The Ugly Baby

"The truth will set you free, but usually it will piss you off first." --Anonymous

While standing in line at the Commissary, my youngest daughter (who was three at the time) turned to look at the man in line behind us. As soon as she saw him, her little eyes got huge and I thought, "Oh God, here it comes," right before she declared loudly, "Wow! You have a really big belly," which she then patted with her little hand. She went on to ask, "Are you gonna have a baby?" The man said nothing but his glare at me was all I needed to know he was not amused! Kids are often brutally and sometimes cruelly honest. Most of us, as we mature, learn which truths to proclaim loudly to the world and which ones we should swallow and keep quiet about.

Philosophers have been arguing about the truth for as long as mankind has had philosophers. John Locke, a seventeenth century English philosopher, postulated that "there is a real world 'out there' apart from and independent of a human being." He goes on to speculate that there is also a world of ideas that "exist" in their own right as psychological entities of the human mind. And German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the "mind is constructed of structural categories by which sense data are ordered into patterns that can be recognized or known." Finally, the coherence theory of truth poses that we "order our lives into reliable categories that we use to discriminate, organize, and judge the people, places, and things around us." While all of these theories help to create a picture of what truth is, they do not answer the following questions: Does lying ever serve a useful purpose? If you tell a kind lie, does that make you a liar?, and Why do we lie?

According to an article from The Discovery Channel (Cognitive Neuroscience: How often does the average person tell a lie?), we tell untruths for several reasons.  Sometimes we lie in order to gain the respect of others or to stave off the consequences of a mistake we've made. We lie to spare others' feelings, or to make a better first impression when beginning a new relationship. Recently I was having a conversation with someone about honesty and he claimed he never tells a lie, nor does he "sugarcoat" things. I asked him, "So, if your best friend and his wife have an ugly baby, you'd just blurt that out if they asked you what you thought?" His response was, "Hell yeah! If you ask me a question, you're gonna get the truth." He is not the first person, nor will he be the last to use truth as a weapon. Historically speaking, people have done this to justify a multitude of heinous things, i.e. Holy Wars, the right to own slaves, the persecution of people who are different from the status quo, such as gays and/or lesbians, to name a few. While these are much more extreme than telling someone you think they have an ugly baby, the premise behind them is the same, justification of causing harm to another by way of calling it "truth".

I believe that people are of value and have meaning. I also believe they have the right to develop their own beliefs, define themselves, and create meaning for their own lives, even if all of those things are vastly different from my own beliefs and ideas. I also believe that, "Telling someone a hard truth without a kind heart, compassion, and a touch of humor isn't called being honest. It's called being mean" (www.abeautifulmessinside.com). I want to live in a world where people speak their truth, but do no harm. I can handle the truth, anyone's truth, but when you speak it to me, be consistent, have conviction, and say it with kindness; otherwise I'd appreciate it if  you'd just exercise using your "shut up button" and keep it to yourself. Aunt Mattie would say, "If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all."

*Invitation to Philosophy, Tenth Edition, by Honer, Hunt, Okholm, & Safford, pp.50, 53, & 58. 2006, Thompson Wadsworth.
*Image from www.zebradetox.com/funny-pictures

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