Awareness
Posts: 3918
Joined: 9/8/2010 Status: offline
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FR There's honest and there's honest. People who say they're brutally honest are self-absorbed wankers who're too obsessed with themselves to consider the person they're trying to communicate with. Communication is both an art and a science. I like the presupposition that "the meaning of a communication is the response you get". Specifically because it puts the onus upon the person initiating it. It's not enough to simply make "brutally honest" statements with no consideration of how they'll be interpreted. Everyone interprets things through the lens of their perception with reference to their internal model of the world. Consequently, if you want them to hear you, you have to take the time to speak to them in a way which they'll understand. Here's a visual metaphor explaining what I mean. Imagine whatever you're saying is being constantly twisted into a new shape by the interpretation of your listeners mind. In order for them to get what you really mean, you have to twist it in the opposite manner so by the time they've kinked it, it comes out roughly the same as what you're trying to say. Only by knowing them do you know how they twist things by their intepretation - and while it's infeasible to expect you to communicate well with total strangers, the people you know and care about deserve that extra effort. "Brutally honest" simply means "I'm too focused on what I want to say to care about the listener". Second - how very fucking boring. Life is about the subtext, about the things which go unsaid. Whenever a movie has dialogue which says exactly what a character is thinking or feeling, that's a FAILING not a virtue, because real people aren't like that. Real people don't blurt out whatever comes into their head, don't reveal their deep inner feelings. They're complex. Some people might flatter themselves that they're some kind of honesty saint, but these threads almost always bring out the flattering self-evaluations which have as much basis in reality as Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions.
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Ever notice how fucking annoying most signatures are? - Yes, I do appreciate the irony.
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