Telling the truth that could be, delivering bad news, giving a negative performance review/comment, disagreeing and digging heels publicly means risking one’s future/life. Truth hurts. Veto someone else’s project and see the reaction. Speak your mind (to your superiors) and you lose your job; if you don’t lose your job you may lose face or a place on the list of fair-haired/blue eyed promotable. Alternately you may remain attached ‘down-in-the-dumps’ or end up getting walked over, trodden-on and beaten-down or sent packing to languish in obscurity or vigilance/crime/police net till you’re finished. The cult of candours, with the quality of being honest and telling the truth, especially about an embarrassing subject, has therefore since gone extinct as dinosaurs. You may find fossiled remains only.
One way of getting in trouble is to simply ‘speak-up’ or ‘disagree’. As they’re always perceived as a challenge to authority or critical of cherished programs, Costs of Disagreement (COD) are exorbitantly high. People don’t ‘disagree’; they don’t speak the truth. They rear a body language that transmits that they’re not to be treated someones who ‘speak-up’ or ‘disagree’. And consequently they’re not, therefore, the opponents. Seeming to be failing at getting honest, and afraid of the truth, people assume they need to protect themselves and others from it. As if it were a chemical reaction when people hear the truth, faces go red. Temperatures soar. They feel like striking back with all the signs of defending and debating.
Best ideas get communicated through whispers in the hallway meetings that happen after the official meeting because people worry about how the biggies will react if they speak the truth. Truth being bare and naked not coated and straightforward, it invariably sounds crude and unpleasant to the ears. Truth is always hard to accept, most often bitter and unpalatable. Dubbed as the ‘bitter-truth’, people often find themselves in an indecisive state, in a dilemma— to hold it back or to spell it out as it’s. It may not be appreciated by everyone but matter-of-factly truth cannot have any additions or subtractions. Even if someone doesn’t like it, it has to be told at times, for it doesn’t show any sympathy or appreciation towards anyone. It shows no consideration and isn’t concerned with the consequences that the listener would have to bear.
Perhaps because of the proverbial “say-one-thing-and-do-another”, so often practiced in our social hobnobbing, we verbally emphasize (unbearably sermonize) truth-telling, exaggerate and omit facts and at the same time tell “little white-lies”. Contradictory assumptions/signals about telling the truth engender nothing but dishonesty and hypocrisy. People don’t normally like us, to tell them truth, even if it costs them for having been kept in dark to use the opportunity to correct them. They like someone telling them that they like their new haircut when what the latter really think is that it makes them look fat. We come to think of such harmless deception as necessary social graces. While lying has gone deep into our DNA, fabrication has become a die-hard habit that we find ourselves lying when the truth would have been much easier.
A common man, who lives in a make-believe world, may not like the truth. He thinks that the truth-speaks are simply dangerous and disastrous; the speakers utter them for entertainment or to hurt or to insult without reason; to put him in trouble; to create problems in community; to create misunderstanding between relations and friends or between anyone and everyone or in the society between individuals and communities to be the cause of constraints and calamities. When it hurts someone or hinders progress in someone’s life, blurting it out could jeopardize someone else’s life. Truth hurts. But it inspires too. People spend too much time calculating the risks that come with being honest – and too little time thinking about the rewards.
We forego honesty perhaps because we’re unwilling to accept the consequences. We don’t want to take responsibility for our choices. We’d rather stay with what is familiar and safe than take that risk. We lie, to others, as well as to ourselves. Many of us don’t look with abhorrence at telling lies. No one openly says that lying is something to be proud of but people often lie in order to get out of a tricky situation or when it serves their purpose. They even admit to lie and don’t expect to be censured; others often laugh or express approval. People expect a person to tell the truth in formal situations. Dishonesty alienates us from ourselves whereas honesty earns self-respect. Honesty requires tenacity, commitment and courage which we are sorely lacking. In our environment where lying runs rampant, we have developed such a strong feeling of mistrust that living has become impossible.
Truth doesn’t see faces, places, situations, convenience, inconvenience, time, age, purpose, profit or loss, after effects etc. Truth has its own nature, ways and effects. For they know the inner beauty of the truth, God loves it, the saint loves it, and the existence loves it. Even truth itself cannot change the nature of truth. Truth is divine, simple, cannot be measured or changed in any era. Speaking and hearing the truth are acquired skills. Blunt questions can force people into corners where they feel compelled to shade things – even to lie. For candour timing is everything. Even if he doesn’t have a problem with telling the truth, the person on the receiving end of the conversation might have a problem with hearing it. On those rare occasions when he’s direct and honest, the message is got to get across.
‘kahta hoon vahi baat, samajta hoon jissay haq;
na ahli-masjid hoon, na tahzib ka farzand.
apnay bhi khaffa mujh saay hain, bey ghanay bhi nakhush;
mai zahr hilahal kou kabhi kah naa sakka qand.’
(iqbal)