Rationale (Original: Warning: Long)

"The Relationship Between Honesty and Desire"


Do people want to be lied to? We lie to our lovers and we lie to our patients, our political bases, parents and teachers. This custom has clouded our society to the point that some now habitually assume that anything told to them is quite likely to be the opposite of the reality in question. Hand in hand lies the belief that, dramatically, people cannot handle the truth, that it would cause them to be tragically unhappy, and it is our foremost responsibility to each other to avoid this fate.

To challenge these circumstances, I argue that honesty is in every way more desirable than deception.

Whether or not accurate information is desirable is a debate who lineage includes Sophocles, Socrates, and Huizinga I have not actually read Huizinga. (uh, yet). -Marie Asinovski 1/29/10 2:00 AM . As people begin to see themselves as agents who choose their own experiences, they strive to empower their intentions into actions. As a result of this relationship, there becomes a compelling relationship between accurate information and what a person desires.

In so far as a person's actions strive to achieve an objective, any manipulation of the information about that objective is coercion of a person's desires, and a deliberate assault on their free will. To take that argument one step further, an agent of free will longs begs for purity of information, a world in which someone could strive for the goals without questioning whether what they hope to attain really has value. A world in which people are constantly manipulating information in attempt to alter your desires and choices is a world where one has to be constantly on the alert, where analyzing the currency of information becomes the primary concern.

This aversion to living in a world populated by liars can translate, according to some philosophers, into a mandate for behavior. Philosophers and theorists such as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, state that it is necessary for every individual to live as if they were making the laws for all. Despite my admirations for its idealism, this framework seems to be lacking a sufficient reason for its use. It has a very abstract the process of deciding why one may want to live like this.

Additionally, honesty is a source of empowerment. I believe that one can begin to take ownership over one's own experience through the practice of honesty. being as open and accurate with one's intentions and information as possible. I consider honesty to be the practice of being as intentionally accurate with oneself and others as possible. Accurate statements are how one confirms one's own reality to oneself. From an existential viewpoint, if one makes oneself, then to be a walking contradiction is a living nightmare.

A person is endowed with tremendous powers to manipulate information, especially through his conscious choice to emphasize one thing over another, glamorize certain ideals and repress others entirely. People's beliefs can cause them to live in worlds that range from heaven to hell. With such tremendous power attributed to thought and language, it seems that, at first glance, that the most reasonable thing to do is to use language to ameliorate all situations one encounters.

Yet the detriment to the individual that chooses to do so cannot be overstated. From the existential prospective, only honesty enables one to proscribe meaning to one's actions. Successfully aligning meaning with action requires a completion of belief. John- Paul Sartre is correct to note that consciousness is such that it permits one not only beliefs, but awareness of those beliefs. Awareness casts doubt, the possiblity of non-belief, onto ones own beliefs. So one's beliefs tend to be dualistic, insecure and incomplete. To secure one's beliefs, to cement them and embolden them, one uses good faith to “flee this 'non-believing what one believes' by finding refuge in "being” (Sartre 69). “Bad faith flees itself by taking refuge in 'not-believing-what-one-believes'. It can be simply understood as pushing oneself to believe what one does not, on the ground that one should believe it and it is right and proper to do so. While good faith seeks to align one's own being with one's thoughts and beliefs, bad faiths flips that around so that one conforms their beliefs to justify their actions. This leads to a constant confusion amongst one's own beliefs and intentions- were the original intentions the true ones, or perhaps the justification is a better fit?

If one comes to question the meaning behind their own actions, that is, if one does not trust oneself, it is unreasonable to assume that anyone else would either. The maintenance of integrity is a crucial point, of course, but it could be argued that an impressive front or a shiny appearance could do just as well. Perhaps, in the attainment of any one particular goal, a flawless appearance might be very helpful indeed. Yet, in multi-faceted continuing existence of a person, who usually must live beyond a single moment or a single achievement, the maintenance of a duality between what one is and what one appears to be is an exhausting and destructive way of being. The hidden danger lies in the fact that it is impossible for a person to choose something without also assuming that their ideal conception of a person would perform the same action as well. Sartre continues to say that in the mind of this person, all persons will act this way as well. Thus, a liar assumes that an ideal person would lie, and it follows from this assumption that all people lie as well.

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin regards the experience of 'White America' to be one of people who fundamentally distrust their experience. "The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality- for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitude."

On the other hand, if the same person was to tell the truth, they would be able to rely on themselves as a stable force in any situation.



Exhausting yet arguably necessary, in a society where trust, a social good like any other, has been eroded, embarking on any venture or entering into any association becomes difficult. Furthermore, in a society where people are constantly slanting and twisting facts, where this practice is widespread and rewarded, the experience of an individual becomes incredibly insecure. Lies can make one question if they do, in fact, live in a mutual world with others around them. If one were to believe everyone, they might assume that each person lives in their own head, that everything is a matter of pure perception.

“Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended, in a very real way, to make us crazy....What we accept as real is a world that others cannot see, touch or experience in any direct way. A person who believes a lie is constrained by it, accordingly, to live “in his own world”- a world that others cannot enter, and in which even the liar himself does not truly reside. Thus, the victim of the lie is, in the degree of his deprivation of truth, shut off from the world of common experience and isolated in an illusory realm to which here is no path that others might find or follow” (Frankfurt)

“Deceit and violence- these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings" echoes Bok, "Both can coerce people into acting against their will. ...deceit controls more subtly, for it works on belief as well as action”. Lying to people inherently creates a power dynamic, in which the liar perceives his or herself to be more powerful than the lied to.

To the extend that knowledge gives power, to that extent do lies affect the distribution of power; they add to that of the liar, and diminish that of the deceived, altering his choices at different levels (Nicolai Hartmann Ethics). In so far as a person seeks the intent of his actions to realize themselves, a lie leads his intent astray. "A lie, first, may misinform, so as to the obscure some objective, something the deceived person wanted to do or obtain." (Bok 19).

Those who are lied to are the most severely affected. Their disempowerment is cruel and destructive. “They see that they were manipulated, that the deceit made them unable to make choices for themselves according to the most adequate information available, unable to act as they would have wanted to act had they known all along” (Bok 20). In Killing The Black Body by Dorothy Roberts, Roberts frequently reports of how the choices of women, particularly women of color, were affected by the lies told by medical practitioners. Mexican-American women were given oral contraceptives in a family-planning clinic. Some were given placebos, and became pregnant.

No one articulates the anguish felt by people who are systematically lied to more than James Baldwin. Baldwin really touches upon what it means to both believe and doubt lies one encounters; to exist in a realm of lies, to suffer in it and take refuge in it, and the incredibly terrifying sensation of finding no grounding truth beneath oneself. Baldwin's self-realization of deceptive society is an empowering text on accepting one's own experience, leaving the reader firm in their own sanity.

Some may object that, often, by telling the truth, one can cause damage. In many positions of power, particularly through the practice of medicine or politics, to tell people the truth seems to be a form of injury. Though this seems to conflict with the generally accepted maxim of, to do no harm, one must remember that the messenger that carries information is not equated with the information itself. Thus, it may seem that you are harming a patient by informing them they have cancer, but it is the cancer, not their knowledge of it, that is the question at hand.

A final theme I would like address in my colloquium is the idea of what could possibly be considered accuracy in a postmodern society. Vitally, it is important that a conception of accuracy does not overlook the incredible complexity of reality, and takes into account the transformative elements of perspective. I would most disagree with Montaigne, in Essays, writes that “If, like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better terms.....but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field”. My conception of what is true is the exact opposite; lies are the easiest to spot through the discomfort of contradiction. A lie is also realized in one's own conscience by the recognition of an intention for one's statements to be misleading. It is only the intentional manipulation of information that renders it inaccurate. Truth is vast, there are an infinite variety of true statements about any particular thing. The point could be made that, if there are an infinite amount of true possibilities and perspectives to bring to an object, then there are also an infinite amount of false ones. This is so, but although every true statement can stand alone, a false statement made intentionally must negate an already formed true thought in one's own mind.







Aeschylus, The Orestia

Aquinas, Thomas A Treatise on Theology

Arendt, Hannah "Truth and Politics"

Baldwin, James The Fire Next Time

Bok, Sesily On Lying

Camus, Albert The Fall

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison, Objectivity

Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Honesty

Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Kant, "On A Moral Imperative to Lie"

Plato The Symposium

Sartre, John-Paul Being and Nothingness

Sartre, John-Paul "Existentialism is a Humanism"

Sartre, Nausea

Sartwell, Crispin Six Names for Beauty

Socrates, "Meno"

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Sullivan, Evelin The Concise Book of Lying

St. Augustine, On Lying

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Black Body

Yalow, Irvin Love's Executioner