“Honesty is the best policy”.. Really?

“I love you”, “You are the most amazing person I have seen”, “I think I am quite contented with the life I have” etc etc. We often hear people make such statements in different contexts. How truthful are people when they make such statements? Are they being true/honest or delusional/dishonest?

People also say things like “I want to be honest with you”, “I want to be able to tell what I actually feel like and not hide things”, “I want to follow my feel and be natural rather than artificial”. Now, these statements seem to suggest honesty and dishonesty, natural and artificial, true and false are 2 states and one can be either here or there. Let us explore the validity of this (mis)understanding.

According to me, honesty, being truthful etc etc is a spectrum and NOT 2 states where one can belong either here or there. I shall explain the rest with the help of graph.

In the above graph, honesty varies on X axis. A very dishonest person (close to 0) is an absolute hypocrite and someone who is very very honest (max on x axis) cannot be “normal” and has to have frontal lobe disinhibition (Watch House MD, “The social contract”). As one becomes more and more honest, inner peace (blue line) increases. This might be difficult to understand but imagine if one CAN speak the truth without having to maintain a web of lies, how comfortable it can get. Many times we are lonely when it comes to our thoughts because we seldom share them (mainly because we can't). We believe one thing but pretend to believe something else because what we believe might offend someone else. Also one can get labeled as crazy if he/she speaks whatever comes to mind which eventually leads to social rejection. People cannot bear to hear others' inner most unpleasant, sexual, cynical, pessimistic thoughts though they themselves will be having similar such thoughts. Everybody wants sugar coated sweet lies and therefore “Everybody lies”. As a result one can only hope to strike a balance between inner peace and social acceptance and find their own “sweet” spot. In the above graph, the point corresponding to 10 on X axis is the sweet spot where both the lines meets (a magnitude of 5.5/10 of inner peace and social acceptance). But this is no way universal. Each person has lines of different slopes and hence different sweet spots.

This graph can also help us to understand why people drink. The sober state (being inhibited) can be quite annoying at times. So we tend to drink to loosen inhibition so that we can rant out our inner thoughts. This is socially OK if others are also equally drunk but imagine drinking and ranting around people who are sober??. The comfort of speaking out inner thoughts comes with a cost of social awkwardness.

For an imaginary person with the above graph, he/she is roughly half honest, half natural, half peaceful and accepted by half the society :-). I know this is an over simplification but I hope the idea is clear.

“People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.” - ― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings