Honesty Is Not The Best Policy

Why truth is “true, but useless” when realizing empathy.

I’m someone who believes in transparency. Who believes that ignorance is not bliss. Who believes that enlightenment cannot come unless we accept truth in all its ugly, naked, unadulterated glory.

And yet.

And yet I’ve been thinking a lot about Jerry Sternin’s concept of “True But Useless” recently. Sternin, when trying to alleviate the seemingly intractable problem of malnutrition in rural Vietnamese children, was told that malnutrition couldn’t be solved until big infrastructural changes took place. Without proper sanitation, food distribution, good water, etc. there was no hope. But these problems *were* truly intractable, so he deemed them “true, but useless” and instead found ways to alleviate malnutrition without necessarily “solving” it (you can read more about this in the book Switch).

I’ve also been thinking a lot about True Empathy recently: What is it? How do we try to engage in it? Can it be realized? And the conclusion I’ve come to is this: True Empathy is full understanding of another person, at the level of thoughts and emotions; and the primary tool we use to understand each other is language; and language is necessarily insufficient to provide true empathy, but because we don’t treat it as such we use it more poorly than we could.

Conventional wisdom tells us to be true to ourselves and to accept the truth in others and that this will lead us to better understandings. But I think truth, when it comes to empathic conversations, may be “true, but useless”.

Let me speak to my own experience for a moment.

I’ve found myself saying things before that I justified with “well it’s true and if he/she can’t handle it then they aren’t worth worrying about.” I’ve talked about my thoughts and emotions as if there was language I could use to make sure my conversation partner truly Understood me. But there’s not. I’ve talked about my thoughts and emotions as if I weren’t plagued (blessed?) with ambivalence. But I am. I’ve talked about my thoughts and emotions as if I, in all my complexity, could be put on display in one succinct conversation. But I can’t.

I think we are all like this: we are all too complex to be explained and yet we all speak about our “true selves” as if we have the eloquence to break through that complexity in a single conversation.

So if we can’t form True Empathy through words what’s the point of conversation?

Perhaps it is to form a “more perfect” empathy in a way that acknowledges that the holy grail (full understanding) is out of reach. Perhaps conversation should also be precipitated by the acknowledgement that we are not one self; we are not self-consistent.

This leads me to believe that conversation can’t be about two sides sharing themselves — they will necessarily fail if this is the goal. Rather, conversation must be the art of reaction. Reaction, and its converse anticipation. We speak with anticipation and react based on how well our anticipation was met. Rather than make ourselves and our ideas the center of the conversation, we make the other person’s reaction and our anticipation of their reaction the focus. We speak with curiosity. We speak in order to test our hypotheses (another word for anticipation) about the other person. We choose words based on how we think they will affect the other person and change our tactics if we’re wrong.

Actors are trained in this form of conversation. Actors are told that every scene is about what they want from the other character and whether they get it. Anticipation and reaction play better on stage than truth and action because they make actors vulnerable to each other. When we anticipate, we may be wrong, thus anticipation increases vulnerability. Anticipation is predicated on curiosity, and if we are curious we may discover something we fear, thus also increasing our vulnerability. And when we react we are inherently letting the other person set the terms of the conversation, again increasing our vulnerability. I think vulnerability is a necessary component of empathy and so we should aim for anticipation, curiosity, and reaction in our conversations.

Rather than choosing your words based on how true you think they are to yourself, base them on what type of reaction you aim to provoke. Don’t speak to inform, speak to learn. Rather than exchanging “truths”, exchange questions.

Ahh but Micah, you are undoubtedly thinking, you said words are insufficient to explain ourselves, so what can we expect to learn by asking questions? I think our reactions speak to deeper truths than our words. Reactions are a type of action you can’t verbalize except in response to someone else. They may be thoughtful but there is still something necessarily instinctual about them. And we can learn from that. We can discover more about ourselves and each other by reorienting our conversations around reactions. By making the vulnerable choice to be curious and in allowing ourselves to react, we place ourselves in the best position to understand ourselves and our sparring partner.

But that sounds awfully antagonistic Micah. I’m not a confrontational person and you’re turning every conversation into a confrontation.

Yes, yes I am. But if we want to truly learn anything in our conversations, if we want to put ourselves in each others’ shoes, we must be confrontational. We must confront ourselves and our complacency to accept our own thoughts and emotions without question and we have to confront our partner to understand the thoughts and emotions behind their words.

Language is insufficient to form empathy. Honesty is meaningless when it goes unquestioned. Confrontation (that is, speaking with curiosity and anticipation, and reacting to what you hear) may be a necessary and too often overlooked component to forming empathy.