Is honesty always the best policy? Or better stated, how can the truth be used to gain power over someone? I read an article in Esquire Magazine a few months ago that sparked a conversation with a group of friends that made us wonder if and when honesty is ever inappropriate. The article, titled "I Think You're Fat," features the story of one of the company's young, male writers as he narrates his arrogant and often disturbing account of his experiment with "Radical Honesty."
I understood a lot of what the author A.J. Jacobs writes about the problems of actually implementing radical honesty because I too have experimented with the practice. If lying were a drug, you could say I've been sober for just over a year. It's not that I was a compulsive liar, or that I lied all the time. When I did lie, I was holding back crucial information, or I would purposely not tell the whole truth. I usually did this in relationships to avoid answering questions I knew would lead to hard conversations or arguments.
Last year however, something changed. I told a whopper of a lie (or rather a whopper of holding back the truth) and I almost lost someone I love very much. Ever since, I've committed to a personal standard of radical honesty and checking in with my deeper feelings about what I wanted to conceal.
It wasn't easy, and I failed a more than a few times. I always admitted the lie after and talked about why I was scared to confront whatever situation I had to deal with. Every time was about trust. I was scared that the other person would misunderstand me and/or react in a way that I would not be able to handle. It was about fear of not feeling strong enough to be capable of handling the implications of the truth.
Funny enough, it turns out that I can handle the truth. Like a muscle, it gets stronger with practice. Over the journey of this past year, I had times when I realized that it wasn't appropriate to "just" tell the truth. Sometimes I knew it was going to hurt the other person, a lot. In these situations, that old fear would come back and I'd try to find excuses to not tell the truth. I followed the guidelines I had set out for myself at these times and realized that my fear then was justified, the other person will be hurt by what I was about to do. So I asked myself, what then should I do?
I had a friend a few years ago who lived down the street from me. We would meet at either her house or mine a few days a week and talk about all of our worries and concerns in our lives. We'd talk about our guilt, anger, frustration, and our humiliating secrets. Obviously, this isn't the kind of thing one would usually do in public or with someone they've just met. There's certain parameters we would establish in order to facilitate the truth session. We'd light some candles, put on a pot of tea, put on some nice incense and music, sit on the floor and smoke cigarettes. In effect, we created a space for it and gave it what Walter Benjamin might call the sacred "aura" of a ritual.
We called it a "Blah Session." She'd call me up and say, "Can we Blah? I need to Blah." Sometimes a Blah would go terribly wrong. The situation or timing parameters wouldn't be adhered to and it set into motion a challenging and painful (un)reception of the Blah. Like playing football with cold muscles, it hurts to enter into Blah space when you're not ready. When we recognized that it was a failure of ritual and setting, we began to coin a term for it- we called it a "Non-consensual Blah."
The Non-consensual Blah feels like being violated. Imagine, someone coming up to you at an inappropriate time (maybe while you're at work), in an inappropriate space (maybe the bathroom) and telling you something deeply personal when you are not expecting it. Now imagine, someone you know first asks you if they can talk with you, then together you go to a park bench where they proceed to tell you deeply personal.
In the first instance, your personal boundaries feel violated. It's usual to become angry, as if the other personal has taken something from you, or as if they have soiled you by dumping their problems on you (perhaps that phrase reveals the physical sensation of the feeling?). So in the article, I can understand when the author feels guilty for being so brutally honest. His performance of being honest has no connection with social behavior. By dropping truth bombs on his unsuspecting recipients, he places himself in a position of power over them. His recipients didn't give consent to the kind of intimacy required to listen to him, and he therefore proceeded to violate what I would consider their social boundaries.
In the case of Jacobs, he said he felt creepy after he told the young woman he employs to watch his children that she's "stunning" he would ask her out on a date if he wasn't together with his wife. Feeling creepy is a side effect of blatantly using the power of his truth to put his nanny in a position of inferiority. Because he didn't ask if he can tell her something, he didn't afford her the agency to agree or disagree to subject herself to his advances. By asking her he would be arranging a sort of social contract that would allow them to equally hold the power in the intimate space he was creating.
The imagined space of intimate conversations exists on a real level, and practicing radical honesty can take you to that space before you and your audience is ready to handle it. Consent for discussing an intimate topic is just as important as consent in any other intimate activity. Because the truth can be so powerful, it's important to recognize how you use it. When one is careful to create structures of equal power relationships when practicing radical honesty, it becomes a tool for creating the kind of transformative space where a trusted friends can help each other take heavy truths off each other's backs.
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