I am running away from reality, as fast as i could.
and trying not to look back, so as to prevent my eye from tearing.
Truth and Honesty - A conversation
Monday, October 6, 2008
I remember a conversation that I had with a friend over dinner sometime during May; it was about truth and honesty. His argument was - that one cannot survive by telling the truth. Also, truth by itself does not exist. Because one can come up with a logical and a very complex rule that can make truth ambiguous. An absolute truth is anything but ambiguous. All of us accept that sun rises in east. There is enough scientific evidence for that; evidence that is irrefutable. But the whole statement is based on certain set of preconceived accepted fundamental facts; east is in the direction that the sun rises. So, inherently, the statement "sun rises in the east" is always true. Thus, truth becomes a matter of perspective of a group of massive proportion and cannot be contested logically. If one would have a kind of mania for truth (for telling, I mean), then it would be from the perspective of the person in question. If a man were to hold my friend at gun point and ask me to answer a question and if by being truthful my friend could potentially die, then what power would the truth has? I have read pages and pages of articles talking about truth and honesty, but no one really talks about the price of being honest. Being honest need not be being truthful. If I tell you that I lied to you yesterday in my blog, then I am being honest. But being truthful is much difficult and the price is much costlier than one would expect. In the given social construct, one cannot be truthful. I do not agree that it is possible to utter the truth and expect that being truthful is the greatest virtue. If a man cannot empathize for another man, be it by lying or by deceit, then no amount of truth could bear the cost of comfort. I remembered this conversation today because of the predicament that I was in. I was in a dilemma as to being truthful or be a good friend. I chose to be a good friend.