By Victor Greto
Am I a bad person?
Don’t answer that. I mean it.
This is what’s nobly called a rhetorical question – exclaimed as a prologue to self-examination, a sigh before a furtive glance in the mirror reveals a puzzled expression of WTF??
Even if I – and many others – really don’t want to know the answer, there’s a dude out there who argues I should.
A psychologist named Brad Blanton claims that the only way to live is by practicing “radical honesty.” That nothing should bubble from your mouth but the truth, what you’re feeling at the moment, about the world, yourself and others. It’s a bastardized and attention-grabbing form of Gestalt therapy – of living in the moment in order to reveal one’s true self.
Radical honesty, he says on his website (radicalhonesty.com), “is direct communication that leads to intimacy in relationships. Then people can powerfully create their future together. This works for couples, families, communities and nations.”
Right.
I don’t have a true self. I have so many of them I can’t keep track. When I was a strapping youth, I longed to get at my authentic self, sans the detritus of civilization and manners and all the phoniness that stifled my creativity.
I discovered after I reached 40 – not that long ago, he lied – that peeling away at my self was like peeling at an onion: there’s nothing at the center but tears.
But radical honesty justifies a lot of things besides the silly claim to reveal your true self.
The implications are perfect for the elderly who don’t give a damn who they offend, who feel they’ve earned the right to say anything in their head while they still have their head together.
Call it a feeling of entitlement, which many in the oldest generation share with many in the younger generation.
Like my Mom, whose plaintive refrain, “I’m just being honest,” has worked to alienate both girlfriends and sisters-in-law who have dared to become part of the family.
(OK: I admit I had a big lobster-clawed hand in alienating all of those women, too.)
More often than not, Mom’s radical honesty clumsily tries to excuse inexcusable rudeness and perhaps the radically honest reason that she simply resented the attention another has received.
Blanton’s radical honesty has become a shtick, a way to get attention for a psychologist who couldn’t possibly believe that telling a woman you’ve just met that you’d very much like to have sex with her is the truth.
You know why? Because it inevitably is not the only thing I’m thinking about you. I’m as complex and multi-dimensional as the next horny guy. There are so many intangibles to attraction and repulsion that telling you the first thing that comes to my mind sells us both short.
And perhaps therein lies the key to radical honesty: it is as simplistic, adolescent and as phony as those who live to manipulate others through their radical dishonesty.
Let’s stick with manners and courtesy and adjusting ourselves to the moment.
It’s not any safer, actually, than radical honesty. But it’s more true.