Ack, it hurts so badly, I cry, and then I cry some more. Travel is fantastic, yet it also makes it possible for all of us to live apart. And we do.
This thought-experiment shows you the social practice of truth-telling has great value both generally and personally. You benefit directly from the practice. But how does this fact of personal benefit translate into a personal moral allegiance to veracity? The fact that a system of truth-telling benefits you enormously doesn’t by itself justify your adhering to the Principle of Veracity. After all, if personal benefit is all that counts for you, then why not reap all the benefits that a system of truth-telling brings, and then reap a little bit more by lying for personal gain? Which is exactly what is done in so much of all business in America – take advantage of the concept of truth to sell to unsuspecting Americans. For example, we use a television doctor in commercials for stomache ache medicine.
Of course, you couldn’t announce your policy to the public; it would have to remain your secret. You don’t want to undermine the practice of telling the truth. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to gain anything from your lies. And you don’t want people to distrust you. A lie is advantageous only in circumstances where people will believe it – only where a practice of truth-telling generally prevails. Such a practice prevails only when most people are doing their part to support it – that is, when most people are telling the truth. The liar, then, wants to be a free rider. She wants others to do their part to maintain a system, while she skips doing her part.
A lie is advantageous only in circumstances where people will believe it – only where a practice of truth-telling generally prevails. Such a practice prevails only when most people are doing their part to support it – that is, when most people are telling the truth. The liar, then, wants to be a free rider. She wants others to do their part to maintain a system, while she skips doing her part. She reaps the benefits of the system without investing the reciprocal sacrifice of supporting it.
Now, what gets you from the fact that a system of truth-telling benefits you personally to the further fact of subscribing to a moral principle against lying? The answer: a simple egalitarianism. You can’t see any reason why you are special, why you are different from all the rest of mankind. Yet you have to view yourself as different if you think a different rule applies to you than applies to everybody else. In wanting there to be a system of truth-telling and in wanting also to lie whenever it benefits you, you want to make an exception for yourself. However, if you are unwilling to make an exception of yourself, unwilling to believe you are more special than everybody else, then Sissela Bok supplies you all the argument you need to see why you should adhere to the Principle of Veracity: telling the truth is just your doing your part to uphold the practice you benefit from.
So, there are two steps to defending the Principle of Veracity: step 1 depends the fact that you personally benefit from a system that you want others to do their part in maintaining; and step 2 invokes a principle of reciprocity or fair play, requiring you to do your part in maintaining the system if others are doing their part. And herein really lies the problem, shall we do our part to uphold society and therefore be duped by a society that maintains no interest in the veracity of truth? That to do anything simple like open a bank account or see a physician we must first complete a dissertation of research to locate the correctly honest bank and the fairly competent physician (who would not tell us his errors in the first place), we must work hard to search out the truth.
The Principle of Veracity is a moral, and not just a prudential, principle because it tells you not to lie even when you could get away with it.
I have to tell you that while she was making the decisions she made, they were the right decisions, but afterward, my mother was angry and resentful. I know that in the universe of today, no woman would allow a priest to tell her to -not- use birth control, but in the world of 1960, it was reality. Abortion did not exist in rural Louisiana in 1960. Choices were not made by women, they were made by society and often, the choices did not benefit women.
We moved to Florida in 1966 and we never attended church again. She allowed my sisters and I to go to the Baptist church with neighbors, but she scoffed at any Christian discussion. There may be more, there may be less to the story, but Momma never forgave the Christians and that was the end of that.
I also realized that people want jobs with authority because they feel so special as a result of having these jobs. This is ironic because as every “working stiff” in America knows, you do not have to be special or superior to gain a manager’s job. In fact, very often, the exact opposite happens. I was reading the other day (on Linked In) an article about executive recruitment, which stated that 40% of new executives fail. There are the statistics, beyond our own experience with bosses, that really, a promotion does NOT say that you are special or superior in any way. Promotions are often timing and have very little to do with objective measurements of intelligence or knowledge, or any of the other 100 desirable traits that a manager should have.
If you realize that these things are true, it may open up a world to you. You can also see that no matter who you meet in this life, they are not ‘better’ than you are. Even though people will try and try to demonstrate their superiority, you can know that it is not real. You do not have to be special or better to get a promotion, often, all you need is to be in the right place at the right time.
Authority does not mean superiority. Often (not always), gaining authority is non-sensical and undeserved. Using authority to gain ‘specialness’ or ‘superiority’ is falseness that no one should allow. Authority must be given by the people that you have authority over, they may grant it, but it equates to nothing else – not specialness and not superiority.
It is also important that I add this: there is nothing wrong with being just like everyone else, it’s okay, it’s cool, you can still be loved. We don’t have to gain individuality at anyone’s expense, we can be individual without declaring superiority over some one else. Authority does not buy us anything except responsibility, so beware.
I say this partly because of our dates, I left Florida on September 29th 2009 and his wife passed away (they live in Florida) in October of 2009. I lived in Virginia until May of 2010, enough time for me to have some retrospection and enough time for him to be lonely. So at the end of June, I went on a date with him and I knew without doubt that he was the man for me. After a couple of years of dating and then cohabitating we decided to get married. When you have grown children you think it will be simple, kind of like when you are teenagers, but no, it is not the thing. It is quite complicated with grown children.
In any case, we are precise people who enjoy “partying” and hanging out with our offspring. Precise, nonetheless, we know what we want. How can you be over 50 years old and NOT know what you want? Well – that is another question isn’t it?
So, back to my preciseness: I hired an expensive wedding photographer and what I wanted was not exactly wedding pictures. I explained very clearly, this is not the normal wedding, we are mostly interested in capturing pictures of our children and our families. Our kids are incredibly important to us and it is so seldom that we get them together that it is very important that we get portraits of each family and I also want to make sure to capture our entire family. “Please understand, I am not all that interested in the wedding photography of the moment, I really just want great pictures of all of my family, please.” Wedding photography of the moment is all that goo-goo nonsense of wedding rings and cakes, etc. I am a 54 year old woman and I am not even buying flowers, I am not buying flowers because I want my money for food, friends and family – not flowers. Over and over again, I emphasized, I am not the typical bride! (Duh, just look at me…) I couldn’t have been more clear if I was crystal. She kept not listening to me. The photographer just was not hearing me, but I did not realize it until my wedding day, she showed up in ripped jeans. I think she thought it was cool, but it was a disappointment to me and it showed me in a very clear way that we had not made the connection that I thought we had made.
I thought the photographer understood my message. “I am paying you a great deal of money and I want you to picture my entire family and each family unit.” I provided her with a typed list with names so that she would be able to check off each and every one. I told her earnestly “please make sure that you go around the party and snap pictures of each grouping so that I have a record of everyone who attended my wedding.”
So many issues, it is difficult to list them all, but the bottom line is that she did not hear ME. She heard wedding and bride and groom. She did not listen and she did not do what I asked her to do, rather what she wished to do for a WEDDING.
I spent ten minutes on the phone explaining to her that I wanted a group shot of our grandsons, I was letting her know how important this facet of our wedding was to me. Cousins who lived a thousand miles from each other were having a reunion and I wanted it expressed in photos. These are the kind of conversations I had with the photographer over and over again. To my chagrin, she focused on her idea of ‘wedding’ and spent very little attention on my requests. The pictures of my grandsons together are very few and at best, they are clumsily done. On the other hand I have a half dozen pictures of my wedding dress hanging from a tree (???!!!).
At one point during the reception, with great effort, we finally got 8 of our kids onto the deck, she was supposed to be getting pictures, but instead stopped to talk with a guest about photography, it was completely unnerving.
I repeated before she left the reception: over and over, to make sure that she documented the guests by taking pictures of everyone. Somehow, in the aftermath of editing and preparing my discs for me, she completely forgot that part. I have pictures of the wedding cake, I have pictures of the wedding rings, but I have not one picture of my husband’s brother-in-law. So even though she had taken thousands of pictures, she deleted my panoramic view of guests. She was editing her idea of a wedding rather than responding to me, the person who had hired her.
Before she had produced anything for me, she called me and said that the final payment was missing out of her bag; she said that one of the kids must have taken it (?) Why make up something when you don’t know? In the meantime, I received the missing check in the mail, one of her neighbors had found the check in a muddy ditch next to her home and mailed it to me because my name is printed on the check and the neighbor did not recognize the photographer’s name. It bothered me deeply that she would be so frazzled as to lose the check and then to accuse “one of the kids”?!!!
So here is the thing, it’s one of those relationships that cannot get fixed, a wedding is one of those events that once they occur, they are done! I can’t recover from the wedding photographer’s mistakes in thinking. She thought she was doing a wedding, I begged her to understand that it was a family reunion and that I dearly wanted documentation of my family. She did not ‘hear’ me. What she heard was ‘wedding’, she could not hear my words over her own words that were running through her head. And that really, is the point of this story, if the universe knocks, you have to be able to ‘hear’ and that means being open to new ideas that are not your own. You must be capable of listening to someone else’s idea of reality. This does not mean they are correct, you can discard their idea of reality, but when they are paying you – well you could be losing your own career in addition to this client.
I do want to add that the photographer was not a complete disaster, she was able to capture some very important moments that needed to be documented. Her creativity with words and wedding cakes were not needed here, but those moments of love and tearful joy, those moments documented, were worth every dime and more.
It is like being a parent, if you are not a parent, you have no way of experiencing the wide range of emotion that parenting brings to an individual. Because of that, you cannot judge a parental reaction very well. You cannot evaluate what is essentially a mystery to you.
Men accept that women are not known to them. It was a man who coined the term “the mystery of a woman”. You may hear them talking about women and discussing with each other how they really do not understand women at all. On the other hand, if you listen to women talking, they seem to think that, not only do they know all about men, but they also understand all of the mysteries of the universe. Women won’t admit that men are essentially very different and that a feminine evaluation of them may miss the mark of reality completely.
I’m not saying that women are particularly better at being “know-it-alls”. I really am not! Men can be really dumb too. The current attempts at legislating birth control and abortion are spectacular examples of men being “know-it-alls”. What I am saying is that men will admit they have no clue about women. Women will not admit that they have no clue about men. For the last 50 or 60 years women have been trying to communicate with men as if they are women and it is not working. Men have a special language that does not include a feminine perspective at all, they all know it. It does not matter to them if women understand this masculine language and that is a demarcation line in itself. Women want to and think they should ‘understand’ everything. Men just don’t have that need…
I think what I may have been mistaken about is this idea that folks do alter their reality through thinking and that when a few people get together to think thoughts it can impact reality. What I mean by this is that if you have a perception that a person you work with is lazy. You will not recognize difficult work or hard effort on their part; you will minimize any performance so that you can maintain your thoughts about the person being lazy.
So let us say that you dislike someone intensely and you attribute to them faulty behavior. You will give the most benign activity a nefarious description. “Look at how she turns her head that way, she is a stuck up bitch!” But then let us say that you never quite have a conversation with this person, so the person does not know about your thoughts and feelings, nor does this person know that you are often conversing in a negative way with others about this person.
So then, others talk to this person from your conversation and now this person is confused. “Well everyone thinks you’re stuck up.” Whenever we speak with someone, we are speaking to them from our own thoughts, beliefs and feelings, indeed, we speak FROM the conversations that are inside and outside our head. So, if this person that you do not like, or perhaps feel negatively about, has no idea of your internal conversation, you may be surprising them. In fact, you could be unwittingly ambushing them. This is a sorry state of affairs and is much more difficult to deal with then honest and forthright communication. The person you dislike, does not know that their behavior is affecting you and therefore has a disadvantage, not only in communication, but in action. How can you respond and defend yourself, if you do not know that the ‘crime’ is? How can you respond to well meaning friends who ‘ambush’ you with their own rendition of reality – people who have no intention of having a conversation – people who simply want to tell you – how to be?
I think it is a shame that people will go to great lengths to NOT say what they are thinking and feeling, but the thinking and feeling is pervasively experienced by all. Bystanders will buy into one of these versions of reality and that is when “perception is reality”. And then, You really are a bitch…