What if they were all honest?

Right now I'm imagining a world in which everyone were honest. What would it look like? First off, it would produce a lot of memorable quotes, and we can play a fun game trying to imagine those quotes. Here is a sampler:

"I think our petty disputes, power-mongering, and money-grubbing behaviors are more important than the survival of civilization. Besides, the military and shadow governments have guns pointed at our heads." -- nearly every world leader

"Let's cause climate change catastrophes and promote our product while people die" -- the CEOs of the oil companies

"Hogging the wealth is more important to us than a better world even though we have far more than we need." -- the richest 1% of world society

"Let's talk about vacuous stuff while seriously bad things happen around the world." -- most of America's mainstream media journalists

"Capitalism sucks, but our careers defending it are more important than ending it. Besides, we assume its existence as an axiom of human nature, and mathematics justifies our pedantry." -- nearly all professors of mainstream economics

"Selling policies with low actuarial values and high deductibles is good for our net worth because we get to make tons of money off of defenseless sick people who would get better deals in other countries." -- America's health insurance company representatives

"We have no model for how a 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 would result in minimal change to the climate. Therefore we're making stuff up." -- climate change deniers

"America fights wars today mainly to funnel money to military corporations." -- Defense Department apologists

I'm sure you can think of some of your own. Remember these rules though, before you start to play the game:

1) Your suggestions of honesty must pertain to a GROUP OF PEOPLE. Suggesting that individuals would accuse themselves of crimes if they were honest, for instance, is to assume that said individuals actually committed those crimes, which isn't always the case. The point of this game is to identify a group of people who have agreed that everyone would be better off if they were to fool us, and to imagine what it would look like if they stopped. (And, yes, I was really tempted to attribute "I really just love Republicans and their policies" to Barack Obama.)

2) Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule. Therefore, your suggestions of honesty can cover bases by using the words "most of" at the beginning of your statement of who would say what if they were honest.

3) Try to avoid unnecessary self-incrimination in your statements of honesty. The truth is dangerous enough to those who won't tell it without such material.

Okay, play away!

--- further reflection ---

One of my favorite books is a pop-psych volume called A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. It's by Cordelia Fine. It's mostly full of anecdotes on how we have numerous tendencies to fool ourselves. Here's an encapsulation:

All sorts of biases slip in unnoticed as we form and test our beliefs, and these tendencies lead us astray to a surprising degree. Of course, an ignoble agenda -- the desire to see evidence for a belief we'd secretly prefer to hold -- can wreak its prejudicial influence on our opinions. However, even when we genuinely seek the truth, our careless data collection and appraisal can leave us in woeful error about ourselves, other people, and the world. (p. 81)

Now certainly our tendencies to fool ourselves could not have been a great secret of human nature. People have no doubt recognized such tendencies for vast ages of humankind. The real foolery, though, is in some people's notions that they can fool others without fooling themselves. You think?

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mimi's picture

you can't fool me with your foolish game. I was a fool, I am a fool and will be a fool til those foolish games kill me and make an end to all that foolery. And besides he got it right.
[video:https://youtu.be/eKgPY1adc0A]
Don't you love foolish presidents? I do. Wink
May be we had world peace, if we all were honest?
Now that is a truly foolish thought.

And btw. don't be fooled into thinking I didn't like your essay. I would be a real fool, if that were true.

Ah, it got a high reading your essay and writing this comment. Smile

Thanks.

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Centaurea's picture

@mimi

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

~Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Act 3, Scene 2

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"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi

"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone

Alligator Ed's picture

Delightful tour you have provided, in Socratic fashion, no less, of a fine distillate of recent (and ancient) political hypocrisy. Just remember to include weasel words to protect yourself from the thought police. Alleged is one of my favorite words. Reliable sources is always a stalwart as is having the facts based upon a reliable authority.

The snarkiness of your essay sets the tone. Have you considered a compendium of such wisdom for us?

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'Rehabilitation is not our goal'
The folks from the mass incarceration industry.

and

'Our products kill but make lots of money'
Bayer / Monsanto consortium

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for corporations and billionaires interests from the right. Any moron can do it. Our specialty is shilling for them from the left, while tricking our naive well-intentioned base into voting against their own interests year after year. It's a niche career but there's big bucks in it for good actors with no conscience." Establishment Dem leadership.

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@entrepreneur n/t

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

nobody will be able to say no to us. It's kind of like a superweapon."

--Monsanto

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

earthling1's picture

or global nuclear war we can rid the planet of the un-chosen and have the whole planet to ourselves."
The Chosen.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

lotlizard's picture

and some of them commit horrible crimes to build a political movement from scratch, even though we don’t really have any new ideas about governing except making nationalism fashionable again where globalization is perceived as having failed. —— The right-wing populists in Europe

(2) Oh, yeah? Well, we’re going to use the fact that there are racists and neo-Nazis and some of them commit horrible crimes to seize control over what anyone will be allowed to say and think on the Internet, in legacy media, or in academia, if they don’t want to be “cancelled.” —— The “Political Correctness Complex” (which includes the German establishment and, in the U.S., the ADL and SPLC)

https://www.nzz.ch/international/der-andere-blick-wie-unliebsame-meinung...

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