A friend of mine — I'll call him Tom — had been working toward something for the better part of a year. A small food business. A stall that would become a van that would become a place of his own, with his name over the door. He'd talked about it for as long as I'd known him; it was the thing he was going to do instead of the job he hated. And one night, four or five of us around a table, he set the whole thing out. The spreadsheet. The site he'd found. The name. He was full of enthusiasm.
And I could see the flaw in it. The rent he was quoting, the number of customers he'd need to serve, and the price people would actually pay for what he was selling — the figures did not add up, and they were never going to add up. I'd done enough of that kind of arithmetic to see it at once, and I said so. Carefully, I thought. I took him through the numbers, line by line, in front of everyone. The others went quiet. Tom nodded along, in the way people nod when they are taking in something they had hoped not to hear, and by the end of it his enthusiasm had drained away, and the conversation moved on to something easier.
Here is what I felt on the drive home. Not sorrow for my friend. I felt perceptive. I felt like the one person at that table with the courage to say what was true, while everyone else sat there being supportive and useless. There was a satisfaction in it, a sense of being above the others — I'd seen what they could not see, and I'd said what they would not say. And the sentence I had ready, the one I'd have offered if you had stopped the car and asked me why I'd done it, was the easiest sentence in the world. I'm just being honest. Somebody had to tell him.
Now here is what took me years to notice. Maybe I was right about the numbers — I probably was. But "I'm just being honest" was doing two things at that table, and only one of them concerned Tom. It was telling the truth about his business. And it was also, beneath that, letting me enjoy being the most perceptive and most courageous person in the room — and presenting that enjoyment as a favour to my friend, so that I'd never have to notice that I'd discouraged him from his plan, in front of his friends, partly because it felt good to be the one who could.
I told Tom something true. But there was a second thing at work beneath it, one I was telling myself — and that one was not true at all.
Last week the question changed direction and became a question about ourselves. For four episodes we had been working out what we owe other people — how much truth, and what makes the kind lie wrong. And then a second question came up behind it, one we had never thought to ask: am I honest with myself about why I say what I say? We identified two stories a person tells about their own motive — two flattering accounts of why one spoke — I'm just being honest, and I didn't want to hurt them. And we found the difficult thing about them: the very method you would use to check whether you are telling yourself one of these stories is the method this kind of self-deception is built to defeat.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the sixth of eight episodes on the most ordinary difficult thing there is: telling the truth, or not, to the people you love.
Tonight we examine the first of those stories: the brave one. I'm just being honest. There is a whole movement that presents it as the cure for everything wrong with you. We are going to find what it gets right, and where it goes wrong — and then, with the help of two thinkers, we are going to ask the harder question it hides: how is such self-deception even possible? How do you conceal your own motive from yourself, when you are the one doing the concealing?
Let me start by giving this position its due, because if I present it as a caricature you will never recognise it in yourself. You will nod along about other people and conclude that you are innocent.
The case for it runs like this. Sometimes a room really does need the thing that has gone unsaid, and almost nobody will say it. You have sat in those rooms. The meeting where everyone can see the project is doomed and everyone keeps nodding. The family in which the thing that is wrong has a name, and no one will use the name. The friend whose new partner needles them in small ways at every dinner, and the whole table has agreed, without a word, to pretend not to see it. In rooms like that, politeness is not kindness. It is cowardice that has learned to call itself good manners. And the person who finally says the true thing — this isn't working, or he talks to you like that and you flinch, and we all saw it — that person is doing something genuinely difficult and genuinely good. They bear a cost the others avoid. I am not going to claim that honesty is a vice. Sometimes the brave thing and the right thing are the same thing, and the courage is real.
Keep that in mind. Everything tonight depends on its being true.
Now here is the difficulty — and last week we came close to it, so let me take it one step further than we did then. We saw that the pleasure of being the one who says the difficult thing, and the genuine virtue of saying a truth that is needed, feel identical from the inside. The same satisfaction, the same physical sensation, the same words coming out of your mouth. Here is why that is more troubling than it first appears.
Put yourself back in one of those rooms — one where you were the person who said it. Set aside the fear you felt before you spoke. Look closely at what came after. Because if something counterfeit was mixed in — a small satisfaction at being superior to the room, the realist among the romantics, the only adult among the children — notice what that feeling does not feel like. It does not feel like vanity. If I were merely vain, if I simply liked being complimented, I could probably detect it, because vanity has a slightly cheap quality to it, and some part of you always knows. This feeling has no cheap quality at all. It feels like integrity. It feels like the best thing about you. The very sensation that ought to serve as a warning — the satisfaction you feel as you deliver the hard truth — is identical to the satisfaction of having done something difficult and right.
So this self-deception does not hide in your weakness, where you would think to look for it. It hides inside your strength. It hides inside the one thing you are most proud of. That is why I said last week that you will defend this one far harder than you ever defended a craving at two in the morning. Nobody is proud of wanting a snack. Everyone is proud of having courage — and so you will resist, and resist strongly, any suggestion that the courage was not pure.
And because the brave impulse really does point at something true — because habitual politeness really can be damaging over time — it is very easy to build a whole way of living on it. A philosophy that says: the satisfaction is not a warning sign at all; the satisfaction is the point. Stop apologising for it. Say the true thing, always, to everyone, and your life will become clearer and more honest. That philosophy exists. It has books, and workshops, and a name. And it is where we are going next, because it is the brave impulse taken to its logical end and made into a doctrine — and a doctrine is the quickest way to see both what the impulse gets right and exactly where it goes wrong.
In the 1990s an American psychotherapist named Brad Blanton wrote a book called Radical Honesty, and it grew into a small movement — workshops, a following, the whole apparatus. And the core of it is the brave impulse of a moment ago, taken to its extreme and made into a rule for living.
Blanton's claim, roughly, is this. The thing damaging your relationships and your life is not your anger and not your appetites. It is your lying. Not the large lies — the small, constant ones that keep everyday social life running smoothly. You are bored and you say you are fine. You are attracted to someone and you suppress it. You resent your friend and you smile at them. You think the presentation was bad and you tell them it was excellent. Every one of these, on Blanton's account, is a small act of withholding — and it is the accumulation of them that is doing you harm. You spend so much energy managing what other people feel that you lose contact with what is actually true, and actually your own. So the cure must be radical. Stop concealing. Say the resentment aloud. Say the attraction. Say that you were bored, that you think they are wrong, that you do not like their husband. Stop editing yourself for the benefit of other people. The discomfort you feel in doing it is simply the feeling of a life becoming real.
And I want to be fair to this, because there is something true in it, and you already know there is, because you felt it in that first room. Habitual politeness is real. Most of us are managing other people's feelings most of the time — and much of that management is the management of our own comfort, presented as consideration for theirs. Blanton has identified a genuine problem. A life made up entirely of small accommodations is a life gradually disappearing. So far, he is onto something.
Here is where it goes wrong. And there is a good correction to it, so let me give you the correction first, because it is right — and then show you the one step it does not take.
There is a businesswoman named Kim Scott, who set out her view in a book called Radical Candor, after years of watching this play out in workplaces, and she makes a point I think is right, as far as it goes. She says that radical honesty gets used as a weapon. "I'm just being honest" becomes a licence: people use it to say cruel and careless things, then take shelter behind the word honest, as though truth excused the cruelty. And her correction is this: real candour is not brutal. If you actually care about the person in front of you, the care is part of the honesty — not something added afterwards to soften it. The advocate of brutal honesty has combined two things: the message and the malice. And he is including the second under cover of the first. So separate them. Set aside the malice; keep the message. Care about them and tell them the truth — you were never forced to choose.
That is good. It is true. If the whole of tonight were a question about how to behave better, I would give you that and we would be finished: care about the person, tell the truth, and do not be unpleasant in the delivery.
But it stops one step short of the thing this whole series is about, and I want to show you the step it misses, because the step is the entire point.
Notice what the correction quietly assumes. It assumes the brutally honest person knows there is malice in what he says — that he is choosing to allow it, and concealing it behind the word honest. And if that were true, the remedy really would be simple. Stop choosing the malice. Catch yourself, be kinder, done. But return to me, driving home from Tom's. I was not sitting in that car thinking I was cruel to my friend and I am covering it with the word honest. I would have denied that completely, and I would have meant the denial. What I felt was that I had done the right thing. I felt that I had done him a favour. The pleasure — the small satisfaction of being the perceptive one — was not something I was choosing and concealing from him. It was something I genuinely could not see, because the word honest concealed it from me, and I believed the word. I was the one it deceived.
That is the difference, and it is the whole episode. The correction treats this as cruelty — something you are doing deliberately and concealing. But most of the time it is not cruelty you are choosing. It is self-deception. And you cannot cure self-deception by resolving to be kinder, because the whole difficulty is that you do not know it is there. You have not hidden the malice from them. You have hidden it from yourself. "Be kind as well as honest" is sound advice for a person who can already see their own motive. It is no help at all to a person whose motive is concealed by a story they cannot see through.
So the movement is half right, and the correction is half right, and between them they have described it from the outside without quite seeing what it consists of. To see what it consists of, we have to ask a stranger question. Not whether the brutally honest person is cruel — but: how is it even possible to conceal your own motive from yourself? Who conceals what, from whom, when the deceiver and the deceived are the same person? And for that, I need to bring in another thinker.
The thinker I want is Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1943, in a book called Being and Nothingness, in a long section on what he called bad faith. And he is after our puzzle: how can you lie to yourself at all? Because an ordinary lie needs two people — a deceiver who knows the truth and someone deceived who does not. The deceiver holds something back that the other cannot see. Sartre's question is what kind of being could be both at once: the one holding the thing back and the one it is kept from, in a single person. It looks flatly impossible — and yet we do it constantly, so it cannot be impossible. Which means we have misunderstood what a self is.
And his answer — I will put it as plainly as I can, because he does not always make it easy — is that bad faith is not a mistake you occasionally fall into. It is something the kind of being you are can always do, because of a division that runs through the centre of you.
Here is his most famous illustration of it. Watch a waiter in a café, Sartre says — a waiter who is a little too good at it. His movements are a touch too precise, a touch too quick. He leans towards the customer a shade too eagerly; he balances the tray with a shade too much care. He is, in Sartre's word, playing at being a waiter — performing the role the way a child performs an adult. He is trying to be a waiter the way a stone is simply a stone, with no distance in it, no gap, no part of him standing off to one side. And of course he cannot, because he is not a stone. He is a free man, pretending for the length of the shift that he is a fixed thing. And the pretence is a relief to him. Because if he is simply a waiter — the way a stone is a stone — then he does not have to face the unsettling thing that is actually true: that he is free. That he chose this. That he could set the tray down and walk out of the door, and that nothing keeps him in the role but his own continued choice of it, minute after minute.
That is bad faith. Not lying about the world, but evading your own freedom by pretending you are a fixed thing — a role, a type, a settled kind of person — when in truth you are choosing it, moment to moment, and could choose otherwise.
He gives a second example, which I find even sharper. A woman on a first date. The man reaches over and takes her hand. And she — she does not pull it back. And she does not squeeze it either. She leaves it there. And, Sartre says, she manages not to notice that she has left it there. She keeps the fact suspended: not quite acknowledged, so that she does not have to decide anything; not quite refused, so that the evening can continue. Her own hand becomes, in his cold phrase, a thing — something that merely happens to be lying there, for which she is not responsible. She knows and she does not know, in the very same moment, deliberately, and without ever once putting it to herself in words. That last point is the key. Never putting it into words is how the two halves are kept from meeting.
Now bring that back to me, driving home from Tom's, because that is what I was doing. "I'm just being honest" was my version of the waiter's performance. I was playing the part of the honest man, completely, with nothing left over, so that I would never have to face the freer and worse thing beneath it: that I had had a choice about how, and when, and in front of how many people to say what I said — and I had chosen the version that showed me to best advantage. And like the woman's hand, the pleasure was something I kept suspended — present throughout, doing its quiet work, never quite put into words, because the instant I put it into words I would have to answer for it. So the self-deception, on Sartre's account, is not something I added on top of an honest act. It is the whole posture: being "an honest person" the way a stone is a stone, so that I never have to acknowledge, openly, the choice I actually made.
And you can see, I think, why this makes "look harder at yourself" such a weak remedy. Because the looking is done by that same free being — and the looking, too, can be done in bad faith. I can examine my own motives as a performance of a man examining his motives, arrive at the reassuring answer I was always going to arrive at, and never notice that the examination itself was part of the performance. Sartre shows the structure that makes this possible — the division that lets the examiner be complicit. What he does not settle — and what others have argued over ever since, in far drier language than his — is exactly how the mechanism works, and whether, once you understand how it works, there is any way left to catch yourself at it at all. That argument is next week. Tonight I need you to see only one thing: this is not a lapse you happen to commit. It is built into the kind of being you are.
Now I want to step back and ask where all of this comes from. Because we have been speaking as though "be honest with yourself," "be true to who you really are," "stop performing and find the real you," were simply permanent features of being a person — the foundation beneath everything else. There is a literary critic, Lionel Trilling, who gave a set of lectures at the start of the 1970s, published as a book called Sincerity and Authenticity, whose argument is that this foundation is nothing of the kind. It has a datable origin. It is a fairly recent idea; it replaced an older one; and the substitution changed what honesty asks of us without anyone noticing. And — this is why I want it here — the substitution built in the exact difficulty we have been circling all evening.
Here is the older idea. For a long stretch — roughly Shakespeare through the seventeen-hundreds — the governing word was sincerity. And sincerity meant something specific, and something outward: a match between what you present to other people and what you actually are. Being, in public, no different from what you are in private. No difference between the face you show and the person behind it. You know the famous line — old Polonius, sending his son off into the world: to thine own self be true. But what is it for, in that older world? The very next line tells you: be true to yourself, he says, so that "thou canst not then be false to any man." Being true to yourself is in the service of not deceiving other people. It is a social virtue. It faces outward. It is required for their sake — so that when you tell them something, they can rely on its being what you actually believe. On that older picture, honesty is mostly about the truth you convey to other people — which is exactly the picture you walked in with on the very first night.
And then, Trilling says, somewhere in the last two centuries, the ideal moved. The word that took over was authenticity, and it points somewhere different. To be authentic is not to match your public face to your private one. It is to be true to a real self — a self beneath all the roles, set apart from any part you play for anybody, the genuine self that society and convention are always threatening to cover over. And the centre of honesty moved with it: from others, to the self. The deepest honesty stopped being "do not deceive them," and became "do not betray the real you."
And here is the difficulty — the whole reason I have brought a literary critic into a conversation about your sister and the kitchen table. The older ideal, sincerity, had a check on it. It faced outward, so other people could actually see whether you met it: whether your public face matched your private conduct was something observable from the outside, by them. But the new ideal, authenticity, faces inward — at a self that is defined as being apart from every role — which means there is nothing outside it to test it against. No witness but you. And so, here is Trilling's sharp observation, and it is the point this whole hour has been moving toward: we end up able to "sincerely act the part of the sincere person." Hear that again. You can perform authenticity. You can play the role of the person who plays no roles. You can be, with complete conviction, true to yourself — and have the whole thing be a performance, and there is no one outside to detect it, because the only observer is yourself, and you are not an impartial observer. You are the one performing, and you wrote the performance.
That is the origin of the ideal the whole brave impulse appeals to. When Blanton says stop concealing, be your real, authentic self, stop performing — he is appealing to the inward ideal, the one with no external check. And the trouble is not that the ideal is a bad one. The trouble is that it is the most easily faked demand we have, because the only witness to whether you have met it is the very self that has every reason to tell you that you have. "Be true to yourself" turns out to be a standard handed to us fairly recently, by a culture that exchanged an outward, checkable honesty for an inward, uncheckable one — and then told us the inward one was the deeper of the two. So when all of this asks whether you can really be honest with yourself, that is not gloom about human nature. It is a specific problem, attached to a specific and fairly young idea — an idea constructed, without anyone intending it, so that you can never quite tell from the inside whether you are meeting it.
So let us turn it on you, because you did not come here to think about me and Tom.
Find your own version. A time you were the one who said the difficult thing. The meeting where you named the flaw in someone's plan while the room watched. The friend you told, to their face, that the relationship was a disaster. The family dinner where you finally said the thing everyone else had agreed to leave alone. You have one. Perhaps you have a dozen — perhaps you are a little known for it; perhaps "I don't sugar-coat things" is practically your motto. Pick the clearest one, and put yourself back in it: the half-second before you spoke, and then the few minutes after.
And put the two questions to it. The first, because it is a real question and I am not taking it away from you: was it true, and did they need to hear it? Sometimes the answer is plainly yes. The plan really was doomed. The relationship really was hurting them. Someone owed them the truth, and you were the one with the courage to provide it. If that is what it was — good. That is courage. It is real, and the whole argument collapses if I pretend otherwise.
Now the second question, the one that points back at you. After you said it — what was actually present? Was it only the cost of a difficult thing done? Or was there, somewhere in it, a satisfaction that was not love? The sense of superiority. The satisfaction of being the one who saw, the one who said it, the realist among the soft-hearted. And if it was there — and the people quickest to swear it was not are the ones I would trust least — ask what "I'm just being honest" was doing for you in that moment. Was it naming the truth you told them? Or was it also laid carefully over the pleasure, so that you could keep the pleasure and go on believing the whole thing was a favour?
And here is the part on which there is no secure ground. You cannot settle it by looking harder. We saw why tonight, twice over. Sartre: the looking is done by the same self, and it too can be a performance — you can examine your own motives as a performance of a person examining his motives, and arrive at exactly the reassuring conclusion you needed. And Trilling: the standard you would appeal to — be true to yourself — is recent and easily faked, with no witness but the very self that is on trial. So I cannot give you a clean test for catching it. The moment I named one — feel for the satisfaction, and if it is there, you were vain — you would learn to pass it, to perform a person who feels no satisfaction. The self-deception would absorb the test and use it as further proof of innocence.
What you take away, then, is this — not a tool you can use, but not nothing either.
When you walked in, I'm just being honest could settle the matter — could stand as the plain truth about why you spoke. You leave knowing that a whole movement made a doctrine of that sentence and got something genuinely right about habitual politeness; that the usual correction — be kind as well as honest — stops one step short, because it treats the fault as a cruelty you are choosing, when most of the time it is a self-deception you cannot even see; that Sartre showed this is built into the kind of being you are, not a lapse you will one day outgrow; and that the ideal beneath all of it — be true to yourself — is more recent and less secure than it has ever felt. You can still say I'm just being honest. Sometimes it will even be the whole truth. You simply cannot say it in the old way any longer — flatly, with certainty, the question of why treated as closed — without a moment's hesitation.
Next week we take down the other story — the kind one. I didn't want to hurt them. And we go straight to the question Sartre opened tonight and then stepped around: can you ever actually check? The people who have spent their careers on how this lying-to-yourself works do not agree with one another, and the question we will pursue is whether their disagreement leaves you any way out.
For tonight, take this with you. The next time you hear yourself say I'm just being honest — and notice how good it feels to say it — pause on that feeling for a moment. Not to settle the matter on the spot; you cannot, not in a single moment, and I would be wary of anyone who thought they could. Only to ask: is that feeling the truth doing its work — or is it the pleasure of being the one brave enough to say it, with the word honest laid gently over the top, so that I never have to look?
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.