Except as a war tactic, head games are sin.
It’s a broad general principle that attempting deception opens the door for demonic presence. It violates cosmic justice. However, just putting the Laws of God into any human language can itself be somewhat deceptive. All the more so within a Western cultural, because of the imaginary logical absolutes. But from a Hebrew frame of reference, we recognize that it’s pretty hard to use deception with an honest motive.
Pearls before swine is not a matter of denying the truth, but refusing to make truth a political football. It’s refusing to play games because you know that regardless what you say, it’s going to be used against you. It’s not about truth but refusing to engage someone serving Satan.
Denying your enemy intelligence is not a sin, of course. However, the biblical morality about warfare is flagrantly violated in just about every Western nation on the earth, most especially the US. Not a single war in American history was justified in God’s sight; every one of them reflected unreasonable and ungodly demands on our part. That is not to say the other combatants were any better, but we are guilty before God. Still, you don’t owe your enemy total access to your planning, and real tacticians know that playing too tightly with security details simply hampers your own troops.
The ultimate value under God’s Laws can be characterized as social stability. A critical element is trust. When you do things to weaken trust, you attack social stability and make openings for demons. The matter of honesty is an ingredient in trust, not a thing unto itself.
Another broad general principle is civility, a set of habits and customs that promote social stability. Truly civilized people are prepared to handle human foibles, not try to stamp them out. You can be stupid all you like as long as you don’t hurt someone else. In a civilized social setting, we don’t blabber everything passing through our heads, and we tend to ignore most people who do blabber. At most, we treat them as children who don’t quite understand. We don’t answer private questions unless there is a valid purpose for asking. Privacy generally covers things that aren’t anyone else’s business, because they have no valid interest. It doesn’t affect them. We develop various ways of handling outrageous conduct to minimize friction.
Secrecy is holding back things that do affect others. This is not legitimate unless the person affected is your enemy. You don’t do it to allies, friends and family. Head games and tormenting teasing are evil.
It’s not a question of rights; there’s no room for “rights” in biblical morality. All talk of rights is just Satanic leverage to control others unjustly. Whatever it is you’re trying to do by declaring various rights is best done some other way; God will not sponsor talk of rights.
The question is not destroying trust with people who have no choice but to trust you. If you like to play head games, it is totally justified that no one be friends with you. If you do it to subordinates, you might as well torture them, because it’s morally about the same thing. Nobody says you can’t use literary arts in sarcasm, open mocking, or deception as a means of entertainment. If you tell people you are doing card tricks, that’s entertainment, not lying. You are building trust because you’ve told them they’ll be fooled by your tricks. Fiction and acting for entertainment are also not lying. Kids pretending are not lying, nor is the fellow everyone knows to be a clown.
It’s when the audience has no choice but to play the victim that you are evil. It’s one thing if you can’t explain something because it’s obvious the other person can’t understand, or refuses to accept the real story (pigs and pearls again). There’s only so much you can do. The problem is too many people think PsyOps with their friends is entertainment, something that stokes their ego at the price of someone else’s peace.
Build social stability; don’t tear it down for your own personal gain.
