I have always been an honest person. In fact, I would say that I have always been compulsively honest. If you surprise me, honesty comes out. Part of my deep drive to discover the truth is the kind of truthfulness to which many aspire.

But I would be lying if I said I was honesty out of pure saintly idealism. The truth is, I just do not like lying. I despise the sensation of it. I hate that moment when reality splits in two between the real world and the world in which your lie is true, and you now are stuck keeping track of both of them essentially until the day you die, or fess up.

Lies are messy and complicated and make cognitive demands and I have always just preferred to skip the whole thing by telling the truth however I see it.

And don’t get me wrong. Honestly is definitely a virtue. Being an honest, genuine, forthright person can lead people to trust you and rely on you for an objective point of view. Coupled with a genuine desire to help people, honesty can be a powerful tool for good. And certainly, everyone wants to think of themselves as honest. It is one of the core virtues of Western society.

But all virtues become poisonous when taken to the extreme. In the case of honesty, too much of it becomes bluntness, and being blunt is downright antisocial.

If you are blunt and insensitive, you will lose people’s trust because they cannot trust you not to suddenly say something hurtful or rude. The fact that you are doing so completely honestly and innocently actually makes it worse, because the person can’t get mad at you for it the way they could if it was openly malicious.

When I was a younger and less sophisticated man, I would have claimed higher moral authority and said something about how the people who don’t want to hear the truth are the ones who need it the most.

I know. What an asshole. I was totally a neckbeard back then.

But over the years I have learned that claiming that you have the right to say whatever the hell pops into your head in the name of Truth with a capital T runs quite contrary to any thought you might have about being a kind, gentle person.

Basically, you can be honest, or kind, but not both, not when taken to extremes. And after a certain amount of contemplation, I decided being kind was a lot more important to me.

I am too sensitive to knowingly choose a path that will hurt people. I genuinely want to help people. Occasionally that has come in the form of the short sharp shock of reality therapy, but most of the time, that means thinking about what I say and, more importantly, how I say it to keep it from being hurtful.

But that is not at odds with basic honesty. You can only say things which are true without saying the things that will hurt people. It is a matter of careful choice and it is a tightrope I have walked for a very long time, a compromise between my desire to be kind and my compulsion to be honest.

That is how I have lived for the bulk of my adult life. But recently it has struck me that this is not enough.

I will give you an example. Last Xmas, an online friend of mine was kind enough to buy me some books. Among those books was American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I didn’t care for it. (I know, heresy.) I found it ponderous, slow-moving, emotionally flat, without any characters that I really liked (or hated), and overall I felt like it was one of those books that just goes on for a while then stops, without any sense of having gone anywhere or done anything.

So I didn’t like it. Later, she asked me what I thought of the book, and I told her the exact truth, that I didn’t like it at all, and she was clearly hurt by my blunt opinion.

And the thing is, I knew that she had bought me three books that she personally loved, totally as an act of affection, and that therefore her opinion of the book was highly positive.

But I just blurted out the truth anyhow, cluelessly, and it was only later that the stark truth of the matter become clear to me : I had hurt someone of whom I am very fond for no damned good reason.

It would have cost me nothing to say that I liked it, or at the very least been a lot more gentle in my explaining my opinion to her. She was clearly making herself vulnerable to me and I just thoughtlessly stomped all over her.

I went into what my dear friend Felicity calls “classroom mode”, which is kind of the default mode for all nerds. In it, you treat any and all questions as if they were questions from a teacher and you will be graded on the accuracy and thoroughness of your answer. So you blurt out the whole entire truth.

But life is not the classroom. There is nobody to hear your ever so clever answer and then give you a pat on the head for being
so gosh darn smart.

Yhere’s just people, regular people, equals, and they can be deeply hurt by a blunt and thoughtless remark from a person they know and like. People will not want to trust you or get close to you if you think you might hurt them at any moment.

So there is a limit to how much honesty is a virtue. There are times when honesty is a great strength and other times when it is not just a great weakness but morally wrong.

And that is a lesson I need to learn down to my very bone if I am going to continue to think of myself as a kind and gentle person who never hurts anyone unintentionally.

And I do.

Now if you like what I have said tonight, then I meant every single word of it.

But if you didn’t like it and it upset you, relax, it was all just a joke.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!