Truth is the currency of intimacy
Or, Why I risk friendships, and everything else, for truth.
The potential depth of any connection is directly proportional to one’s capacity for truth.
When someone is inauthentic, this is usually not overt dishonesty or bad faith, but an attempt to hide from something painful, frightening, challenging, or inconvenient.
Facing the truth1 about ourselves is extremely difficult, and in many cases may even be situationally maladaptive2. We protect ourselves from seeing our lives and motivations too clearly, to preserve our ego investments, our attachments, our sense of justice, morality, and righteousness. In doing so, we lose the very possibility of all of those. We may gain creature comforts or various forms of safety, but at the expense of insight, intuition, compassion, and real strength.
The more you can tolerate reality, the closer we can be.
The more you can tolerate reality, the closer you can be to yourself.
The more reality you can tolerate, the more you can fulfill your own essence.
If you liked this post, I’d recommend you stop reading now and simply reflect on what was already said above, specifically, what better fulfilling your own essence might look like in your life, which is an idea worth orienting around. That's what I'm gonna do.
This is a footnote for those who would seek to problematize the notion of authenticity; those seeking to make some wiggle room in the way I am using “truth”… This was meant to be a very short post, but because of the ongoing war on understanding being waged by the weak and the weedy among us, who have taken for themselves nearly every position of credentialed power (only because the preservation of weakness is among the most remarkable features of industrial society), I would be ill-advised not to supply you with an brief inoculation against the persistent gaslighting of the feminized, industrial-scale culture in which we presently exist.
“Truth” and “authenticity” are ideas that frequently come under fire because relativism is used as a shield. Of course, subjectivity is an inherent part of cognition and perception. The philosophical and ontological implications are often not really the point when people problematize truth. Subjectivity is weaponized to deflect criticism and evade responsibility. Ideas such as “truth” and “authenticity” are frequently attacked by those who wish to deny objective reality, not because they truly believe that it doesn’t exist, but to avoid accountability. Precisely, to avoid the weight that such concepts might expose. This is often done to excuse weakness or to maintain existing power structures, especially those that are hidden in plain sight, for example, when the so-called historically “marginalized” use such statuses as the means to oppress and accrue personal advantage in real time. This is a deliberate distortion of reality to manipulate and exert control over others by undermining their sense of what's real.
If you find yourself struggling with the usage of the terms “truth” and “authenticity” this is likely because you may be at least tangentially committed to one or more false, incomplete, or disordered narratives within yourself. This sort of discomfort with truth—that is, the need to create space by making qualifications such as, “there are varying conceptions of truth and authenticity” is a tell for an intellectual infection. It may be the accumulation of pus in a spiritual wound that you are reticent to incise and release, because doing so may lead you one step closer to confrontation with aspects of reality that make you uncomfortable or, even more likely, that cause you to work harder for your daily bread.
Situationally maladaptive, especially when we are trying to thrive in a cultural landscape that has profoundly normalized truth evasion for personal gain. One thinks of how embedded such notions are in the zeitgeist as, “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” and “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. We already know that we don’t want to know. Never come between a man and his paycheck! Let there be romance! Let there be indirectness! That is, after all, how we get to have our monomaniacal way with each other and remain blind to the better half of it.
I know, from the outset, the fate of the messenger.