Name: Radical Honesty
Rating: 3.2 (310 reviews)
Author: Brad Blanton

What’s in it for me? Discover the incredible power of the truth.

When was the last time you told a lie? It wasn’t anytime recently, was it? Ah, good. Well, kudos on your honesty! Unless, that is, you’re lying right now. Are you?

No matter how you answer that question, it’s a fact: people lie constantly. At least, that’s what the author, Brad Blanton, believes. We lie to others about how we’re feeling and we lie to ourselves about who we are and what we want. Learning to lie is simply part of growing up.

But that doesn’t make it healthy. The truth is, all this lying is killing us inside. So how do you stop, when lying is everywhere?

The answer is simple, yet also incredibly difficult: you just have to tell the truth. Radically.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what moralism is and how we can escape it;
why there’s nothing noble about bottling up your anger; and
why you need to tell your partner every last detail about your sex life.

Moralism means that your mind dominates your being.

Let’s start at the very beginning: the womb.

A few months after conception, consciousness dawns, and that’s when you experience experience itself for the first time. Everything seems to be eternal, timeless.

You may not consciously remember this experience, but, on some level, it remains with you. It’s this experience of eternity that you, like everyone else, long to go back to.

But you can’t. Because once you’re born, you learn how you’re expected to behave in the world around you. As the author puts it, the mind takes over from the being. And that clarity you had in the womb is lost forever. That’s what religion and philosophy are about – they’re efforts to recapture that lost purity.

It’s like a disease, the author says, and it slowly kills us all. He calls it moralism.

The key message here is: Moralism means that your mind dominates your being.

In trying to do the best for their children, parents teach them morals. These lessons learned from past behavior help keep them safe and teach them how to behave. But children also learn negative behaviors from their parents’ lessons.

The author tells the story of Stephen, a young boy who made a mess while secretly making lemonade in the kitchen. When his parents found out, they were angry and punished him. In response, he got angry, blaming his parents and saying he hated them.

This was only natural. In fact, it was a survival mechanism. In apportioning blame and getting angry, Stephen was imitating his parents.

The problem lies in trying to apply a fixed set of rules to the fluid and complex world around us. Lawyers do this when they try to apply the rigid dictates of law to nuanced real-life cases. They’re what’s called field dependent.

To understand that idea, picture a rod inside a square frame. The rod and frame turn independent of one another, like hands on a clock. The room you’re in is dark, so the rod and frame are the only things you can see. Suddenly, the frame stops moving but the rod continues. So when is the rod vertical?

According to field dependent people, it’s when it’s parallel with the frame. Field independent people, on the other hand, realize the frame isn’t a reliable reference point and instead use their own bodies to work out when the rod is vertical.

Moralists are field dependent. But there’s a very basic problem with field dependence: it’s a lie.

We all lie our asses off, and that hurts us.

We all lie. In fact, we lie all the time. And not just about the little things. On a deeper level, most adults are living a lie they taught themselves in adolescence.

Adolescence is when you first ask the question, Who am I? And it’s human nature, unfortunately, to want a single, definitive response. So you pretend that the response you give yourself – the persona you adopt – is actually a true reflection of who you are.

Radical honesty means telling the whole truth, no matter how uncomfortable that is.

Radical honesty is a simple concept – just stop lying and tell the truth. Putting it into practice is hard, though. As an example, imagine this difficult situation: you’ve slept with your husband’s best friend, and now it’s time to come clean. You might think that being honest would simply mean telling your husband that basic fact. You’d probably then have a fight about it, and end up resenting each other, maybe forever.

But radical honesty is different. It means being real – uncomfortably real – right down to the smallest detail.

Telling the truth – the whole truth – is vital for any relationship.

The author has been married five times, and people sometimes joke to him that four failed marriages hardly make it look like he knows what makes for a successful relationship.

But he argues that, actually, it does. Not only does he consider each of his marriages to have been a success – his divorces have been successful too, and he remains on good terms with former partners, with friendly and effective relationships in place for issues like coparenting.

To free yourself from moralism and start living a radically honest life, take responsibility.

The pace of life is quick these days, and we’re surrounded by stimulation. Given that, it’s no wonder that lots of us are stressed – our bodies just aren’t designed to be this busy all the time. And our commitment to moralism just makes things worse.

So how can you get out of this stressful state, free your mind, and revert to a state where you can acknowledge your true being? Well, dealing with the problem means learning to tell the truth. A psychotherapist can help people with this, but that doesn’t always work. Ultimately, it’s all about taking responsibility for yourself and putting plans into action.

Kernaussagen in Radical Honesty