Honesty

I think people generally are honest when it's positive but when it comes to all the negatives they hide what they really think. I'm way more honest than usual because I try (when I can, certainly not always) to be totally honest. In truth if everyone was being totally honest I'd appear an angel probably compared to most people. But since I'm pretty much the only person being so honest I'm thought of as rude, blunt, a "troublemaker", etc.

This is why I'm so honest:

Generally speaking the more you know, in the long term, the happier you should be. I've taken this too far, hence the title of this blog. I truthseek to a fault. I don't spend enough time just being silly, having a short term good time. The gears of long term truth seeking are always running in my head. And to share the positive and hide the negative is just so... unscientific. It's like doing a bunch of experiments and then tossing out the half of the results that didn't give you the answer you'd hoped for.

Such science would be pointless. And so with half the truth (whatever is negative) mostly hidden. The whole idea of truth seeking is chucked out the window. As a truth seeker (of course practicing the golden rule) you would either have to always be honest (with people you think you can afford to be so unassimilated to the social norms with) or you've got nothing.

The other side is not thinking so long term. Not truth seeking. Instead living for the short term. Just having a good time. Might as well hide the negative. This "anti-honesty" point of view is immensely nihilistic. It believes that people won't learn anything from the truth, that they won't come to any better understanding and instead will just fight. It believes that there are no truths worth understanding.

A short story could go like this:

Two men are the last living people on earth. They are scientists searching desperately for a way to clone, reproduce, somehow save the human race. They've been working a long time. They have one possibly final desperate experiment. The one scientist is especially getting old and sick. He thinks certainly this one should work. And if it doesn't it's over. That's it for the human race.

He falls ill and can't get to the lab to see the results. The other must tell him the results which were a failure. The other recognizes that finally it's no good to tell him the truth. He'll learn nothing that he can use in the future. It's time, finally, to live for the short term. To hide the negative. Finally the truth will hurt too much. And this person can do nothing good with it.

As a twist though, it could turn out that the dying scientist remembers some crucial thing that was done wrong. But with being lied to and told the experiment was a success doesn't bother to mention it as he dies and the race of man ends.

Anyway the result of my honesty is that I'm not as well liked as I'd otherwise be. It's highly ironic in a way because actually to be so damm honest I have to pretty much think like an angel. If one were to go inside the heads of people I associate with and compare it to my own, I wonder what the people who think so little of me would think then?

Maybe they know full well and still just don't care. As long as the ugliness which is in others is so much more hidden, so what? As long as there's a big smile and some silly thing to laugh about, what does it matter? There was never any intention to get very close anyway, so what does it matter?

It isn't just a matter of varying degrees of long term/short term thinking. It gets far more complicated.

It is also being optimistic enough to think a person can handle the truth.

It is also a matter of being incapable of just having a short term good time (being instead "zombiefied").

It is also a matter of not feeling vulnerable so that you're actually in a position to be so honest.

It is also the need to have more "meaningful" connections with people, to be closer emotionally with more people.

.....