RooK at 06:46, 11 March 2018

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	Honestly, honesty isn't all it's cracked up to be.		Honestly, honesty isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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RooK at 02:09, 14 February 2011

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[[category:2007 Rant]]
Honestly, honesty isn't all it's cracked up to be.

<i>(In the interests of full disclosure - which should not be even remotely confused with honesty - I didn't knowingly rip that line off of some emo indie lyric. Furthermore, it should be acknowledged that I realize I covered most of this same material 7 years ago.)</i>

The thing is, honesty is a lie. It's not just any ordinary lie, either; it's a seductive ideal that lures everybody into occasionally becoming idealogues. The very idea of honesty in any sort of pure form as a plausible element of dialogue is an insidious destroyer of harmonious communication.

Consider first that every aspect of a statement can be factually true, and yet still be misleading.

Then reflect that our primary means of communication is this thing called language, and know that it is intrinsically limited by the number of symbols it can wield. What's worse is that most of those symbols are things that we can't necessarily agree upon the meaning of. Our individual experiences affect our understanding of each of these symbols.

And then remember just how terribly inept we all can be at expressing ourselves, regardless of the facts or the limitations of language.

How does honesty even have a chance against odds like that?

Someone asks you how you are, and you can answer, "I'm fine." Even if you are fine overall, which is probably a 50-50 wager at best, is that really all there is to the answer? Every little twinge and every tiny worry etch designs of dishonesty on the answer. Maybe it's more honest to obey the desire to not getting into all that assorted crap in the course of a casual greeting. But how is that different than saying "I'm fine" even when I am, in fact, quite poignantly not fine? Sometimes I think the most honest answer to "How are you?" is a sneer and a diatribe about how utterly sick I am of having to choke out a formulaic social response designed not at all for dialogue, but is instead merely a verbalization of a pack instinct to sniff each other's butts and acknowledge each other's belonging.

The dictionary says that honesty is a fairness and straightforwardness of conduct and an adherence to the facts. But that's not what honesty really means in interpersonal dialogue, is it. When someone prompts you for an honest answer, what they really want is an unabridged response - regardless of how fair you think it might be, or how much you might ramble and elaborate, and there doesn't have to be a single damn fact in the lot as long as there are opinions.

There's a kind of honesty mythos that shrouds all interpersonal interactions. Did they really mean that? Is there anything they're not telling me? If the answers are "yes" and "no" respectively they might be deemed as being honest. Unfortunately, the primary way of determining if somebody really means something is if there's some way of detecting if they still mean it later. Like they couldn't really mean it before, and then change their mind. And for most people with an IQ sufficient to tie their shoes, there's always going to be some things they aren't telling you. It's called editing, and it's done for clarity.

The most honesty can claim is that it is not primarily trying to deceive. Deception is also going to claim that it isn't trying to deceive, so it's a pretty meaningless claim, really.

All honesty can ever really be is a direction of intent on the part of a person expressing something. And the shitty thing is that people can lie to themselves about it.

2007.06.09 Honest Honesty - Revision history

RooK at 06:46, 11 March 2018

RooK: 1 revision imported

RooK at 02:09, 14 February 2011