When Honesty Isn't Honest

Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, has characters Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx do an experiment in which they try to tell each other their full and complete thoughts: "We're trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our minds."

The experiment does not work:

They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events..."it started a train of my own, something real wild that I had to tell you, I'd forgotten it, now you've just reminded me of it..." and two new points were born.

Thoughts "going viral," that's how thinking works. One point leads to five or two, filed for later in the conversation, but it just gets worse as we progress. The brain works faster that the mouth!

All of this proves the point that some people are being something other than honest when they insist that they must "honestly" tell others everything in their hearts and minds - even, and especially it seems, if what they say is cruel and hurtful. (These folks are closely related to those who say terrible sexist, racist, mysoginist, homophobic things in the guise of a joke - "What, can't you take a joke?")

As Carlo and Dean readily demonstrate, we simply cannot say everything that passes through the mind; it's not humanly possible. That means that we are being selective in what we choose to say to others; we have no choice but to be selective.

In short, what comes out of the mouth is chosen by the speaker from among all those thoughts and ghosts of thoughts, sensations, memories. Cruel and hurtful speech is not necessary for the full expression of all we think, which we can't do anyway. It is a purposeful way to be cruel and hurtful.

We should call people on this, just as we should call people on those jokes that are not only not funny, but are also usually bigoted.  We should call out people for hiding behind humour and honesty, for they are being neither funny nor honest; in fact quite the opposite.

So the next time someone pulls this on me, I will say that those more literate would know from reading On the Road, that it's just not possible, and that those more intelligent see the cruel bigot in them - and as I want also to express the fullness of my mind, I just had to say so. And that's no joke.