from The Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
…I don’t quite agree, of course. No amount of dishonesty turns a person into a “thing.” No person should be thrown out. But. Dishonesty is a force that destroys, both inward and outward. With even a mild exaggeration, we hurt others a little and hurt ourselves a lot. We degrade our value.
The Internet is not set up to be an honest place. And the Internet is one of the domineering fulcrums of our culture. So the more time we spend in front of a screen the more we leverage our meaningfulness on a crumbling, dishonest fulcrum.
Anything we post on the Internet has an element of dishonesty, including this post. Examples:
- we aren’t going to post that picture, we’re going to post the third one where we like the look of our chin
- we aren’t going to portray ourselves in an e-mail; we are going to portray our best selves at best and at worst we send some strange coifed and primped puppet of ourselves
- we write headlines, tweets, and links to attract, not to measure or describe
- and so forth
None of it is what you would call honest. Thus a universe constructed on the certainty of 1s and 0s has neither. Instead of knowledge we get hints wearing masks. Instead of mentorship we get celebrity. Instead of love we get pornography. Instead of fruit we get sugar.
But I’m not here to solve the world’s problems, I’m here to solve my own. Everything I write or have ever written, from teenage poetry onward, is a quest for honesty. To surface internal truths, however adorned and obscured, and respect them. So even when I write dramatic poetry to make myself big or small, I am also trying to find something true.
Honesty in the company of other people is difficult—there are so many constraints and needs visible in the other person’s brow, how could we dare to let our guard down?—but when we write we are joined only by ourselves and an imagined audience which is also ourself. So, if you can, be honest here.
Whenever I sit down again to try this, the first result is emptiness. Silence like a desert when the wind has dropped. Carlo Rovelli suggests everything is a series of relationships to other things, and when you take a human and remove their tribe, there’s a lot of silence at first. But also an opportunity for honesty. To be honest about fear, sadness, desire—and above all, to be honest about all the things I do that may be dishonest, at least insofar as they fail to tell the whole story of what I am feeling.
An inauthentic smile is not a lie, it is simply one half of a story. And if we don’t tell our stories, at least to ourselves, they dry up like so many raisins, raided by the ravens of the late afternoon.
I don’t lie aloud, I don’t think. But I need to watch myself for fictions in any conversation, note the urges to primp and prune reality. These impulses come from all sorts of directions. We like to tell good stories, to create meaning where there is none. When I can breathe, I can easily hold off the pressure—and it is always fascinating to see where the desire to squeeze reality comes from and what those desires want.
Mostly, I notice that I really, really want to be loved. Or liked. Or… to just be safe. The desires to exaggerate the bad and good parts of myself when I speak come from this shared origin, which seems contradictory. The cure to resisting any form of half-truth is always the same, I think: remember that only the truth sets us free. Remember that only the truth can be loved for what it is. My goals and my deeds become aligned when I remember this.
Back to George McDonald. “Poverty” is relative and suffering is the universal human condition. Neither is under our control, very much: you can nudge your financial security in the right direction, but mostly it is based on the circumstances of your birth. We can control how we feel about it, maybe. But honesty, which McDonald suggests is a far greater measure of value, feels like the most basic choice. This choice sits eternally on the crisp outer shells of ourselves, which reflect both inward and outward.
Example: when someone asks whether you like something, it may be easy to state your answer. Or your desires and fears might trap your answer in your throat. But I think if we grope about, honesty is always at the ready, a tool on a loop on our belts, even if I can only utter, “I don’t know.”
Dishonesty, especially deliberate dishonesty, takes the tool out and uses it to break your own windshield. After you exaggerate or lie, you can no longer see clearly where you are going or why you want to go there. Your eyes are fragmented by spiderweb cracks in your shatterproof glass.
Anyway. Stay off the Internet. It isn’t an honest place. Or stay on the Internet. Humans have filled it with so many great hints, so many possibilities!—you might wander its marshes and put together enough materials for a pretty good bridge. The assembly of which, I think, happens only offline.