Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Lying, in Sontag's hands, isn’t a melodramatic sin; it’s a low-tech survival tool. Calling it "elementary" is doing quiet but decisive work: she strips deception of glamour and pathology and frames it as something learned early, almost instinctive, like flinching or covering a wound. The phrase "self-defense" then yanks lying out of the moral theater and drops it into the politics of vulnerability. If you have to defend yourself, someone or something is already threatening you.

That’s the subtext: truth isn’t distributed evenly as a luxury. For people under scrutiny - by the state, by institutions, by family, by lovers, by the ever-hungry gaze of public opinion - honesty can be less a virtue than an exposure. Sontag, who spent a career dissecting how culture turns bodies and identities into readable texts, is pointing at the coercion baked into demands for transparency. "Tell the truth" is often code for "Make yourself legible to me", and legibility is a form of control.

The line also carries a chilly, modern awareness: lying is a technique for managing power differentials. It’s what the weak do when the strong insist that confession equals character. Under censorship, in closets, in hospitals, in courtrooms, in interviews, the lie becomes a small barricade erected to keep a self intact.

Sontag isn’t celebrating dishonesty. She’s refusing the comforting story that truth is always safe, and that the moral burden belongs only to the person who lies rather than the conditions that make lying necessary.