The Honesty Sniffers

“Do I look fat in this dress?”

            I look up, my eyes clearing from their comatose haze and my arms aching from the bags of clothes I have been lugging around for what seems like hours. Her calves bulge out from the bottom hem like two overripe sweet potatoes. The skirt seems crushed up against her thighs. In fear, I move my eyes upward. The overly tight belt gives off the impression of a filled water balloon being squeezed between someone’s thumb and forefinger, and above it, molten rolls of fat tumble over the edges like the first spouts of lava bubbling down from the volcano’s cusp. In the overwhelming tightness of the dress’s torso section, a soul-consuming black pit is visible near where I imagine her belly-button must be, and her tits bring to mind the image of two mounds of dough, flattened against a wall with a sledgehammer. Quickly racking my mind, I run through possible answers that would not be untrue. “Well, not particularly” is the best I can think of. As I gaze up at her I can feel my eyebrows attempting to save me by running toward my cheeks. I fear that I may never achieve an erection again.

            It is times like this that I am made aware of what a horribly overrated virtue honesty is. Of course, she should have known better than to ask such a question. There are some questions that should never be asked, some known truths that do not need to be voiced. For example, I have long since given up asking questions like “Hey, does the fact that I haven’t shaved in a week make me look like a pedophile?” or "Hey, i just shaved; do I look like a pedophile now?"

            But it is too late to teach my dear friend of the virtues in the question left unasked. It is times like these that I thank my great creator for giving me the ability to lie, dutifully and nobly, through my teeth. I do not bat an eye. I do not drop my smile. It is Laurence Olivier to the rescue. Like all supposed virtues, honesty can be a great tool in crushing someone emotionally and spiritually. As long childhood nights spent listening for the sounds of reindeer hooves on the Christmas Eve roof proved, sometimes it is more pleasant to hear that the elves made your toys than it is to hear that some suicidal 9-year-old Asian boy in a sweatshop did. Sometimes the lie is more fun. Sometimes the lie is more magical. Sometimes the lie just hurts less. As its been said, proponents of brutal honesty are always first and foremost lovers of brutality.

            And like all virtues, honesty is often mistaken as an end rather than a means toward the end of doing the right thing or acting ethically. However, honesty as a supposed virtue is distinct in that it has a loyal and fervent fanbase, to whom honesty reigns supreme over all other concerns and virtues. These people are the Honesty Sniffers. Often times one will find entire families of them, all clambering toward the person who is most willing to degrade himself and all those around him in some misguided effort toward stating things that are factually true. Honesty is the ultimate, and sometimes sole, measure of character in their eyes, and there can be no wavering in the allegiance one holds toward it. When I was a sophomore in high school I dated one of these Honesty Sniffers for a few months. One day I ran out of condoms a few hours before she was going to come over. As an excuse for why I was running out for twenty minutes in the middle of the day, I told my mom that I was running up to the CVS to pick up some razors. Later that night when we were basking in the confused awkwardness of adolescent post-sex TV watching, I told my girlfriend about the maneuver I had used to procure the condoms.

            “Well did you buy razors?” she asked with weighty seriousness in her eyes.

            “What? No, I was just headed down to get the condoms” I answered in confusion.

            “You should have gotten the razors”

            “I have like twelve in my room,” I said desperately trying to cling to any chance I might have had at finishing off the three-pack “I didn’t need razors”

            “But now you’ve lied to her”

            Now she had had no problem with us having sex in spite of what our parents might have thought if they had found out. And buying an extra pack of razors would have, obviously, made no effect on the intent or outcome of my actions. Unless she had planned on shaving my back that night, that is. But the fact that I did not pointlessly buy unneeded razors meant that I had now been dishonest. The other two went unused as she glared at me in cold disapproval for the rest of the night.

            Of course, honesty usually is the best policy. Being honest usually is the right thing to do. Where the Honesty Sniffers get confused is that they believe that being honest is a virtue in and of itself. In confusing a means toward ethical action with the end of ethical action, they become what Kierkegaard once called “an Ethical Retard”. Such thinking brings to mind the old Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns assembles a roster of MLB all-stars so that his softball team can win the championship. It all comes down to the bottom of the ninth in a tie game and Daryl Strawberry is up for the Power Plant. But Mr. Burns pinch hits Homer in for him, reasoning that pinch hitting for a left handed hitter when there is a left handed pitcher is just good managing. It is totally lost on him that this, often times true, principle only exists within the specific context of the situation itself. That this principle is merely a tool that good managers use toward the greater end of putting their team in a position to win.

            “Oh I just wish you’d be honest with me… Oh I just wish you’d tell me how you feel,” the Honesty Sniffer will lament to you. What makes this absurd is the complexity and ugliness of any comprehensive emotional truth. In every moment of love there are tinges of hate. In every feeling of generosity there are shades of contempt. No emotion or thought or impulse or feeling is untainted. I may love you but I also surely hate you, and feel contempt toward you for holding me down, and feel anger at myself for feeling these things, and then feel anger at you for making me feel angry at myself. It goes on and on.

            Actor Bryan Cranston was once giving an interview and was asked a question about finding the necessary darkness within himself to portray his character on Breaking Bad. He told a story about how when he was in his 20’s he had a girlfriend who was a drug addict. Even though he loved her with all of his heart, he found himself—or at least some parts of himself—wishing that she would just die already and stop making his life hell. He even found himself fantasizing about killing her sometimes. As I read the interview, I found myself smiling at the thought of Cranston’s then girlfriend being one of those Honesty Sniffers. What he had experienced internally was completely natural—love mixed with hate and anger and contempt, as all love is. But would he ever have been able to be honest with her? Would he ever have been able to answer her pleadings of “I wish you’d just be open and honest with me about how you feel” with “sometimes I wish those drugs you were taking would kill you so that you would finally leave me alone”?

            What makes such a prospect all the more absurd is that—in spite of such truths often being better left unsaid, in general—the Honesty Sniffer, who so worships the truthful statement, would be the very person most fundamentally unable to accept the ugly complexity of such emotional truth. After all, why does one adhere and pledge allegiance to a blind ethical code or abstraction? Why does an Honesty Sniffer tie himself to honesty, and why does a pacifist tie himself to nonviolence when over and over it is proven that sometimes the right thing to do is to lie and say your friend looks good in a dress or to kill an army of Nazis or confederates for a greater good? The answer lies in the fact that a functioning moral agent must be fluid; he must be aware and thinking and able to take in all the conflicting factors of a situation, and act without the compass of any strict code. Because as Sartre argued, no such code exists. It is up to man to create it to the best of his ability, in each situation and each moment. This is an unbelievably difficult task to aspire to. And what those who adhere themselves to any blind and unbendable code are doing is shirking that responsibility and challenge. At heart, such people do not trust themselves. They deny their own humanity out of fear and loathing of it.

Batman is a great example of this. Consequentially, it would have been far more ethically sound if Batman had just killed the Joker in Batman #1 way back in 1940. Hundreds if not thousands of lives would have been saved. However, Batman cannot do this. He looks at Bruce Wayne as a human being and is terrified. He sees the rage inside, and the drive toward vengeance that set him on his life long crusade. And so, he ceases to be a fluid moral agent. He destroys his own humanity. He ties himself to an unbending code so to be a symbol rather than a man.

And that is what the Honesty Sniffers do every day. Unable to bear the thought of what they might become if left to their own devices, they tie themselves to a strict code and see the world through its lens. But ask yourself, what kind of person would do that? What kind of person has that little trust in himself?

Well, a person with low levels of self-trust or self-esteem. And here is the grand Catch-22 of the Honesty Sniffer. The very same low self-esteem that leads them to bind themselves to an unbending abstraction makes them unable to handle the truth that they so desire. Out of such low self-esteem, the Honesty Sniffer will live in constant fear that they are not good enough, or loved enough, or respected enough, or attractive enough. And so upon hearing the shades of negativity and hatred and ugliness that are inherent in even the most loving of truths, they take it as a confirmation of all their fears. The Honesty Sniffer will take a lie as the greatest betrayal and a truth as the most crushing of blows. In answering one’s questions you’re fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t.

Usually I try not to give any advice. In general, I am more than happy to simply point out flaws until you are as bitter and hate filled as I am. But just this once, I will part with a piece of advice. If you ever find yourself with an Honesty Sniffer, run. Run from their questions on how they look. Run from their requests for appraisal on their poetry. Run from their absurd laments for openness.

Run so that you might avoid the day when they ask you how you feel about them.