I teased this subject several episodes ago, but I’m finally ready to release my treatise on honesty. Unlike most religions, I don’t see any moral imperative for being honest. In my mind, honesty is beneficial for purely selfish reasons.
As social animals, we are designed to connect with other humans. In fact, many scientists think belonging is the most powerful and important human need. Because humans survive better in groups, we have evolved all of these emotional reinforcements towards belonging. This means our ancestors who enjoyed being social survived and our more solitary, individualistic ancestors perished. As such, we inherited pleasant emotions like love and joy as positive reinforcements towards connection, and unpleasant feelings like shame and loneliness as negative reinforcements to encourage us to avoid isolation and disconnection, which were an inevitable path to death.
However, we now live in an ultra-modern and safe society in which death is no longer a day-to-day threat. This means the message of shame, to fit in at all costs in order to survive, is no longer relevant. We now have the opportunity to focus on pleasant emotions and wellbeing instead of constantly worrying about avoiding death. And the best way to experience pleasant emotions and wellbeing is through the positive reinforcements surrounding sociality, connection, and belonging with other humans. But in order to experience true connection and belonging, we need to be honest!
Deep down, our subconscious brain knows when we are being dishonest, or inauthentic, or putting on a mask, and therefore it knows that we can’t be truly connected or loved for who we really are because we are hiding something. As such, not being fully open, transparent, and honest robs us of the opportunity to experience true belonging, arguably the greatest feeling we humans have. Honesty then becomes a conscious strategy we can enact in order to feel the best feelings a social animal can feel.
