The other day, as I was surfing the Internet, I came upon an interesting little movement called Radical Honesty. The main idea of this movement is that you cannot ever lie to anyone and must always tell the truth, even if it hurts. You must express your feelings openly and directly, such as in "I resent you for ____."
At first, I thought this idea was somewhat ludicrous. All of us tell little white lies occasionally, often for the politeness or expediency. We all hide our feelings occasionally to avoid hurting or offending people. And yet, this idea of "Radical Honesty" still remains somewhat appealing to me.
In today's culture, lying occurs all the time. It happens in everyday life, in business (Madoff), in sports (steroids), and in politics. It would be almost a relief for everyone to start telling the truth. The founder of Radical Honesty believes that lying obstructs communication, and that honesty would aid it. Would the world be better off if no one lied?
Of course, I recognize that this is highly impractical. As we know, language is just a set of arbitrary symbols that can be manipulated either way. We can never truly know whether someone is lying or not. But if we could completely eliminate lying, would it be worth it?
-Eric W
9 comments:
It would certainly be interesting to see the world without any lies. However, it is extremely difficult to imagine such concept because we simply have never experienced such condition.
There are some lies which are necessary for various reasons. The range of our white lies stretch from one's outfit to national security issues, and without them, we would offend or hurt others.
However, there are more bad lies than good lies. These include serious crimes, frauds, etc. This kind of lie should be eliminated for the good of our society. The best answer to this question would be eliminate bad lies and keep the white lies.
Jennifer Park
While I understand the appeal of "Radical Honesty," how would it be a "relief" for most people? While people are reluctant to encounter another Madoff scandal, wouldn't outright honesty hurt our society on a far more basic level?
Part of what makes us human is our interactions between people and the sum of the aforementioned totaling to what we call "society." Lies, while usually unwelcome, are a part of our interactions and thus also a part of society. By eliminating lies, sure, we would have less cheating in schools etc. but wouldn't we be in more of a mess?
Everyone would know everything about everyone else. There would be no subtlety left in the world. Since prom is coming up, I'll use the example of love. Are random public confessions of love always the best choice?
I know this is a reference to fiction and not even good fiction but in the book Extras a group of people have this brain surgery that makes it so they can only tell the truth. Most of the time there are no problems with it because they don't really have any secrets. The main character though, always has a secret and she finds it really interesting that the guy she likes is in the honesty group. In the book they couldn't even imply something that was a lie.
In real life this would make some situations better and some a lot worse. I think it would be interesting to try going through one day without lying. Manners would go out the window.
Does remaining silent count as lying?
(Kelley Volosin)
p.s. Eric, I think it is really funny that you didn't need to give an example of lying in politics as you did for all the other subjects.
A world without lying would not be much better than a world without it. What would it be like in a world with no secrets? Grace mentioned the prom, while i think that thats an example we all can relate to personally, i think the repercussions of no lying would stretch far past individual embarrassment.
If no one can lie, then how could anything be a secret? Beyond the little offenses and humiliations we all feel, what if say, a man like the president could not lie? Even in a world without lying people would have enemies and those with different opinions. And there would be no real ways to protect yourself.
Some might consider it a sad fact, but without lying, secrets and mysteries, i don't think our government or our society would truly be able to function.
(Connor Tweardy)
Well, lying is definitely useful in some situations, but I wouldn't say that it is necessary. I don't think it wouldn't hurt if everyone were to stop telling lies. Then again, this is all about personal opinion. I would rather someone tell me the straight truth all the time. I think that it just tends to save a lot of trouble in the end. After all, once you start one lie, you have to back it up with a bunch of other lies.
On the other hand, I know people that would rather not know the truth because it can end up causing more drama in their lives than they want.
To answer Kelley's question about staying silent, I think that it can be even worse as lying. Whether you lie or tell the truth, you are still telling the person something to take place of the answer they are looking for. If you just stay silent, the person ends up going crazy from anxiety because they are left without any sort of information.
I see value in a world where no one lies. Unfortunately, it's not likely that this will ever happen, but it's a nice thought...
On the other hand, though, a world where no one lies would have its consequences. Sometimes dealing with the truth is hard, even if it's for the better. I honestly don't think that humans, the way we live today, could handle that kind of emotional pain, having to face up to our failures and weaknesses in such a blatant way.
Another note that I would like to make is that honesty doesn't necessarily have to be brutal. In many cases there are ways to make hard truths sound good, or to evade one truth with the purpose of highlighting another. For example, if a girl asks you how you like her dress, instead of responding honestly that it looks terrible on her, you could shift your focus and say that the color looks nice on her. It still answers the question, but it avoids unnecessary hurt feelings.
So, honesty can hurt in a lot of ways, and our world could be a much better place if people would only face up to hard facts. On the other hand, honesty could be tempered and aligned to be encouraging, as opposed to simply "the way I feel about it."
Emily T.
I personally think the elimination of lying would definitely be worth it. Yes, honesty would have its negative effects as well, but I still believe that lies have a greater negative impact. While honesty can hurt the person to whom the honest statement is directed, in my opinion, it does not hurt the person who directs the honest statement because he/she is being truthful. Lying, on the other hand, can hurt both people because neither is aware of or has communicated the truth. Yet I recognize that this is merely my opinion and that others who have different values have different opinions.
Although this situation is impractical, I still cannot help but delve a little deeper into the notion of a "lie-free" society. In such a society, the concept of "honesty" would not exist because, without lies, there would only be honesty and thus no such discrete concept would be necessary. This then brings me to consider the real society in which we currently live, namely the source of its issue of lying...
It is important to realize that the real issue is not a matter of the negative effects of lying, nor a matter of honesty being a better option. The issue is that one has the CHOICE to either lie or be honest. Many of us (myself included, obviously) have commented here arguing whether lying or honesty would be more hurtful to people or which would be more beneficial in the long-run. However, the point I emphasize is that, in truth, neither is better/more beneficial than the other. Just as long as only ONE of them is present, then there is no problem. But since in reality we CHOOSE to lie or be honest, both are present (not just lying), which consequently forms the issue. In essence, Eric stated this point in his post:
"We can never truly know whether someone is lying or not."
(Janet Lee)
Because this is all so abstract, I don't blame you if my language made no sense! I apologize for any confusion but would surely clarify if needed. :)
If lying no longer existed, think about how drastically our store of vocabulary would decrease. The phrase "I don't know" would clearly be reduced to a minimum, though it could still be used when disputing the answer to a math problem or something of that sort. I really wish we lived in a kind of ideal world where lying was simply not an option, but the fact is that we don't..and never will. (I know I'm gonna get into trouble for using that as an absolute. Forgive me, Mr. Lazarow.)
Moving on.. If lying didn't exist, wouldn't nations be perpetually belligerent? (I guess I just cleared my name by using a vocab word!) Nation's leaders would be unable to remain diplomatic, leading to angry politicians who would be unable to negotiate because their inability to lie would not let them cover up the fact that they simply don't give two hoots about anyone else. The same applies to people. "I resent you." "Well, I resent you, too!" Sure sounds like the epitome of a great conversation to me.
Basically, what I'm trying to say that is that we have to look at lying as a necessary evil. It's torturous and heartbreaking, I know. But what can we do? I don't know how proud Locke would be if he saw of reason was being used these days.
(Sam Maliha)
I guess what many people are trying to get at here is that lying is a term that is particularly susceptible to the circumstances in which the action is found. While diplomacy, whether political or personal, can be viewed as "lying", so can submitting a false police report. The simple fact that "lies" are simply statements that do not correctly state/describe the actual matter in question makes it an incredibly broad category in itself.
I personally am not really enchanted by the concept of a lie-free society. We often end up equating lies with "badness" and honesty with "goodness." If you really get down to the core of it, the vagaries of language indicate an underlying unwillingness to know and communicate everything in the most direct fashion. Admittedly, this is a little less evident in a relatively concise language such as English. Nevertheless, we still tend towards "softening" truths and beating around the bush. To be blunt and straightforward can, at times, be construed as being insensitive and rude.
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