DRMacIver's Notebook
Honesty is kinder than lying
Honesty is kinder than lying
Another draft bankruptcy post. This is one of those posts that I started writing because I was annoyed about something (I forget what, I don’t think it’s present anywhere in the text), and stopped writing when I lost steam on that annoyance. I still think it’s important and worth saying, but I lost the impetus to keep saying it.
Advance warning: I am not pulling any punches in this post.
Do you want impostor syndrome? Because that’s how you get impostor syndrome.
For various reasons I’ve been thinking recently about something I helped a client with a while ago.Details slightly altered and kept vague for confidentiality reasons.
Roughly the scenario they found themselves in was this: Someone new had joined their staff, and this person wasn’t bad at their job, but they were very slow at it, taking much longer to complete basic tasks than seemed reasonable.
More, this person knew it, and was clearly very bothered by it, and kept apologising for it. My client kept reassuring them that this was fine and it was normal to take a while to get started. This didn’t seem to help, and they kept being anxious about it.
Anyway, a couple of months of this had passed and my client now had a problem: Their staff member was still too slow at their job. It could no longer be written off as just slowness getting up to speed, they actually weren’t fast enough at the job to keep up with the needed workload, and weren’t showing any signs of improvement.
I’m reasonably confident that the problem isn’t that the client’s expectations were unreasonable. We talked a bit about it and it was a set of requirements that it was perfectly normal to expect a person to be able to do, nothing terribly out of the ordinary.
What I’m not sure about is whether in an alternate history their subordinate could have been capable of doing the job at that point. Certainly in this history they weren’t.Unfortunately I also don’t know if they became so. Due to a mix of funding changes at the client’s company and me winding down that part of my business, this was only a month or two before my last session with that client, so I don’t know how the story ends. It doesn’t matter for the point I’m making though.
And part of why they weren’t is that my client had, bluntlySomewhat more bluntly than I put it at the time, although I think I was at least clear about what they’d done wrong. spent the last couple of months lying to them about their performance.
This wasn’t the client’s fault. It’s what we’re all trained to do. When someone is expressing anxiety, you reassure them that the thing they’re anxious about couldn’t possibly happen and everything will be fine. When someone is expressing guilt about how they fucked up, you tell them that it’s not their fault and there’s nothing they could have done. There’s this deep seated cultural assumption that the way to be kind to people is that you lie to them.
I hate this and think it’s a travesty.
In the spirit of honesty, I will admit that I do this sometimes. Much much less than most people do, I think, but it’s hard not to. There are a lot of forces pushing you to do it. When I find myself doing it, I try to learn from that and do better in future.
In a similar spirit of honesty, I know that you probably do this too, and I’m disappointed in you for doing so. I would like you to do better.
The reason we all lie to each other like this is often framed as kindness. I don’t think it is. I think it’s a form of cowardice. Honesty has consequences that we have to own in a way that dishonesty would not. If we speak the truth, we are responsible for any hurt inflicted, and might have to face the other’s negative reaction to our words. If we tell a nice lie we are not responsible when the problem we are lying about inevitably has consequences.
Doing better requires both the courage to face those consequences, and a sense of responsibility for events that are not our “fault” that everyone is keen to disavow.
The correct way to handle something like my client’s situation is, in my opinion, to say something along the lines of: Yes, you’re underperforming compared to what I’d hope for. It’s not a problem yet, but if it continues it will become one. I’ve got your back in trying to prevent that. Let’s figure out together what you need to solve this problem and do our best to get it for you.
This is, of course, taking on a lot of work, and it’s also taking on a lot of responsibility. Now in the quite likelyA sad reality is that many people are in fact not good enough at the jobs they’ve been hired to do, for reasons that are outside of anyone’s power to fix, or at least to fix fast enough to be viable. When this happens it’s important to treat them well, but it’s also important to not retain them in that role. event that their subordinate failed to perform and had to be let go at the end of their probation period, it would be in part be because they had failed to help them.
Depending on how much capacity is available, that might not be an option. I was talking to a friend recently about their company’s situation and he was in a similar position but absolutely didn’t have the capacity spare to help the person in question learn to perform at the level he needed (and suspected that they couldn’t or wouldn’t anyway).
In such a circumstance I honestly think the kindest thing to say to someone is something along the lines of: Look, this is what we need, and the fact that you can’t give it is a problem. If you’re willing to take responsibility for stepping up, we’re happy to give you the space you need to do that, and can make some changes to support that but cannot commit a lot of resources. What do you want to do?
This sucks to hear and it sucks to say. This is not going to be an easy conversationAnd in this particular example and depending on where you are can run into employment law complications. Not legal advice etc., but it is necessary, and the results of not having it are worse. Again, this is why I think avoiding conversations like this is a form of moral cowardice. Not having these conversations allows you to pretend that the failure is not your responsibility.
You shouldn’t lie to your friends
Anyway, I don’t care that much about the employment example right now. It’s important, but it’s not why this has been on my mind.
I was talking to some friends recently about the advice “when you find yourself beating yourself up over something, imagine you’re talking to a friend or loved one and ask if you would talk to them that way”.
One of the objections to this advice raised is that when talking to a friend or loved one you will tend to lie to them in the ways I’ve been discussing. You diminish the degree to which the situation is their fault, you downplay the possibility of bad consequences. This feels fine to do to a friend, but bad to do to yourself because you can see through the ruse.
This objection is a commendable level of self honestyAlthough I think self honesty of this form is often too “brutal honesty”., but also reveals how much we let our friends down.
Because here’s the thing: Your friends can see through the ruse too. The thing about having a social norm of lying to people is that everybody knows you lie to people in this way.
Recall the example of my client. One of the problems with lying to his subordinate is that it didn’t give them the support they needed to improve. But it also didn’t make them less anxious.
And of course it didn’t. If people are going to tell you that something isn’t a problem even when it’s a problem, you can’t trust that reassurance at all, so why would it help?
If you want to be able to reassure people that something isn’t a problem when it’s not a problem, they need to be able to believe that you would tell them that it’s a problem if it were one.
You can achieve this belief in one of three ways:
- It can be true.
- They can have poor judgement.
- They can lie to themselves.
That is, when you lie to people, you either fail to help them, or you make them complicit in the lie, and at some level that’s hard to maintain, and it’s bad for them and it’s bad for the relationship.
The problem of brutal honesty
Honesty has a differing thresholds problem.
I often get accused of being brutally honest. It’s certainly sometimes true - I think this post is erring on the side of brutal honesty, partly because I’m fed up and partly because I don’t think a softer version would land - but I think actually most of the time I’m not brutally honest, I’m just honest in situations where other people wouldn’t be, and this rounds to brutal honesty.
But my primary association with people who self describe as “brutally honest” is that they tend to care more about the brutal part than the honest part, and that when you are being “brutally honest” with someone it tends to be more because you don’t care about their feelingsOr do care about their feelings, in that you want them to feel bad. than it is because you care about telling them the truth.That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily not telling them the truth, but it does usually mean that you’re telling them only the bits of the truth that hurt the most.
I think brutal honesty has a missing mood. Something along the lines of “It is regrettable that I must hurt this person but the truth is in this instance more important than their feelings”. Instead, the attitude seems to be much more “truth hurts, suck it up”. This is not an attitude I want to encourage.
You probably shouldn’t lie to yourself either
One of the reasons why I’ve been thinking about this recently is that I was talking about self-help books the other day, and realising that there’s really one fundamental message that underlies the vast majority of self help books.
It’s this: You know that problem you’ve been having? It’s not your fault. You don’t have to feel bad about having it.
Sometimes this is a useful message for people to hear, because it lets them get a bit of emotional distance from the problem that they need to solve it.
And if it helps them achieve that, and they then solve the problem, (Editor’s note: I apparently stopped writing this post mid sentence here).
Postscript
I think I should revisit this theme at some point as honesty is somewhere where my moral intuitions seem to sharply differ from other people’s, in a way that causes frictions when ~I’m right and they’re wrong~ we have differing intuitions about how to e.g. answer a question.
I do honestly think that my way is better. I’m not blind to its downsides, and it requires skill to do wellAnd sometimes I even have that skill!, but I think the downsides of the status quo are much worse, and choosing them feels like a sort of collective cowardice to me.