Brad Blanton, founder of a movement called Radical Honesty, is swirling a drink as he sits by a fire in his rural Virginia home, telling me why it\u2019s important to live without lies. \u201cYou\u2019ll have really bad times, you\u2019ll have really great times,\u201d he says, \u201cbut you\u2019ll contribute to other people because you haven\u2019t been dancing on eggshells your whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Radical Honesty is based on a simple premise. Blanton, a 69-year-old psychotherapist, claims that everyone would be happier if we just stopped lying, if we just told the truth, all the time. That would be radical in itself, of course \u2014 a world without fibs. But Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out all the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you\u2019re having fantasies about your wife\u2019s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. To him, it\u2019s the only path to authentic relationships, the only way to smash through modernity\u2019s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.<\/p>\n
Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever: Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.<\/p>\n
And yet … maybe there\u2019s something to it. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-telling would do me good.<\/p>\n
Blanton, in person, isn\u2019t the bully I expect. He\u2019s a former Texan with a big laugh and a big voice. He calls himself \u201cwhite trash with a Ph.D.\u201d Twice he\u2019s run for Congress, on the novel platform that he\u2019d be an honest politician. In 2004, he ran as an independent and won a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district.<\/p>\n
Blanton\u2019s movement is at least sizable, if not huge. He has sold 175,000 books in 11 languages and has 25 trainers assisting workshops and running practice groups around the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you think it\u2019s ever okay to lie?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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. I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified.\u201d<\/p>\n
Upon my return to New York, I immediately set about delaying my experiment. When you\u2019re with Blanton, you think, Yes, I can do this! The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. But when I get back to bosses and fragile friendships, I continue my lying ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019s Radical Honesty going?\u201d my boss asks. \u201cIt\u2019s okay,\u201d I lie. In fact, not until my boss says he needs the story ASAP do I get serious about the project.<\/p>\n
The next day, my wife, Julie, and I get a visit from Julie\u2019s dad and stepmom. \u201cDid you get the birthday gift I sent you? Did you like it?\u201d asks her stepmom. \u201cNot really. I don\u2019t like gift certificates,\u201d I say. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re giving me an errand to run.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once again, I feel the thrill of inappropriate candor. And I feel something else, too. The paradoxical joy of being free from choice. I had no choice but to tell the truth. I didn\u2019t have to rack my brain figuring out how to hedge it, spin it, massage it. \u201cJust being honest.\u201d I shrug. Nice touch, I decide; helps take the edge off. She\u2019s got thick skin. She\u2019ll be okay. And I\u2019ll tell you this: I\u2019ll never get a stupid gift certificate from her again.<\/p>\n
By the end of the week, I\u2019ve slashed my routine lying by at least 40 percent.<\/p>\n
One thing becomes quickly apparent, though: There\u2019s a fine line between Radical Honesty and creepiness. It\u2019s simple logic: Men think about sex every three minutes, as the scientists at Redbook remind us. If you speak whatever\u2019s on your mind, you\u2019ll be talking about sex every three minutes.<\/p>\n
I have a business breakfast with an editor from Rachael Ray\u2019s magazine. As we\u2019re sitting together, I tell her that I remember what she wore the first time we met and that I\u2019d try to sleep with her if I were single.<\/p>\n
The thing is, the separate cubbyholes of my personality are merging. Usually, there\u2019s a professional self, a home self, a friend self, a with-the-guys self. Now it\u2019s one big improper mess. Either this woman and I have taken a step forward in our relationship, or she\u2019ll never return my calls again.<\/p>\n
While getting my hair cut, I stop my barber short when he starts telling me how he doesn\u2019t want his wife to get pregnant. \u201cYou know, I\u2019m tired. I have a cold. I don\u2019t want to talk anymore. I want to read.\u201d \u201cOkay,\u201d he says, wielding his scissors, \u201cgo ahead and read.\u201d Later, I do the same thing with my in-laws when they\u2019re yapping on about preschools. \u201cI\u2019m bored,\u201d I announce. \u201cI\u2019ll be back later.\u201d And with that, I leave the living room.<\/p>\n
Radical Honesty can save a whole lot of time.<\/p>\n
My break with Blanton\u2019s philosophy comes soon enough. A friend of a friend wrote some poems and sent them to me. This was an older man. His wife had just died, and he\u2019d taken up poetry. He just wanted someone \u201cin publishing\u201d to read his work, and though I didn\u2019t like the poems much, I wrote to him that I thought they were very good.<\/p>\n
I confess my lie in an e-mail to Blanton, then ask if I made a mistake. Blanton responds curtly, advising me to \u201csend the man the e-mail you sent me and ask him to call you when he gets it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Show him the e-mail? Is he kidding? In his book RADICAL HONESTY, Blanton advises us to start sentences with the words \u201cI resent you for\u201d or \u201cI appreciate you for.\u201d So I write back to him: \u201cI resent you for giving me the advice to break that old man\u2019s heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blanton responds quickly. First, he doesn\u2019t like that I expressed my resentment by e-mail. He expects resentment to be expressed in person so that \u201cyou can stay with\u201d the person you resent \u201cuntil the sensations arise and recede and then get back to neutral \u2014 which is what forgiveness is.\u201d Second, he tells me that telling the old man the truth would be compassionate. \u201cYour lie is not useful to him. In fact, it is simply avoiding your responsibility as one human being to another.\u201d<\/p>\n
I try to understand Blanton\u2019s point about compassion, and I will concede that my e-mail to the old man was wrong. I shouldn\u2019t have been so rah-rah effusive. But I\u2019ve hit the outer limit of Radical Honesty, a hard wall. I can\u2019t trash the old man.<\/p>\n
I call Blanton several days later to tell him I intend to end my experiment. \u201cYou\u2019re going to start lying again?\u201d he asks. \u201cYeah,\u201d I say, then concede, \u201cBut I\u2019m going to lie less than I did before.\u201d<\/p>\n
I can say this for Radical Honesty. Whenever I am radically honest, people become radically honest themselves. In fact, all my relationships could take a whole lot more truth than I expected.<\/p>\n
But the giddiness I experienced at first wore off pretty quickly. A life of Radical Honesty is filled with a hundred confrontations every day. They\u2019re small, but relentless. \u201cYes, I\u2019ll come to your office, but I resent you for making me travel.\u201d \u201cMy boss said I should invite you to this meeting, although it wouldn\u2019t have occurred to me to do so.\u201d At one point, my wife told me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I had to go help our son with something, then forgot to come back. \u201cDo you want to hear the end of the story or not?\u201d Julie asked. \u201cWell … is there a payoff?\u201d I asked. She cursed at me.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Adapted from the book THE GUINEA PIG DIARIES by A.J. Jacobs. \u00a92009 by A.J. Jacobs. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brad Blanton, founder of a movement called Radical Honesty, is swirling a drink as he sits by a fire in his rural Virginia home, telling me why it\u2019s important to live without lies. \u201cYou\u2019ll have really bad times, you\u2019ll have really great times,\u201d he says, \u201cbut you\u2019ll contribute to other people because you haven\u2019t been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[617,347,3553,616,1798,1764,113],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}