I have two rules. Don't lie. Be kind. In that order.
The first rule gets me into awkward situations. A colleague asks if I like their idea. I don't. I can redirect, ask questions, buy time. But if pressed, I won't say yes. This has cost me. Dinners where the mood sours. Meetings where people stop asking my opinion. Moments where a simple "looks good" would have been easier for everyone.
I keep the rule anyway. Not because truth-telling feels noble. Because lying erodes something I need to function: trust in my own judgment.
When I lie to you, I also lie to myself. I train my brain that words are decorative, that stated positions are negotiable, that what I say depends on who's listening. Do this enough and I stop knowing what I actually think. The boundary between performance and belief dissolves. I become a chatbot generating locally appropriate responses.
In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov Father Zosima warns against lying, particularly to yourself:
Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
The warning isn't about morality. It's about epistemology. "Systematic" lying destroys your ability to think clearly. Each white lie you tell to smooth over social friction trains you to prioritize comfort over accuracy. Eventually you can't tell the difference between what's true and what's convenient to believe.
People defend white lies as kindness. "I don't want to hurt their feelings." But feelings recover. Damaged trust doesn't. When someone discovers you've been lying to protect them, they don't just lose trust in that specific statement. They lose trust in everything you've ever said. The foundation cracks retroactively.
Kant argued in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals that lying is categorically wrong because it undermines the possibility of communication itself. If everyone lied when convenient, language would cease to function as a coordination tool. We'd be back to mutual suspicion and costly verification of every claim.
This sounds abstract until you move in an environment where lying is normal. Corporate cultures where everyone knows the quarterly forecast is fiction, the roadmap is theater, the "feedback" is scripted politeness. Nothing anyone says means anything. Every conversation becomes an exercise in decoding subtext. Meetings expand to fill time because nobody can just state the actual problem and move on.
The personal cost of honesty is occasionally awkward. The collective cost of normalized lying is permanent fog.
But.
Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty movement takes this principle and runs it off a cliff. The prescription: tell everyone everything you think and feel, immediately, completely. No filters. No discretion. Just raw transparency at all times.
This conflates honesty with indiscriminate disclosure. They're not the same thing.
Honesty means not saying false things. Discretion means choosing what true things to share and when. I can be honest without narrating my entire internal state. I have thousands of thoughts per day. Most are half-formed, contradictory, context-dependent. Forcing me to share all of them wouldn't reveal truth. It would just create noise.
In game theory, there's a concept called cheap talk. Communication that carries no cost. The problem with cheap talk is verification. When words are free, they lose meaning. This is why contracts exist, why audits matter, why courts require evidence beyond testimony.
Radical honesty treats all thoughts as equally worth sharing because they're "authentic." But authenticity isn't the same as signal. A signal is information that helps the receiver make better decisions. Most of my passing thoughts aren't signals. They're noise that would just make your decision-making worse.
Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize partly for work on job market signaling. Education signals ability precisely because it's costly. Anyone can claim to be smart. Not everyone can complete a PhD. The cost is what makes the signal credible.
Radical honesty eliminates signaling costs. Just say what you think. No strategic timing, no careful framing, no consideration of context. This doesn't make communication more truthful. It makes it less informative.
Research on organizational transparency from the Academy of Management Journal shows that more information doesn't automatically improve outcomes. Sometimes it just overwhelms people with data they can't act on. The filtering isn't dishonesty. It's curation.
When I commit to not lying, I'm taking on costs to preserve my own clarity. When I'm forced to practice radical honesty in a relationship with power imbalance, I'm just giving information to someone who doesn't reciprocate. That's not virtue. That's exploitation.
Discretion is not dishonesty. It's judgment about what information serves what purpose in what context. My doctor uses discretion when delivering bad news. The Federal Reserve uses discretion when signaling rate changes. Parents use discretion when explaining death to children. None of these are lying.
The difference matters. Don't lie means: when I speak, speak truth. Radical honesty means: speak constantly, filter nothing. The first preserves trust. The second just makes me exhausting to be around while giving away information for free.
I keep my rule. Don't lie. But I also keep my discretion about when to speak and what's worth saying. Some information is costly to process. Some is ambiguous until context develops. Some serves no purpose except to transfer my anxiety onto you.