Defenestrated wrote:
Disembodied wrote:
I agree there's not enough being done. Have you looked into the Authentic Relating or Radical Honesty movements? There are groups and in-person events in most major cities, might be good for meeting like-minded people whose values are more aligned with yours. At least, from what I've read from your posts here.
I haven't heard of Authentic Relating. What's the idea behind that?
Copy-paste from authrev.org:
"Authentic Relating (AR) is the practice of freely expressing your true experience in the company of others.
Expressing in this way enables you to create connections in the world based on who you really are.
Authentic Relating practices create a safe, intentional space - rooted in play and supported by clear boundaries - to create meaningful and enjoyable connections to self and other. By learning Authentic Relating skills, you can drop your conditioned relational habits, and learn to relate with yourself and others from a deeper more authentic expression of your truth.
This allows us to be more human with one another, in ways that often fall by the wayside in today's social norms."I've heard it called by some facilitators a type of "meditation", a practical method that allows you to see what is there in relationship, without self-judgement. Which is something we aren't given many opportunities to do in everyday life - if any.
All of that might sound vague, and that might be because authenticity is hard to define. Here's a decent article on what it means to be authentic:
https://authenticmontreal.ca/2019/04/29/authentic/Quote:
Radical Honesty, I think I read an article or two on - or maybe I'm thinking of some discussions I saw on Sam Harris's Lying...it's been a long while, though, and I haven't followed Sam Harris since 2014's Waking Up. (I actually remember enjoying Waking Up for the most part, though ultimately I was more inclined to explore outside the neighborhood of New Atheism, and it also looked like Harris was being increasingly embraced by people of an alt-right or Intellectual Dark Web bent.)
The impression I had of Lying was "Yes, dear, that dress makes you look fat" as a way of life. Maybe that's caricaturing it a bit, but I think the idea was to reject the notion of white lies, lies which seem to be harmless and/or necessary. It sounds noble, sure, but I can't escape the sense that it's...well, the adjectives that come to my mind are "rigid," "naive," "severe," "over-ambitious"...
The idea of Radical Honesty is a bit different from this - the intention isn't to eliminate lying but to help reverse the "domination of the being by the mind". As my Radical Honesty book says, the language of being is descriptive while the language of the mind is evaluative. And really, the phrase "that dress makes you look fat" may not be a lie but it's very mind-centered and opaque. It isn't describing what is happening within the being of the speaker at that moment, it's making mind-based judgements based on comparisons and standards which are completely different from one person to another. It's also pretty obvious the intention of saying "that dress makes you look fat" is to criticise and not to be honest, to expose the self, to be authentic. I think the
honesty vs transparency point is important - a statement can be "honest" but not transparent, and like you I feel like Sam Harris is being way too literal in talking about honesty.
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Taking a somewhat more careful look at Radical Honesty - I mean, simply perusing this
Core Principles statement I just now Googled - my reaction is mixed. I'll just quote and respond to this bit:
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Stress, pain, oppression of self and others, and even war are primarily caused and maintained by various forms of lying (withholding, pretending, attachment to belief about what “should” be true, etc). Being honest, listening and sticking with each other is the key to improving relationships with others and improving how we feel about ourselves.
This is bold, and its plausibility/implausibility depends on how broadly "lying" is understood. If the standard case of lying looks like "No, dear, that dress does not make you look fat" (or whatnot), then it strikes me initially as pretty far-fetched: Are we supposed to picture a world in which cashiers say to customers, "My employer expects me to muster the appearance of interest in your holiday plans"; customers say to cashiers, "I'll just be moping alone in my apartment, pausing between beers to wonder where it all went wrong"; and then we all reflect on these and any similar transactions, drawing and applying the appropriate lessons...until war is finally brought to an end?
The book I've got devotes a whole chapter to the levels of truth-telling, and it's obviously inappropriate to give higher levels of truth as a cashier to a customer. I do agree there are practical challenges, but see no reason that cultural changes can't be implemented gradually. Eventually I see people getting used to simply being honest - instead of the dead-faced obligatory response of "I'm good" to "how are you?" maybe we can open to expressing deeper levels of truth, gradually changing the existing culture of relating. I'm not particularly happy with that culture, and haven't been since a young age. It's exhausting to have to pretend to be something I'm not and I've noticed how it strips aliveness from my interactions and relationships. I think there's been a reversal going on since the 60s at least, and I see that process continuing naturally in each generation who aren't as willing to put up with the bullshit of the previous one. More active movements like AR and RH come in to accelerate that process, and I think more people are starting to see their value.
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OTOH, I could see the attempt being made to address this sort of knee-jerk skepticism by generalizing the meaning of "lying" - hence, as the author says: "withholding, pretending, attachment to belief about what 'should' be true, etc." But I think there are problems with this as well, or at least with this particular attempt:
-"Withholding": There are very often good reasons to refrain from expressing our thoughts and beliefs. We seem to grasp these reasons automatically, without noticing, as they're practically built into the practice of communication. For one, many of our thoughts and beliefs are impertinent (or even hostile) to the common, underlying purposes that shape our communication. What we say and what we mean don't
exactly coincide.
There are all kinds of illustrations of this
here: e.g., "I drank a bottle of vodka and fell into a stupor" means that I drank a bottle of vodka and
consequently fell into a stupor. Although I obviously believe that my stupor was
caused by my vodka consumption, there is no need for me to explicitly state this belief - and similarly, there is no risk that the hearer will misinterpret me as indicating that the stupor might've taken place
before (even years before!) the vodka consumption, even though the "and," strictly speaking, technically does create this ambiguity in the sentence as it's composed. (Incidentally, I've read that AI programmers can really struggle to capture all these unstated nuances, and so it's supposed to be surprisingly, perhaps hopelessly challenging, to create an AI that mimics human conversation without such bizarre non-sequiturs.)
This goes to what I said above - telling stories isn't what is meant by being honest. If you're going into the past with the mind and reflecting your perceptions as truth, then you're not describing what is true for you in the moment. You can't be describing the truth because perceptions change according to the perceiver. We all see things slightly differently, and holding "our" truth as the only truth is only going to lead to trouble. Isn't this partly the reason for most of our conflict in interpersonal relations, in international relations, in domestic politics?
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-"Pretending": Does this apply to wearing makeup and deodorant? (Clothing, for that matter?)
Possibly, although I don't see those as much of an issue. I'd probably say it's more about
why those particular forms of pretending are used. Is it to conceal, out of a felt sense of obligation or lack, our of fear of not being enough? Or is it out of a positive desire to add color to external aspects of the person? Personally it's been a huge relief for me to not feel like I need to somehow make myself conform to a perceived external standard, and that in turn has improved my communication and interaction with others greatly.
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-"Attachment to 'shoulds'": When are we not "attached" to the sense of how things should be? Maybe I'm off on this, but isn't this basically what it means to have goals, purposes, desires, intentions...? (Also, I'm not clear on how the insistence/recommendation to avoid "should"-thinking is not itself an instance of "should"-thinking. I think the author tries to avoid this sort of inconsistency by rejecting "moralistic" language, but I doubt we can ever quite achieve and maintain this.)
I think having a goal is different to being attached to the outcome of that goal. I can have a goal or intention and desire a particular outcome, but that is very different to believing that same outcome "should" occur. That's when attachment and the desire to control comes in, and in turn, anger, greed, egoism, hate, etc. Buddhism talks about this in its doctrine of non-attachment and the ancient Vedic texts talk about the practice of Karma Yoga, which is about performing actions without expecting any particular result. Interestingly, honesty is also a pretty big part of these ancient religions, and the Buddhists I know seem just a little less neurotic than the rest of us.