Les Jones

Misc > Radical Honesty

Esquire has a piece about radical honesty:

"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any government official." (Blanton's politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky's.) "I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker."

Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the floor. He's neither. He's a former Texan with a big belly and a big laugh and a big voice. He's got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself "white trash with a Ph.D." If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the nonannoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.

He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he'd be an honest politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which involve a day of total nudity. They also weren't crazy that he's been married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was going to be crushed.

A little more honesty would help a lot of people and relationships. But not too much more. The downside I see to total honesty is that it would turn most people into jerks who would be all too happy to honestly address other people's shortcomings without honestly fessing up to their own.

Radical honesty wouldn't be a huge step for me, in some ways. I'm not good at hiding my emotions, so even if I don't say I'm pissed it's pretty easy to figure it out. Again, though, the hard part would be admitting my own character flaws. Luckily, I don't have any.

Yeah, that's the ticket.