The Best Self-Help is Free: Honesty Versus Brutal Frankness

Chapter 17

This is Chapter 17 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

Virtually every system of ethics will acknowledge in no uncertain terms that honesty is one of the chief human virtues. What is meant by the term "honesty" varies widely, however. A popular misconception of honesty equates the virtue with always "telling it like it is" and not holding back any of one's thoughts about a person, idea, or situation-no matter what the consequences of those thoughts. This view and its real-world applications are antithetical to genuine honesty.

If we acknowledge that the individual's life is the standard of all value, then every virtue must be identified in terms of its benefit to the individual's life. With honesty, then, the best place to start is with Polonius's advice to Laertes in Hamlet: "Above all, to thine own self be true." Honesty-viewed from a rational, individualistic context-is identical with being true to oneself.

From this understanding, we can derive the proper components of honesty and the way in which it ought to be manifested in the real world. Honesty begins with being true to oneself, which means

1) Always striving to accurately understand reality and one's genuine self-interest;

2) Always striving to act on one's best understanding of reality and one's genuine self-interest;

3) Never engaging in deliberate self-deception in order to "feel good" or to attain a benefit that one's best understanding of reality acknowledges is unattainable or contrary to one's self-interest.