Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth. — Brad Blanton
If you look into any major religions, ideologies, or philosophies, you’ll notice that each has some kind of an enemy. In Buddhism, it’s suffering. In Christianity, it’s a sinful life. For Brad Blanton, it’s our mind. Why? Because minds produce “bullshit”, which Blanton understands as “generic root word for all value-assigned abstraction or summation of remembered experiences”. Minds, in other words, remove us from the objective reality that’s out there. Minds create expectations, strict moral maxims, and false personas. Minds lie and suppress anger. Minds are the baddies in the religion of Radical Honesty.
Overcoming our minds means loosening the grip of its abstractions. One must let go of one’s principles, standards, and moral imperatives — called adolescent moralism by Blanton — in order to set his “being”1 free. And the tool of choice to perform this perilous task? Truth.
But before we delve into that bag of potatoes, let’s get meta. Because the truth, as always, is subjective.
After reading The Master and his Emissary, I’ve begun noticing its themes everywhere. The gist of the book (if one can attempt to make one from a 600-page tome) is that there is an eternal hemispheric struggle. This tug of war between the left and the right (which the right has been losing for several centuries in the Western world) manifests as the struggle between the abstract and symbolic (on the left), and the essential and holistic (on the right). Where the left hemisphere plucks things out of their context in order to manipulate them (which gave us maths, engineering, and all the technological goodies), the right hemisphere tries to perceive things in their natural context — flowy, eternally changing, random (which gave us Buddhism). Rather than rationalizing, which is the domain of the left, the right hemisphere intuits. Its metaphor would be the famous “you can’t enter the same river twice”. Well, that’s the gist as I understand it, and definitely a big oversimplification. Still, let’s keep it on the backburner as we plunge deeper.
The reason I mention it here is that Radical Honesty reads like a plea for a more right hemispheric focus. The mind, as Blanton understands it, is the product of the left hemisphere. It is responsible for making abstractions, thinking, and altogether removing ourselves from reality. It’s responsible for mistaking the menu for the real thing, the map for the territory, and the written Tao for the experience of it.
Telling the truth, in Blantons’ view, is coming closer to the right hemispheric values and worldviews — we let go of the products of the left hemisphere: the thoughts that we’ve come to identify with, the personalities and beliefs that shape(d) us, and the moral standards responsible for viewing the world as black or white.
In toto, Blanton wants us to treat all the abstractions that we’ve come to cling to, derive security and a sense of special-snowlakeness from, as meaningless bullshit.
But why the heck would we want to do that? I’d say that most of us aren’t that masochistic as to renounce our personalities — abstractions that make us who we are, with all the lessons we’ve learned over the years, all the idiosyncratic interpretations of the present, and the hopeful yearnings for the future. No sir, I’d pretty much like to stay a semi-depressed curmudgeon prone to nihilism. Because what is the alternative? I sure as hell won’t become a happy-go-lucky, emotion-filled fluffball (or whatever the opposite of an emotional pebble is) that floats about raining down happiness.
In fairness to Blanton, that’s not what he wants. What he wants is for you to realize that whatever you created and came to identify with using your mind is arbitrary, meaningless, and imbued with meaning only because we all collectively decided that that’s how things are. You tell me who I am and I do the same. Tit for tat. As a result, we all live in a socially-accepted, culturally-sanctioned illusion created by our minds, an illusion that is okay enough — passable, really — but one that leaves you with this quaint feeling of off-ness. It’s Matrix, really.
Until now, I talked only about the mind’s products, abstractions, and symbols. Ephemera. Bla-nton is bla-tant (couldn’t resist) and calls this lying. He distinguishes three kinds.
First is withholding factual information that might be relevant to others. This is fairly straightforward and uninteresting to talk about. It’s your garden variety “nah, I don’t need to tell him I met with Gary… don’t need the drama” kind of excuse. The second is withholding emotions and the consequences associated with it. This is interesting, and I’ll discuss this shortly. The third is assuming that the creations of our minds are real: the personalities that we are, the beliefs that we have, and the thoughts we identify with. This is iffy and too vague to put into words, so I’ll skip this.
But let’s return to #2 — withholding emotions. And the best way to exemplify this — and what Blanton goes to the greatest lengths to address — is anger.
Here’s the gist: what we’ve come to habitually do is repress anger because it scares us. In relationships, anger has the potential to destroy the bond between people, or so we think. In ourselves, it has the potential to destroy the notion of how we see ourselves — well put-together, adult, in control. Definitely not an ape. Nope, definitely no “whack things till they can’t move” kind of gene-hardcoding present in us anymore, thank you very much. Civilized is the name of the game. Refined, even. Above our primal nature. Distinguished.
That’s why anger must be smothered, nipped in the bud, and relegated into the realm of imaginary arguments (where we somehow always come up with the best retorts).
However, the consequences of repressing anger are manifold. On the individual level, we have self-medicating coping behaviors — compulsive gorging on (unhealthy) food, excessive consumption of drugs, and deadening ourselves in the endless autoplay of YouTube and Netflix. On the interpersonal level, the anger manifests itself indirectly as less-than-nice behaviors. Blanton lists a few:
Forgetting agreements, standing people up, mildly criticizing most of another's behavior, having accidents, making mistakes, accidentally saying things to hurt others, and forgetting people's names.
Further:
Most people, however, […] gossip, complain, criticize, fantasize about telling the person off, and let it [anger] out in other indirect ways.
Suppressed anger also manifests itself as helpless thoughts:
“I can't;” “they made me;” “it's no use;” “it doesn't really matter;” and “you just don't understand.”
I’m not sure about you, but I found myself in those descriptions. I often fantasize about magnificent retorts, and giving others a “piece of my mind”. I tend to be overly critical of others’ behaviors (especially people close to me). Sometimes I’m snide and overly sarcastic, hurtful even. Whenever I struggle in a relationship, I often talk (= gossip) to someone about my problems. Just not to the person herself as that’s, well, too direct.
I think it’s fair to categorize the above as repressed anger. It fits.
And what this repressed anger does is the very opposite of what we intend when we bottle it up — it removes us from our relationships, and it removes us from ourselves. Why? Because we — and others — come to dislike the person who we’ve become, because of the behaviors that necessarily crop up in response to suppressed anger. So, instead of smashing things into bits and having a tantrum, we collectively learned to express our anger in a “civilized” manner — indirectly, slyly, sheepishly.
Blanton is having none of that. He wants you to have a cathartic anger release. And your partner — or whoever is the source of your anger — must be present to watch you writhe in self-righteous fury, as you spit out irrational babble (along with actual spit, probably).
Luckily, Blanton also provides a guidebook on how to go about this spitting. I call it the Resentment talk. Here’s how he puts it:
The process of forgiveness involves the following six minimal requirements, none of which may be skipped.
1. You have to tell the truth about what specific behavior you resent, to the person, face-to-face;
2. You have to be verbally and vocally unrestrained with regard to volume and propriety;
3. You have to pay attention to the feelings and sensations in your body and to the other person as you speak;
4. You have to express any appreciations for the person that come up in the process, with the same attention to your feelings and to the other person as when you are expressing resentments;
5. You have to stay with any feelings that emerge in the process, like tears or laughter, regardless of any evaluations you may have about how it makes you look;
6. You have to stay with the discussion until you no longer feel resentful of the other person.
Here are some details from my own recent experience.
You begin by preparing a list of resentments. For me, this happened quite naturally. As soon as I labeled things with “suppressed anger” instead of “nah, that’s my problem to deal with”, the floodgate was open. My hand moved feverishly to scribble down every situation, down from the tiniest slight (”why did I get a hug and not a kiss as a greeting the other day?”) all the way up to huge “dealbreakers” (”did you seriously eat the last cookie?”).
Depending on how much anger you’ve stored over the years, this might take some time. For me, after 3 days or so, the process of resurfacing all these anger-inducing situations has come to an end.
Then, the fun stuff: you get together and talk with the object of your rage (steps 1 and 2). The format is simple. You begin your sentences with: “I resent you for”, speak in the present tense, and mention a specific behavior. Instead of “I resent you for always making me feel insecure”, you say “I resent you for mentioning my struggles in front of my friends a week ago at the party”. Easy, right?
In my case, only a few of the resentments came out in the end. I think it was because they came out naturally, without creating a safe space for the Resentment talk. The fun thing, though? Even such a tiny release worked already! It’s been a week now and I feel lighter, less encumbered by intrusive thoughts. My tiny catharsis might be transitory, who knows, but so far I’m reaping the benefits. The real success though is that now (at least for me), expressing anger feels normal(er). I don’t feel like I have to tread so lightly, expressing the anger in a “constructive” manner, trying to couch it in rationality and sense. Instead, I accept that anger is irrational, random, arbitrary, and entirely human. There’s no right or wrong. It just… is. And it needs to be expressed.
I think Blanton gets some fundamental things right: most of us do live through our mind’s abstractions a tad too much, leading us to be out of touch with our being. I also think that we repress and vilify anger too much, we treat it with too much respect and fear. It also seems to me that we in the Western world collectively cater too much to the symbolic and the abstract, the left hemispheric values and worldviews. And we pay way too little attention to the right hemispheric worldviews — intuition, context, interrelations, change, and so on.
Where I’m concerned is the applicability of Radical Honesty. Because when the object of your rage doesn’t understand that expressing anger ought to be a normal, descriptive, value-less process of letting the inner ape out, you end up with more resentment in total, not less. Because people are, well, people, they don’t intuitively get that there’s nothing personal per se in you telling them how much you “resent” their behaviors. They need to be taught that it’s okay. A space needs to be created. Without that basis, you’ll simply offload your anger on someone else, who then either lugs it directly back at you or worse, at someone else. Displacement aggression is a thing. So, scaling this philosophy might be an issue.
Also, it’s not a surprise that I resonated with a book that’s called “Radical Honesty”. If anything, I got affirmation of my attitudes, and confirmation of my beliefs. But because of that, I’m not so sure about the verisimilitude of it all. Is it wishful thinking that we could all profit from less politeness and diplomacy? How does it relate to validation? I’m not sure. But I feel that through radical honesty the world would be, if not a better place, then at least an easier place to live in. Instead of guessing “what the hell did we do wrong this time”, we’d know — we ate the last fucking cookie. And people are pissed.
Blanton calls our true selves beings (as opposed to minds)
"As a result, we all live in a socially-accepted, culturally-sanctioned illusion created by our minds, an illusion that is okay enough — passable, really — but one that leaves you with this quaint feeling of off-ness. It’s Matrix, really."
I can identify with this so much. Thanks for putting this diffuse presentiment in my head into words.
Regards,
The object of your rage (that still resents you for all the last cookies you ate; present, past and future!)