The Joy of Lying

Greg Carter points us to Brad Blanton’s amusing and provocative site on the concept of radical honesty. On its surface, the site is bland, but if you poke around you’ll find pockets of genuine voice (and a whole lot of o’er-weening self-confidence). Here’s a snippet of a description of one of Brad’s seminars:

This is an eight day program which provides you with the hilarious experience of a new family based on honesty which will give you all the training necessary to sustain ongoing transformation for yourself and ongoing torture of your real family and friends back home. It will also serve nicely to mess things up at work.

Now, Greg points this out because of my recent comments about the importance and inevitability of lying. Judging from what I can glean from Brad’s site, he seems to think that there is such a thing as The Truth and that we either tell the truth or we don’t, although he acknowledges that there are many ways in which we “lie” (i.e., don’t tell the truth). The difference between us is that he doesn’t like any of ’em, whereas I’m quite fond of a whole bunch of them. In fact, our human relationships are so complex and mutually refracted that there is no such thing as The Truth, and shaping and shading our stuff together constitutes much of the joy of sociality. Two people just telling one another the truth would alternately boring and insulting. Oh, and, by the way, it’s also impossible.

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