I've found it!

Honesty is a lot harder to justify than it should be. I used to (and still kind of do) go on the Kantian tenet that honesty is a person's moral duty, for to be dishonest is to rob others of their autonomy--their ability to make choices is compromised when presented with false information. But there was just something about this argument that never seemed to anchor the case for honesty. Perhaps it was that Kant's categorical imperatives contained a critical flaw that leveled their otherwise strong foundation; perhaps it is because being honest is not always the best decision for every situation; perhaps because sometimes a person should have their autonomy compromised. Nevertheless, the idea that being honest is simply The Right Thing To Do still seems to be admirable and just, just not as dominantly as it should.

Enter a conversation I had with my good friend Curtis three days ago. We had got on the topic of self-awareness and self-certainty in contrast with their opposites (insecurity and vacuousness), and we came to the conclusion that people who are self-aware are typically more honest than those who are not. People who shy away from introspection seem to rely more on the outside world to affirm their identity, which leads one to lie more frequently, since they desire--and sometimes require--the approval of others. And while I pondered why someone would ever want to live a life of perpetual lies as I often do, it hit me: it's a problem of information.

When a person creates a lie, they've created something cheap and fragile. A lie can be shattered at any moment; it doesn't provide any solid information. So, in order to maintain a lie, several other lies must be created to provide a web of misinformation to support the initial, dubious manifestation. It becomes systemic, since the misinformation is always on the brink of being struck down by truth.

On the other side, when a person is honest, either with themselves or others, they create or discover something of value, something factual. The more facts a person discovers, the more information they obtain. The more information a person obtains, the better choices they can make. The person who lies creates a scarcity of information for themselves, and is unable to make good choices that benefit them and others.

(Of course, being honest doesn't always mean you'll arrive at truth, and it's possibly to tell a serendipitous lie, but more often than not, honesty will yield far more useful results than dishonesty.)

So you see, the strength of this argument lies in the utility of being honest. Sure being honest is the respectful thing to do, but more importantly it is the useful thing to do. When you are honest you provide yourself and others with information that will help you make beneficial decisions. The more you lie, the less you know, and the more you'll find yourself in stressful, compromising positions.

And it's that simple. That's pretty much all there is to the argument. Of course I'm not advocating this as an absolute rule. I'm sure there are instances where the usefulness of being honest can be superseded by a different reason, or where the usefulness of being honest can prove detrimental; but those are the exceptions, and they will always be in the small minority.

An Apology To Everyone

Thank Niepce for pictures.

I was clicking through photos of myself over the past few years 18 minutes ago and I realized a couple things:

1) Man I've been a happy kid. For all the moments spent in rumination and despair and confusion and anger, there's so many pictures to remind me of the fun that washed it all away, that despite all those negative feelings I could still have the time of my life.

2) Photos of myself used to be a lot more common. Over the past few years there haven't been too many, and the ones there has been there's been a noticeable decline in the amount of people sharing the frame.

I don't feel good about those points. It's not that I feel remorse for those pictures being taken; I feel remorse because what was captured in those pictures is being sacrificed for something else.

Stone is always the end product

There was a beginning. I'm not sure when or where it happened, but I know that there was one. At some point and some place or another, I started to care about the truth. In the nascent years it was about who stole my calculator and what the capital of Sri Lanka was. In the formative years it was about what my feelings really meant and if a pip of gossip was accurate. Now, I'm concerned with the truth behind food production, corporate/government collusion, and anything of meta scale.

I wonder if it was always meant to be this way. No, I don't mean in any sort of grand supernatural scheme, rather if it could have been avoided. Could I have not cared about the truth so diligently and fiercely?

From what I can scrounge from my memory, this is probably the most accurate summation of how I felt (chiefly in the formative years) (though the driving me mad part didn't come till the current years). If I'm remembering correctly, there probably isn't much I could have done.

You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain; but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life--that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

There's something that happens to you when you seek the truth, when you want to know why the world works the way it does. The first thing that happens is you become mad, really mad. From the moment you are born you are told one grand tale after the other--stories of heroes and unseen philanthropists and cute things. Time comes when you find out your beloved luminaries aren't who you thought they were, and you get upset. You've been tricked. You've been made a fool. Finding out about government cover ups and the clandestine agendas of multinational corporations ain't too different. You find out a country or a brand or a product or a store you were loyal to tricked you, you'd be mad all over again.

Second thing that happens is you selectively seek the same info. Your eyes have been opened and you want to know more. What else have you been lied to about? What starts as shock and disenfranchisement turns into vengeful wonderment turns into voracious info-hunting. It becomes regular, perhaps not as regular as you'd like, perhaps only as regular as your sanity can permit, but you've got your shovel and you're a diggin' machine.

Third thing that happens is dissemination. You've awakened. You've realized that you've been living in a world where you're constantly half-dreaming and half-awake, and now that you're starting to wake up from the dream you want to rouse the others too. This is where I get into trouble. You see, people like their sleep. Trying to wake them makes them grumpy. The dream is soothing and placating; wakefulness is jarring and grating. It takes strength to accept you've been dreaming--rather, placed into a dream--and bear the initial ugliness of wakefulness, something the dream does not teach, does not reinforce. The dream wants you to keep dreaming. You don't need it, but it needs you. Without you, the dream ends.

Stone hands petting a kitten hurts the kitten

So you're mulling around trying to get some work done and everyone's still in bed and they're not too keen on getting up. So what do you do? This is what I've been trying to figure out as of late. At heart, I'm a cooperative man. While the creativity of a single person can be magnificent and venerable, one cannot achieve what is possible with many. But before one can join forces with their sapient brethren there must be common grounds on which to build--the co-operating parties must agree on the facts. It is very unlikely that a dreamer and a non-dreamer will agree on the facts. Productive co-operation becomes a struggle, and eventually turns to an adversarial contest to prove who is right. It's not easy to make or keep friends when you argue about what's real, what's true. When you tell someone that they're wrong about something, most likely that person is going to be offended, because what kind of useless fool are they if their perceptive and cognitive capabilities are so inadequate that they can't discern the truth? And again, that's what the dream wants; it's built into the dream. Dreamers are taught to disregard and even vilify any information that contradicts the information put forth by the dream. It keeps the dream safe and intact. If people started questioning the dream, it would be in real trouble.

I cared so much about the truth that my failures trying to get people out of the dream built up like coral calcium deposits. I became hard. Other people just didn't matter as much to me anymore. I couldn't get past disagreements or their fixation of parts of the dream world. I became uninterested in them and turned to those who were awake, or had begun to awaken. Trouble was--and is--there wasn't too many of them out there. Hardly any, at least that I could see. So here I was/am, out more or less by myself, and around me I see all these other people together. Dreaming or no, they're still people, and I still want to be with them. I certainly don't want to make them grumpy.

It's difficult to walk that line though because, well it can't really be walked. There's no floating in between. You need to manage shifts in between the two, which is hard, because once your on the path of truth, how--or why--could you go back to lies and half-truths and one-sided news reports? I really don't want to have to choose between truth and companionship. I think it's terrible that I've even arrived at that choice. Maybe there's a way to have both. It's certainly worth a shot. I could definitely get more done with a few more hands and a lot more hugs.