Radical Honesty on uglychart.com
I found this article on Radical Honesty in Esquire to be hilarious. The author interviews Brad Blanton, a psychotherapist who started the movement - which is to tell nothing but the truth all the time. The interview is great because it is totally honest:
“My boss says you sound like a dick,” I say.
“Tell your boss he’s a dick,” he says.
“I’m glad you picked your nose just now,” I say. “Because it was funny and disgusting, and it’ll make a good detail for the article.”
This Blanton sounds like quite an interesting guy.
Also the idea is interesting. Blanton thinks of honesty as a crude compassion. But the author talks about how most of us are dishonest because we think it is cruel to be honest.
Honesty is also just really funny, for some reason. For people to just say what is on their minds makes me laugh. Like when the author tells his conversing barber “You know, I’m tired. I have a cold. I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to read.” And the barber says “fine - go ahead and read.”
But the author’s experiment with radical honesty leads to some insights:
That’s one thing I’ve noticed: When I am radically honest, people become radically honest themselves.
I’m all for Radical Honesty in everyday life - but I think it would be very difficult and take a lot of courage. I try to be honest, and maybe I’ll try to be a little more radically honest in my day to day life. But on a blog, it shouldn’t be that difficult, right? That’s the appeal of a blog, isn’t it? A radically honest look into someone’s life? Actually it seems to me that the more radically honest the blog, the more interesting I find it.
So if I believe this, I should make this blog as radically honest as I can. Okay, I may give this a try but I need a couple of weeks to think it over.
