make participants virtuous. It made honesty easier. With reduced threat sensitivity, the small losses associated with truth-telling no longer required evasion. Deception lost its appeal.
Testosterone also favors internal coherence. Lying introduces instability. Under conditions where fear is low, that instability becomes costly rather than protective. Consistency carries more weight than opportunism.
When Fear Reinforces Itself
Cortisol and testosterone do not operate independently. Over time, they interact.
Sustained stress elevates cortisol. Elevated cortisol suppresses testosterone. Lower testosterone increases threat sensitivity and reduces tolerance for consequence. Fear becomes easier to trigger. Avoidance becomes more attractive. The cycle tightens.
As fear rises, deception becomes more common. As deception becomes common, trust erodes. As trust erodes, uncertainty increases. The conditions that produced fear are reinforced by the behaviors fear encourages.
At the individual level, this looks like chronic anxiety and narrative thinking. At the group level, it looks like systems that speak carefully but rarely plainly, that emphasize safety while producing distrust, and that mistake reassurance for honesty.
What looks like a crisis of character is often a crisis of conditions.
Related: When Words Don’t Work: Losing Our Common Tongue
Making Truth Survivable Again
If fear drives deception, honesty cannot be restored by exhortation alone. It has to be made survivable.
This is not a call to medicalize morality. It is a recognition that truth-telling depends on conditions that support agency rather than avoidance. Lowering fear matters. Increasing tolerance for consequence matters.
At the individual level, the levers are mostly familiar: sleep, physical strength, sunlight, meaningful work, clear boundaries, stable relationships. These reduce baseline stress and support resilience. They lower cortisol and increase the capacity to absorb discomfort without distortion.
At the cultural level, the same logic applies. Environments that punish mistakes disproportionately or treat confrontation as harm reliably raise fear. They produce careful speech, strategic silence, and eventually self-deception. Systems that tolerate disagreement, allow failure without annihilation, and value competence over appeasement reduce stress and make truth easier to speak.
Virtue still consists in choosing truth over evasion. But the difficulty of that choice is shaped by conditions that either widen or collapse the space in which the will operates.
A culture drowning in fear will lie, often sincerely. A culture that wants honesty must attend to the conditions that make honesty possible.
Truth does not vanish because people stop caring about it. It vanishes when fear makes it too costly to live with.
Editor’s Note: PJ Media is here to fight back against the left’s lies and work toward making our culture great again, rather than fearful and false. Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!
