You Don’t Need to Hurt Others to be True to Yourself (Part 2)
“Brutal honesty” is not good enough a reason to create misery for others
Van Gogh’s Suffering in the Hands of “Truth-Sayers”
If you’ve read his heart-wrenching Letters you know how much Van Gogh has suffered in the hands of “truth-sayers” all through his life.
With the exception of his brother Theo and Theo’s wife Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, no one believed in Vincent van Gogh and they thought it was their solemn duty to say that to his face. During the 10 short years (1880–1890) that he created all his masterpieces, he was told over and over again to quit painting and do something else.
A “Truthful” Priest…
In one memorable instance at the hospital in Arles where he was institutionalized during the last year of his life, Van Gogh meets a “truthful” priest who also tells him to do something else since his paintings are “ugly.”
Imagine, looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, how wrong that tactless priest and all the other truth-sayers turned out to be.
The fact is, the belief in the worthlessness of Van Gogh’s paintings continued even after his death in 1890. At one point the family considered burning the 400-odd paintings and drawings that Vincent left behind. Today we owe the treasure of Van Gogh’s incredible art to his brother Theo’s widow Johanna who insisted on saving all his work since she was sure they would be priceless sometime in the future. Time has proven her right.
Again, it’s worth repeating: what we hear as someone’s “honest truth” is usually nothing more than a personal opinion which, if you wait long enough, can well turn out to be false.
How True is Your Truth?
Also, there is a larger epistemological issue of how we come to know the truth.
Let’s say you believe in your truth because you witnessed something in person. You were there and you actually saw what happened.
Still, I’d like to challenge you — how true is “your truth”?
How reliable your memory of the event is so that you cannot sit on it even to prevent a disaster?
An event has as many descriptions as its witnesses.
If you haven't watched Japanese master Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon I highly recommend it since this silver screen classic is all about the way the narration of an event changes according to the vantage point of the witnesses.
Witnessing is not Truth
Ask any police detective worth his or her salt and they’ll tell you how unreliable an “eye witness” can be. The academic literature is full of studies verifying how subjective, contradictory, and self-serving such accounts are (see the RESOURCES section at the end of this article).
When the notorious unreliability of witness reporting is such a well-established fact, with what kind of certainty can we defend our “truths” as inviolable, infallible, and sacrosanct?
Silence and Timing
I’d like to leave you with a practical method that always works when you find yourself in such an ethical bind: just keep your lips shut.
The alternative of not speaking “your truth” is not lying or fibbing. It’s keeping silent, at least for a while.
Sometimes timing the truth makes all the difference in the world.
If telling your truth right away is going to explode a bomb and cause massive collateral damage, you can always not say anything and wait for the storm clouds to pass over. And then gradually you can approach the issue kindly, in a way to address not only your own concerns but those of the others as well.
Great Advice by Hugh Prather on “Honoring Our Feelings”
Sometimes people defend “being brutally honest” as a way of “honoring” their feelings.
Here is a piece of excellent advice on that point by Hugh Prather from his Love and Courage:
“If ‘honoring our feelings’ is the goal, it’s also possible to beat pillows, scream into the wind, go for a run, or release our bodily tensions in some other harmless way.”
Don’t take the easy path.
Live a principled life but do no harm, don’t say the first thing that pops to your mind, and time your actions well.
That would be a life lived well while honoring the pain and predicament of the others.
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RESOURCES: Academic studies on the unreliability of witnesses:
Hosch, H. M., Beck, E. L., & McIntyre, P. (1980). Influence of expert testimony regarding eyewitness accuracy on jury decisions. Law and Human Behavior, 4(4), 287–296. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01040620
Loftus, E. F. (1980). Impact of expert psychological testimony on the unreliability of eyewitness identification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 65(1), 9–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.65.1.9
“Did Your Eyes Deceive You? Expert Psychological Testimony on the Unreliability of Eyewitness Identification,” by Fredric D. Woocher, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 29, №5 (May, 1977), pp. 969–1030 (62 pages)
Wixted, J. T., Mickes, L., Clark, S. E., Gronlund, S. D., & Roediger, H. L. III. (2015). Initial eyewitness confidence reliably predicts eyewitness identification accuracy. American Psychologist, 70(6), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039510