Tag: lies

Why Honesty is the Best Policy

Marriage fingers crossed
Image from Spotnphoto

In a few short weeks, I’m about to re-enter the world of unemployment, with the intention of moving to a writing-based career. At this point, what bothers me most isn’t the sudden lack of income, or the fear of measuring up in an unfamiliar endeavour, but the fakery that tends to accompany job interviews. These rare and awkward encounters seem to me like a game of poker, in which I’m trying to convince my opponents that I have a full house, when in honesty I have little more than a pair of two’s. The deception required to bluff through a job interview, persuading your potential employers that you have all of the necessary tools to bring value to their company, is something that I’ve always loathed. What I’d really like to do is put all of my cards on the table and say “this is what I have, and I’m a nice guy who gets along with most people. Can I have a job please?” Nothing contrived or rehearsed—just pure, unadulterated honesty.

Given our species’ penchant for putting on appearances, such a situation seems foolishly utopian. Certain scenarios require us to dance the dance that has been chosen for us, or withdraw from society completely to live on our own terms, like Viggo Mortensen’s character in the wonderful Captain Fantastic. But in my experience, the varied situations that I’ve undergone during my time as a regular, city-dwelling homosapien have proven to be best tackled by being honest, as often as possible. People just seem to like you more when you’re straight with them, and those who mutter offended scoffs can go and boil their heads. This isn’t giving yourself license to act like an arse—politeness and social niceties are essential for emotional creatures such as ourselves, with the capacity for horrific violence. It’d be impossible to make friends or get along with anyone if you’re staring them down with a chimpish grin.

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.” 

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

With honesty, all manner of playacting is made redundant, and with it, all of the exhausting responsibilities required to convince the world of your brilliance. It’s the relief a theatre actor might feel when stepping away from their persona for the evening, unshackled from the obligation of remembering lines, striking poses, and fabricating emotions. Instead, every emotion is allowed to rise naturally from the depths of their soul, rather than their intraparietal sulcus—a part of the brain used when acting a role¹. New-found legitimacy engenders a wonderful lightness, as though we’ve been wearing heavy work boots for most of our lives, and have just swapped them for obscenely fluffy, Merino-wool slippers. Given the stress required to live a life of pretense, the buoyancy of honesty might even extend beyond the metaphorical, as stress makes you gain weight. As every little morsel of chicanery dissipates into the ether, our relaxation increases, until we feel able to navigate the world as unapologetically ourselves, in full defective glory. As if by magic, the words that we were previously too frightened to mutter come bursting forth, with little worry about whether it splits our audience in two, or whether we’ll upset the sourpuss in the accounts department. Honesty can have the same effect on our inhibitions as a glass of the Hunter Valley’s finest Shiraz, and feels comparably soothing. In fact, as I’ve gotten older and become gradually more honest, I find that alcohol has much less of an effect on my inhibitions, because they no longer have such a ferocious hold to begin with.

I can’t begin to imagine how much energy I’ve wasted in my life trying to paint the “perfect” picture of myself. 300 hash browns worth, at least. The kicker is, regardless of how perfect you assume your behaviour to be, there’s always a select group of people who’ll continue to dislike you. With honesty, those people are lit up like the Star of Bethlehem, which you can quickly turn your back on in pursuit of something a little more your style. Most people seem well-equipped to detect pretentious behaviour anyway—trying to hide your faults can have the unfortunate effect of bringing them into the limelight. Why not just cut the bullshit and be yourself? No longer will there be any requirement to paint yourself cool, admirable, smart, capable, attractive, or anything else that society deems important. Think of the brainpower that you’ll save for something that’s actually worthwhile, like watching season three of Stranger Things.

“To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.” 

Charles Dickens

The universe can be a pretty cruel place to exist, especially during those uncomfortable moments when we reflect on our own mortality, and what the hell it all means. Slipping into a role for which society would give a boring and predictable thumbs-up is dangerously easy, putting us on a cookie-cutter path that might destroy our uniqueness. The more honest that we are with ourselves, the likelier we are to discover off-roads that could lead us places that feel wholly authentic. We’re born into a greyscale world, devoid of any intrinsic meaning. Honesty is a paintbrush that allows us to colour the world with meaningful vibrancy—we know which colours make us wide-eyed, and we can use that knowledge to paint our masterpiece, with no instruction needed from a higher authority. Only when we muster the courage to be honest can we carve out a meaningful path for ourselves.

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” 

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

At times, reality can be a tough cookie to crack. Our existence as unique, separate beings makes us prisoners of our own subjectivity; we understand reality in terms of our senses, and from what others say about it. If everyone went about their day lying through their teeth, it’d be a lot harder for us to determine what reality actually is. Our brain’s interpretation of our senses would become king—a mediocre choice for a mass of tissue that has a ton of biases, uses mental shortcuts to make decisions, and can hallucinate the most fabulous nonsense imaginable. The level of honesty within our species plays a large role in determining our understanding of the world. If Google decided one day that its maps should only be 50% honest, you might find yourself in the middle of the desert, wondering where all of this sand came from. We owe it to our fellow humans to give them an accurate reflection of the world, whether it’s an external, shared truth such as the weather, or an internal emotional truth, like the grouchiness you’re feeling after last night’s tequila competition with a rustic hidalgo from Guadalajara. With truth comes clarity of vision for all.

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…”

Leo Tolstoy

Bending the truth only seems necessary in times of peril, when the stakes are extremely high. You probably wouldn’t want to tell a suicide-risk friend that their new haircut makes them look like a deranged poodle, lest they make a beeline for the nearest precipice. The loveable robot TARS from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is programmed with a 90% honesty setting, claiming absolute honesty to be an unwise approach for dealing with emotional human beings. I’d argue that 99% is the preferred setting, with the 1% reserved for those rare moments that dishonesty seems to be the correct moral choice. Anything greater seems to be unnecessary, exhausting pretense—strapping on a straitjacket and a plastered smile. In an era infected with all manner of falsity—Donald Trump; tampered elections; fake news; climate change denial; the efficacy of Capitalism; Flat Earth theory; anti-vaxxers, and much more—honesty isn’t just chicken soup for our souls, but a moral necessity, to give us the strength to claw our way out of this filthy bog of crock into which we’ve fallen.

References

  1. Stuart Jeffries, Inside the mind of an actor (literally)

The importance of good ideas

Discoball head

1_QBg4nJeGIW2yDjgyWMrMVAPhoto by Vale Zmeykov on Unsplash

Death – that fiercly dark, inescapable lurker – eventually reveals his position to every one of us, and sweeps us away. If you’re lucky, it could be while you’re softly snoring in your bed, as a blood clot torpedos its way towards your unsuspecting heart. If you’re unlucky, you’ll contract a horrible, drawn out disease with no cure, and stink up your hospital room in the process. The end result is just the same – this life as you know it comes to a close, and you return to the same state as before you were born, a state impossible for anyone to describe.

While we may not be able to persist for eternity (as if that would be a good thing), there’s something that we can create which does continue into the future: our ideas. We can concoct wonderful concepts in our brains, and magically transplant them into the brains of other people, some of which can be passed on and thrive within human culture for millenia. Controversial scientist Richard Dawkins expands on this idea in his book The Selfish Gene, in which he proposes the idea of the meme, which like its biological counterpart the gene, has the ability to self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. This was the definition of memes before the internet took over and turned it into something trivial. Dawkins’ meme is a truly perceptive concept which imbues our ideas with a life of their own; an existence that can adapt, thrive, or die, much like ourselves. The ideas that we send out into the world can be devastingly prolific, or fade away with a depressing whimper. They can live in the minds of entire continents, influencing the behaviour of their hosts in unforeseen ways. This is why it’s so important to ensure that our ideas are good and beneficial to the human race, to the extent that we judge them so. Bad ideas are like a cancer, which can infect multitudes of people and end up annihilating us. Climate change deniers are an example of this – the asburd idea that they hold in their heads might literally end up killing us all. This might be considered more murderous than any cancer that can develop in our bodies, and its effectiveness is strengthened dramatically by the rise of the internet, a network that serves as a superhighway for bad ideas.

Truth is the necessary antidote to such evils. We all have a moral responsibility to send good, true ideas out into the world, which nourish the human race. Worthy ideas are like sustenance for the soul, as though you’re consuming the most nutritious, perfectly balanced meal available to you. Bad ideas are tantamount to visiting McDonalds every day – eventually, they might kill you. The information that you share with your fellow chimps is much more important than you might realise, and so some moments of consideration are required in order to prevent the spread of cancerous concepts. This is why good journalism and writing is such a crucial part of society – we need excellent journalists to counteract the stream of incessent bullshit that is fired at us from every imaginable angle. The truth is often difficult to uncover; certainly not as easy as clicking on the first few Google search results and then re-writing what you’ve discovered. Anything worthwhile takes time, and anyone committed to the truth should realise this, lest they get drawn into the dark world of damaging falsities. Fake news is a genuine problem in today’s world, the validity of which is being undermined every time that Trump incorrectly labels something as fake news, in order to cover up a glaring truth about himself. It’s a part of Trump’s ongoing war with the media, in which he’s going so far as expressing his approval of assaulting journalists, because of their responsibility and gratifying effectiveness at illuminating his obscenities. Earlier this year at one of Trump’s rallies, his supporters were filmed mercilessly abusing the media – a direct result of the president’s words.

The bigger the audience, the more construction or destruction the person can inflict upon the world. The concept can be extended to celebrities, who whether by talent or sheer luck, have amassed monumental audiences in which they can effectively spread an endless amount of awful ideas. Take the Kardashians or any one of their ilk, who whether realising it or not, are spreading the destructive notion that you have to look and dress a certain way in order to be considered beautiful. Their absurd fame is genuinely bad for the human race, notably for young impressionable girls whose self-esteem would be better nourished if they followed the pursuits of people who were actually worthwhile. Sadly, Marie Curie or Rosa Parks don’t have quite the same entertainment value as an over-inflated celebrity with a head full of air.

Our society can only flourish if we help to foster good ideas, and root out bad ones. A solid foundation requires strength and durability, which can only be found in valuable truth. Anything built on deceit will crumble when put to the test, which could happen to our species unless we make a concerted effect to propogate lasting, effective ideas, while at the same time rallying against duplicitious nonsense. Like Karl Pilkington’s Bullshit Man, if you witness somebody in the act of spouting inaccurate drivel, call them out on it, preferably in a similarly dramatic fashion.

We’re all destined for the grave, but our ideas don’t have to be. A small part of us can continue into the future, and if you choose to live with integrity, you might just improve the human race in the process.

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