We live in a time when information is literally available at our fingertips.
On any given day, millions of us can go online and say whatever we’re thinking. On the flipside, we also live in a culture where one can lose their job for said thought. Where the government works with social media companies to make decisions about what is and isn’t acceptable discourse. Frankly, we’re relaying all the wrong lessons about public discourse because we keep scaring people away from honesty, which is a difficult practice in its own right.
Just as in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, there are external pressures that come to bear on our own ability to be honest, but this does not stop the issues themselves from continuing to play out in front of us: who gets to compete against who athletically, the trustworthiness of elections, to what degree vaccines should be mandatory, inflation that affects the bank accounts of working people, police killing civilians, civilians killing civilians, and much more.
The issues are consequential, whether we’re allowed to express our opinions about them or not.
And yet, the pressures that make honesty difficult are not only external. It is empirically-supportable that Americans, in particular, feel the need to self-censor at work, school, and on social media. It is also empirically supportable that voters on both sides of the aisle are often not very persuadable even when presented with facts that are inconvenient to our views.
Perhaps there’s reason within our biology for this, but I suspect there’s much we could do culturally to rethink our opinions without feeling like we’ve lost our identity. People do, of course, change their minds, though there’s often an emotional component to our shift, and of course just because we change on something doesn’t always mean the new version is better. For instance: someone gets robbed or worse and then develops stereotypical ideas about a race or a gender or a neighborhood. We’re fickle people who are limited by experience, and when someone harms us it often takes a bit of psychological work to not hold that against the world.
Allow me to share two primary influences that have inspired some of my own significant shifts along the way.
The first of these—more of a displacing of emphasis in terms of what I thought was important—was a friendship with an older man who has expected more from me than anyone else ever has. Our conversations sometimes feel like a chore, like pulling teeth. I don’t always enjoy or embrace this, but I will admit that I have needed it at times.
This was the man, after all, who was more “there” for me than anyone else when the primary tragedy of my adult life struck about twelve-and-half-years ago. My older brother—only eleven months older than me, an “Irish twin”—made national news for committing a murder-suicide on the school campus where he had worked and been fired. I had been concerned about my brother’s mental health at the time but was stunned, nonetheless. It was my relationship with this friend that has, over many years, asked me to approach that event and its impact on my own life again and again. And to see that the familial influences on my brother’s emotional and relational health were around me, too, and the despair he felt at his life’s end is a despair I have felt many times, too.
Is this material appropriate for every setting? It’s intimate, so probably not. Many people are just trying to get through the day, and so they don’t have the emotional wherewithal to enter such a conversation.
Honesty is something we must navigate both internally—perhaps through prayer or at least meditation or reflection or interaction with nature—and in negotiation with the people who become important in our lives. The fear of expression is often rationalized by the existence and potential of some kinds of harshness and/or bigotry, but in some ways, these things are the opposite of honesty. Instead, they provide psychological protection from the reality of our own vulnerability in this life. “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” That is almost surely one of our instinctual drivers, to protect ourselves from pain.
And so, honesty is the spiritual practice of intentionally moving toward that pain with tenderness and curiosity.
In writing about my brother here, I know this is “my story.” Still, it was not only my story, in that other people were directly affected by the end of his life, and people were emotionally affected by simply reading about it. There are issues of public importance that come up: people who have valid reasons to be sensitive about guns, about mental health in general, and even about masculinity.
And yet, if we cannot come toward each other with our individual triggers—basically wounds that we try to protect from further aggravation—the prospect of healing is not good. Shielding the wounds may be necessary in the short-term, but if we cannot open them up safely in the long-term, the closed nature of our minds is just an extension of closed hearts.
And closed hearts will be unlikely to create a world where these kinds of tragedies occur less often.
