Some people think honesty is an unalloyed good, but we see it more as a commercial good we’re ready to trade in. Stick around and see if we can lie, cheat, and steal our way into persuading you.
Enjoy!
“The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.”
― Edward Bernays, ‘Propaganda’ (1928)
The Honesty Frontier
There's a human social sorting mechanism underpinning society that we all intuit, but which I’ve never heard named or well articulated. The premise is simply that the honesty of a speaker is inversely correlated to the size of their audience. As the number of listeners and people involved in a conversation expands, so too do the number of potential offenses that could be caused. This can be over taboo topics specific to the life circumstances of an individual, such as someone with a nut allergy being sensitive to a joke at their expense, or in the form of competing factional (tribal) interests over access to resources being discussed. I call this shifting horizon of acceptable topics the ‘honesty frontier’ of a social setting.
One can imagine this as a circular diagram of socially acceptable topics that grows inversely to audience size as a speaker transitions from addressing a nation of millions at a podium, to meeting new neighbors, having lunch with two long-term coworkers, all the way to its largest point of chatting with a lifelong friend in the privacy of your car on a road trip. This range of broachable topics, a constantly adjusting frontier of honesty that our highly evolved brains modulate based on a constantly updating (and largely accurate) assessment of personal interests, is a profit and safety maximizing mechanism that serves us each well at the individual level.
And note that I’m not making a value judgment on avoiding topics — frankly, total honesty is not all it’s cracked up to be. An individual with a poorly managed honesty frontier is likely to make arguments in favor of atheism at their family's Christmas dinner, or commit similar gaffs leading to conversations with an unwilling and uninterested audience. In doing so they will fail to further their own goals, and actually isolate themselves from social and material resources, thus creating inter-tribal rivalries which will require future blood, sweat, and treasure to resolve.
And that’s really it. That’s the honesty frontier.
Dishonest Implications
But as a constant factor in all human social interaction the honesty frontier has profound implications on how we organize society, and challenges the theory of mass democracy at the base level. It suggests at the very least a two tier system of honesty. Amongst our own tribe (family and friends) we can be fairly honest about our goals and circumstances, but at the societal level we simply cannot discuss difficult topics in a serious manner.
Democracy, even in its most abstract and representative form, assumes that challenging issues will be debated locally and in the halls of power. But considering the social dynamic of the honesty frontier, its a rather silly assumption to think people are even capable of discussing challenging topics with honesty in public spaces.
But even discounting the false promises of democracy and lowering our collective expectations by accepting that most modern governments work very similarly in practice, the results speak for themselves. Today we live under the largest governments in history, overseeing the most humans to have ever existed and who are more connected than ever thanks to the internet; unsurprisingly we see a rock bottom honesty frontier playing out in real time as public figures seem trapped in increasingly strange performative rationalizations in order to minimize offense.
And before you object, yes I am aware of the incredible levels of corruption and nepotism within governments. The honesty frontier is certainly not the only dynamic at play here, but it’s a powerful one. The most important component would of course be the fact we are all living in a fossilized energy based economy, which enables any of this to exist at this scale, and warps our culture in non-obvious ways. A topic worthy of it’s own additional articles.
But the honesty frontier operating at this scale, with powerful people often addressing hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis, it does appear to be an aspect of petroleum culture. It creates the feeling of emotional urgency behind the rising secular morality which obsesses over managing “cross-tribal” language, representation, and factional equity to ever more minute degrees.
My main takeaway from the honesty frontier is that it suggests itself as yet another entropic force which limits large scale human organization. Humans are simply not evolved to come to decisions in large groups the way we were taught in modern public education, and likely never will be since evolution under normal circumstances incentivizes strategies at the individual level. And while this is perhaps a less convenient world, it is freeing to know which options of human organization do not work, and to have a name for another factor limiting effective governance at the modern nation state level.
So don’t be frustrated at dishonesty from the managerial elite, expect it. Know that whatever bravado you may have, you would likely act similarly under the same immense pressure. But in your own life apply the framework to consciously foster the greatest level of honesty you can within your tribe.
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yes, here we have something interesting honesty is not what your mother told you
she was telling a lie to make you comply
A big problem here in my view is crony capitalist policy inclusive of how the current global financial system operates. As a result of this policy, the inability to have choice in how one lives, and to live comfortably, causes profit-seeking to be a higher value than valuing things which give more meaning in life. For example, content creation across social media is less about things like self-expression, beautiful art, virtuousness, and truth-seeking, and is more about profit-seeking, which goes along with marketing, in a world of excessive resource scarcity caused by bad policy-- which goes along with a greater incentive to say less-- and not necessarily in less words-- and to reap more nihilism as a result; and I view Substack as generally being just another victim of this ugly causality.
But in my Sowell/Mises-loving mind, the far-reaching effects of policy that generally goes against their ideas and utilitarianism affects offline activity similarly, the lack of a sense of "FU money" for the average adult as a result of massive crony/fascist theft on a global scale-- the scale of which I believe will someday stun the public-- and the subsequent lack of emotional security of being able to have radical public disagreement within rational law that would moreso come with that money and opportunities for it, is having profoundly negative effects on the positive social connection, wisdom, and wellbeing of people in society. Most of human history appears to be in tight-knit hunter-gatherer tribes and in some ways we are currently worse off than them.