Honesty? I mean honestly!

Ever since I started this blog, I've been musing what talk about aside from my mundane day-to-day activities. There are definately going to be more posts about what I am thinking as well about what I am doing. You see, I do occasionally have thoughts (even before I started writing this blog, believe it or not!), and it would be nice to make sense of them by ordering them down in my blog.

I have been randomly thinking about honesty recently (no this is not going to turn into a church sermon, honest!). Like honesty is always the best policy is it not? I mean we want our friends and families to be honest to us, we want the media to tell us the truth (fat chance some of the time) we want our politicians to be honest (fat chance all of the time), and so on an so forth. But are there times when it really is the best policy?

In fact me mentionning the politicans there raises an important side issue, do we really want them to be honest? Let's think about this for a minute. If we really knew what they'd been up to, we would never elect them, we would never elect any of them, result: anarchy. Actually, wait a sweet second, that's not such a bad idea, if we did get honesty from our politicians, we'd have to overthrow the political system, so yeah actually we do want it from them as well!

But going back to my general theme, when is it not the best idea to be honest? I mean let's say you get a birthday or christmas present you don't want. You can't actually tell the person you don't like it, because they've spent a lot of time or money, or perhaps both, getting it for you. And besides it's the thought that counts, and you can't doubt this, however much you can doubt the actual gift. However, you can't get away from the fact that you are not telling the truth, in fact you're doing more than that you're telling little white lies, (or big white lies depending on the size of the present). Thankfully this is not something I've had to worry about, having always liked the pressies I've been given.

However in other situations it is quite possible not to tell the truth by omission, without resorting to bald-faced lying. Is this being dishonest? I mean especially if you're not asked something, you're not being dishonest by not volunteering the information surely? And let's be honest in certain situations they may not want to know. If you like someone for example, but you're good friends, do you bother telling them? Because the mainstream school of thought is that you'll ruin the friendship by doing so, so you never mention this. You're not lying, because the person does not ask and/or they don't want to know, but you're still not being totally honest in your feelings for that person. Again this is not something I have had to worry about, not ever having fallen for any of my friends.

The point I am trying to make here, is that despite our society prizing honesty, there are many occasions where actually honesty is not the best policy, and we actually make things worse not better by telling the truth. We prize honesty, but we seem to prize being nice and getting along just that little bit more. The famous quote; "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!" would seem to be strangely apt.