People don’t want to hear the truth.
Garrett Griffin
A Critique of “People Don’t Want To Hear the Truth, Particularly When It Comes To Dating” (2014) by Cody Hightower.
People don’t want to hear the truth, only what they want to hear to conform to society’s standards. Such issues in relationships can result in something, years in the making, falling apart when the truth comes out about one of the partners and their skeletons they have in the closet. This issue is easily transferable to other situations where, although the truth will result in less pain in the end, people will commonly take immediate pleasure over long-term reward to fill society’s demands.
The large effect of society in filtering what we hear is nothing more than a restriction on advancement. In many cases, it forces us to make uninformed decisions and uselessly spends valuable sections of the human existence. Despite Hightower’s article being a pithy editorialized piece it does bring up good, valid arguments against current normative expectations shaped by society’s prejudices against logic. They deserve to be questioned, contemplated and adjusted.
Examples abound where the truth is a lie and lies are the truth. Hightower gives multiple examples of why we should work towards truth, but three were the most salient: relationships, God and the afterlife, and society’s unrealistic expectations for persons. They seem true, but are they lies?
Hightower expresses his own experience in working towards near absolute honesty in almost all situations. One particular area of interest to him is in the realm of relationships. Hightower drew an analogy between the experience of buying a car or a home, a long-term investment, and the process of finding a partner. All three, according to Hightower, are big life decisions.
When you buy a car or a house you tend to inspect every aspect of it to learn all the “truths” about what you plan on investing your time, energy, and money into. In the case of relationships, according to Hightower, we dance around the truths and commonly invoke lies and deceptions because we do not want to hear the truths. People have a tendency to want to stay blissfully ignorant.
Hightower believes our want for half-truths and lies are a construct, or better yet, an effect of society and its structure. In a sort of self-perpetuating cyclic of lies and deception, the foundation for society, says Hightower, are lies. Because of this, society encourages its participants to do the same. By completing this society-prescribed task, the basis for our society is reinforced and supported. This pleasurable un-awareness, while working to support itself, also does inherent damage to the structure it inhabits.
Society has not yet gotten to a point where it has been failed by its own issues, but such processes retard society’s evolution. When a lie results in a conflict, the events built off of a lie fall with its uncovering. This puts the participants back at “square one” and they must begin again; having wasted valuable time. A counterargument to Hightower’s belief in people’s dislike of truth is that perhaps there is no truth.
For some people truth gets them nowhere and they see no reason to care about how it affects society. For many people, their entire existence is built on falsity. It is hard to argue against the validity of truth as a stronger basis to build upon, but not everyone is an advocate for truth. These aspects of the argument are more drawn from Hightower’s discussion rather than included as a part of his.
Hightower does not present a deep, philosophical analysis of the issue, rather a more pithy description of why he thinks people lie to one another. If Hightower were to provide more material to back his claims he would have likely a strong argument, but as it stands it is not entirely convincing, an issue more present in the next topic he discusses.
The second argument Hightower brings up involves religion or more specifically spirituality and questions about the afterlife. He says, despite his advocacy for the honest truth at all times, some instances call for lies. The example given is when a child asks a question like “Where do we go when we die?” a person has multiple answers they can choose from, but for simplicity and to avoid damaging the child psychologically, parents will avoid stating the obvious truth about where the body goes and what it becomes: worm-food.
Hightower fails to make a strong argument when he says a person who answers such a question with something about God or anything about a higher level of existence the parent is lying because, “No one knows if there is a God, no one KNOWS those things, and if they claim to, THEY ARE LYING.”
The reason Hightower likely believes this is the unfalsifiability of an existence of God. Since physical proof of his existence cannot be shown, he cannot exist. Hightower is flawed in his logic in his assumption parents or persons who answer the child with a reference about God do so with the intent of lying. If a person fully believes in an afterlife along with God and tells the child about it, the parent is not trying to hide any real truths.
This argument can be countered by stating the obvious omission of the worm-food explanation, but such supplementary answers can be added later when the child is old enough to comprehend the complexities of life. The parent did not lie, he/she only did not tell the whole truth. Hightower does not condone this as a form of lying, but his assumption that when one speaks of God they are lying is an unsupported claim.
The third issue Hightower’s brings up is the unrealistic expectations society expects us to conform too. These expectations lead us to lie to others and ourselves to our own eventual self-inflicted damage. Some of the examples he gives are logical. Hightower believes that when society tells you to buy a certain product or tells you to do something it is acting unnatural. It forces humans against all things human. This humanistic perspective is flawed though, because it does not assert the notion that not all things naturally human are good.
Some of the primitive instincts of humans are not desirable if the human race expects to make evolutionary progress. Hightower asks the question “We are supposed to fight and go against every instinctual thing about ourselves, for what? To alleviate suffering?” An answer to this structured question requires either a yes or no. The answer is not this simple. He goes on to give his assertion, “False beliefs are the very thing that CREATES suffering.” He is right in many ways. Some of the molds society creates for certain people require great pain and sacrifice to fit into.
The belief that all constructs built artificially by men are bad is simply not supported in Hightower’s argument. Some aspects of humanity are better-situated in society when they are restricted and the energy for those characteristics is channeled into other, less destructive actions.
One of these aspects is discussed by Hightower: the “false” monogamy of humans. He poses the question, “Humans are not monogamous, yet, we are supposed to strive for monogamy?” This claims that humans have the same tendencies of animals and instinctively strive for non-discretionary, non-exclusive sexual relations with other humans. Assuming this is true of the human species, can it really be a good thing? The issues that accompany multiple-partner relationships can generate substantial suffering to any or all of the involved participant. Not saying that suffering is alleviated by a monogamous relationship but, the repercussions of such versus the alternative surely swings in favor of the single-partner example.
With the pervasiveness of lying and deception in multiple facets of society it is no surprise people, once desensitized to falsity, are more receptive to it despite its eventual hampering of evolutionary progress. Hightower does brings the issue of truth not wanting to be heard by people to the table to be discussed, but the argument itself needs more support to explain why lying can be considered a bad practice almost universally.