Truth Is Hard

I think that as I get older I become more and more firmly entrenched in the idea that if our world is overly complex, it’s because people–not the universe–have made it that way. But there is a reason for that that goes beyond a simple love of bureaucracy or needless complexity. The fact of the matter is, the more you strive for simplicity, the harder life becomes to live. At least for most people, because they usually try to cheat it, and shoot for complex benefits while getting–or trying to avoid all together–simple detriments.

Like blogging for example.

There many varied levels of truth. Of honesty. People want an honest blog, but to get a real, honest blog… I think that is nearly impossible, unless you were to tell the person involved that they were just writing their own personal diary electronically, and they were unaware that the blog was being transmitted virally across the Internet. In short, the only way to achieve as close to total honesty in a blog as possible would be if you were to Truman Show it, and have someone be completely unaware of the fact that they were being watched, because in a weird twist on physics, Quantum Theory also happens to be true on a human psychological level; the act of observation (Or at least, the awareness of being observed) changes the outcome of the experiment.

At the most superficial level, blogging has made more relevant the conventions of letters. If you’ve ever read the correspondence of really prolific diarists or letterists, you’ll notice things like referring to people by their initials, as in “Went to the park with M today.” Or the usage of pseudonyms, like “I had another date with Mr. Awful.” People will argue–rightly, of course–that this is to protect the identities of those who may not wish to be publicly read about, and it is their right not to have their lives published for mass consumption. But again, if you get right down to the simplest level of honesty, this is already “lying” since factual information is being willfully withheld or distorted, which is the basic definition of a lie or deception.

But here we’re trading the moral simplicity of total honesty for the more complex/higher moral prerogative to respect another individual’s right to privacy.

On another level, we get to things like the actual subject matter being blogged about. So many people take so many different approaches to this. Like for example, Neil-O for the most part tends not to blog at all about what his wife and children are up to, except in how it directly–and harmlessly–impacts on his own personal experience. He’s not about to divulge where his wife works, and he’s not about to tell people the course schedule for his daughter so that people can track them down and say, “I LOVE YOUR DAD! BE MY FRIEND, PLEASE!” And this is once again, holding back. He’s withholding information. No one is going to argue the sanity of that decision, since it is very wise and very prudent, but that is because Neil-O is not a stupid man and has realized that there are very real consequences for the action of making such information available.

Here’s where some people start breaking down.

As the years go by, blogging has come under scrutiny. There have been cases where people have blogged about work and then been taken to task for it. There’s a question of whether or not people should be allowed to talk about professional matters that affect the welfare of a company, or whether they are well within their rights to share their personal experience and whatever happens outside of that is not them personally and so Not Their Problem. Except that it is. This is what I meant earlier by trying to reap complex benefits while avoiding complex deteriments. Many people still have the incredibly naive idea that freedom somehow means freedom from responsibility. That is, of course, to steal from Douglas Adams, a load of Dingo’s kidneys. Freedom does not mean doing whatever you want free from personal consequence. Freedom means being given the authority to govern yourself INCLUDING all the possible consequences that that entails. In the same way that you cannot reasonably expect to live on your own without worrying about providing for your own food and shelter in exchange for not having to live under your parents’ rules, you cannot blithely say whatever you like without expecting some kind of reaction to it.

If you are not intelligent enough to realize that ideas have consequences, then you are not ready to voice your ideas.

Or, you can do the hard thing. Bite the bullet and say whatever you want, whenever you want. Just be ready for the storm that will surely follow. And it WILL.