Oryx
CoquettishCat
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- Seen Jan 30, 2015
Radical honesty goes beyond never lying to a person - it goes much farther than that. Radical honesty, an idea introduced in 1995 by Dr. Brad Blanton, encourages a person to say everything they think and feel with literally no filter. This includes reactions to things being said and non-sequiturs, insults and compliments. To take an example from the website:
While most people in their lives would like to be more honest, the idea of going beyond basic honesty and actually saying everything you think to a person no matter how insulting, inappropriate, or embarrassing that thing is is frightening to many people. On top of that, there is an issue of power imbalances in relationships; it's currently illegal to sexually harass someone in the workplace, and telling someone you'd like to have sex with him or are imagining him naked is certainly harassment by the legal definition. This issue becomes worse when you extend it to children, as children don't necessarily understand the implications of radical honesty as an abstract concept, only that their parent or authority figure insulted them.
On the plus side, the idea of radical honesty completely removes the fear of not knowing where you stand with a person, as the person will be quite clear about how they feel about you whenever they see you. No one would ever feel like their friends don't want to spend time with them but are too nice to say no; the friend would instead just say "I don't like you enough to cancel my plans with Netflix and wine tonight." Once a mind is reprogrammed, it's much easier to say what you're thinking than it is to try to decide whether the words will be harmful or irrelevant or inappropriate.
What are your thoughts on the concept? How does it interact with power structures in place in our society? Is the fear of hurting other people with our words too strong in society? Is the answer somewhere in the middle?
Q: Suppose you met someone whom you found unattractive. How do you handle that?
A: If the person's outstandingly ugly, then that's an issue I'm certainly going to bring up to talk about right off. I would say, "I think you look kind of ugly and this is what I think is ugly. I think that big wart on the left side of your face is probably something that puts people off and that you don't have much of a love life, is that true?" Then we'll have a conversation about it.
While most people in their lives would like to be more honest, the idea of going beyond basic honesty and actually saying everything you think to a person no matter how insulting, inappropriate, or embarrassing that thing is is frightening to many people. On top of that, there is an issue of power imbalances in relationships; it's currently illegal to sexually harass someone in the workplace, and telling someone you'd like to have sex with him or are imagining him naked is certainly harassment by the legal definition. This issue becomes worse when you extend it to children, as children don't necessarily understand the implications of radical honesty as an abstract concept, only that their parent or authority figure insulted them.
On the plus side, the idea of radical honesty completely removes the fear of not knowing where you stand with a person, as the person will be quite clear about how they feel about you whenever they see you. No one would ever feel like their friends don't want to spend time with them but are too nice to say no; the friend would instead just say "I don't like you enough to cancel my plans with Netflix and wine tonight." Once a mind is reprogrammed, it's much easier to say what you're thinking than it is to try to decide whether the words will be harmful or irrelevant or inappropriate.
What are your thoughts on the concept? How does it interact with power structures in place in our society? Is the fear of hurting other people with our words too strong in society? Is the answer somewhere in the middle?