Honesty

One of the things I have been pondering lately is the subject of honesty and how its opposite, dishonesty, is really harmful to the individual in the end just as much as it is harmful to the people that person deceives. This post will be a break from my (so far) usual bucket of hate that I spew forth through my keyboard and instead will provide what I think might be some practical advice to people based on knowledge gained from my own experience.

Now on the subject of honesty, many people have heard that it is better to tell the truth than to tell a lie and that lying is bad etc etc yadda yadda yadda. I do think most people as they grow older tend to come to the conclusion that there are times when it is expedient to indeed not tell the entire truth or not to tell the truth at all. Well I certainly understand this and do think there are times when not telling the truth may be fine (e.g. the classic example of someone lying to protect someone from being murdered), but what I am referring to is honesty vs. dishonesty as an approach to life and why I think that honesty is preferable to dishonesty if one's goal is to live a happy life. The point that I am making here is that while it may seem to be in our interest in the short term to tell a little fib in order to avoid a negative consequence and/or to appease someone (a reason I have often been untruthful) in the long run, such actions will tend to be to our detriment. This is especially the case when dishonesty starts to become ingrained in a person's habits and when being untruthful becomes a normal way of dealing with people and things.

I think this is a case where practicing what is commonly considered a virtue is really ultimately for one's own sake primarily. The reason is that when you are dishonest in life, you will ultimately hurt yourself the most because you will have to suppress your true wants and needs, which is a sacrificial act more than anything else. I have had to learn this the hard way in my own life through experiencing these negative consequences of chronic dishonesty, as I pointed out at the beginning of this post.

For much of my life, I have often concealed my aspirations and desires while telling people (mostly in my family) what they wanted to hear and also I would tend to go along to get along by doing things that I felt people in my family wanted me to do instead of actually asserting myself. Examples of me doing that are taking courses/programs when I didn't want to, expressing interest in things I was not really interested in while not being up front about my real interests. Another way in which I have been dishonest is by concealing my views from my family on certain issues in order to appease them. This also led to me in essence, constructing a false identity for myself in order to present a person to certain other people that I thought they would approve of. It's somewhat ironic that as a person who enjoyed theatre and acting, my very life was in some sense a play as I was playing a person for much of it that I really wasn't while in some roles on stage that I played, I think I was actually more of myself than in "real life."

The conclusion that I have come to now from this is that while in the past when I was younger, doing this may have avoided conflict, in the long run, what it does is breed unhappiness, suppressed anger, bitterness, and regret in one's life. I think though, that the desire to avoid conflict at the time can be so powerful for some that they will not be able to see the larger picture and will just try to immediately make the problem go away. The problem with doing that is things don't go away, they just become suppressed only to emerge later as even bigger problems than before. Now just because one does not choose a false peace, it does not follow that one must be fighting with others in a state of discontent. One can be assertive without being aggressive, as I'm sure any of you that have taken problem solving courses or read books on the subject are aware. I think that what this conflict avoidance behaviour often leads to is actually a passive aggressive mentality where one sheepishly refuses to state their feelings but then becomes angry because of that and so takes out this anger in other ways. I know that I have been guilty of this in the past and I can say that it is completely psychologically unhealthy to live with that sort of mentality.   

I guess that ultimately my purpose in writing this was to do some mental excretion by writing ideas that have been floating around in my mind for the past few weeks. As I mentioned in a previous post, what I really think my aim is in making this blog is to improve my written communication and so I will take the opportunity to express any idea that comes into my mind because I find that when you put something down it it tends to relieve what I consider mental constipation. Incidentally, that is the response that I give to anyone who considers something I've wrote here to be a pile of shit, hey, its got to come out somewhere and this part of the Internet is where I have chosen to relieve myself mentally.