Telling the Truth: Struggling vs. Presenting Your Perspective

Telling the Truth: Struggling vs. Presenting Your Perspective

Sam Harris’s Google+ Blog, “The Straight Path, A Conversation with Ronald A. Howard (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-path-of-honesty) gave rise to some thoughts of my own about the truth.  Below I’ve written a few of my own observations suggested to me by the article.  

• ·      The importance of telling the truth is a factor of either, how old you are, or, alternatively, how long you are going to have a relationship with the person to whom you are speaking.
• ·      If you, as the speaker of truth/or not, have a perception that you will live an indefinite amount of time, or will have an indefinitely long relationship with the person you are potentially lying to, you have a lower likelihood of telling the truth.  I think this is true even of people who usually intend to tell the truth. The key word is relationship.  There is some unknowable correlation between one being more likely to tell the truth to someone with whom you have a relationship and the potential for lying to someone in a one-off transaction.
• ·      There is such a thing as too much truth.  Like your favorite weather conditions, a sunny sky, a cool breeze, a refreshing shower, or a lovely snowfall, too much of any one or more of these conditions will produce undesired results.  Too much truth can work the same way.
• ·      Self-deception is just as potentially destructive to anyone involved, as telling lies.  Whether the people you are dealing with detect the truth about you or not, whatever you say regarding that self-deception, and particularly, any actions you take based on it are more likely to have adverse results. 

It is not enough to intend to speak the truth, most of the time.  Everyone is better off if we tell the truth, even if it can put us in awkward situations.  We might even find that we have fewer awkward situations if we tell the truth more often.  Even well intentioned lies can have adverse consequences.  Often these consequences follow later, when they are most inconvenient.