I have had some people ask me questions about Post 18 of 100: A discussion about loyalty, and while I do want to address those questions, I think I need to better explain why I don’t believe that honesty can be a neutral value that can be equally shared or prioritized within the context of a hierarchal society. This will come back around to patriarchal misogyny (PM), but it might take a bit to get there.
The idea of honesty is very nice. I don’t like having relationships with people who who are dishonest with me, whether they are doing so to manipulate me for their own personal gain, or to “protect my feelings.” This is particularly true of the kinds of social relationships where someone has an immense amount of power over me. When Donald Trump lies as president, for example, everyone (who can) needs to call him out on his dishonesty and hold him accountable for both what he has lied about, and to what purpose he is telling lies from his position of authority. Is he delusional, and so badly misinformed that he really actually believes that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election? Or did he know he was lying and using those lies to foment insurrection? Both are bad things for a leader of a nation that justify removing this person from power, but one probably requires mental health care, and the other probably requires some kind of trial for social justice. So honesty becomes an important value for people placed in positions of authority over others, but does that make it a universally good value?
Perhaps most people would say honesty remains valuable in power-neutral relationships as well. Again, no one likes knowing that other people are lying to them (with an exception we’ll get to later), especially not in situations where you are supposed to be interacting with someone as an equal. It is hard to establish a pattern of trust and mutual aid in a relationship where you don’t know if the person you are working with is really telling you what they want from you, what they are offering in return, or how much they value the relationship. At the same time, in very small stakes interactions and low investment relationships, there are definitely “white lies,” or what I would personally call “lies of social conformity,” that very few people would consider to be an immoral breach of value of honesty. This probably gets into very muddy ethical waters quickly with questions about myth making for children (Santa Clause), creating hope in situations of despair, and just not burdening some random worker at a grocery store who asks you how you are doing when it feels like the world is collapsing around you. Not to mention all the tricksy/philosophical manipulation that occur around rhetorical questions like “what even is ‘the truth?’” So people might like to sign post that they value honesty, because honesty is something that is generally valuable when other people offer it to you, but most people can also find times in their lives where they only value it so far, and in certain circumstances.
But then there are situations where authority is being exerted over us when we know that the expectation of honesty from us is actually just a tool of control and power, where being honest might mean capitulation to that authority and cause actual harm for ourselves or others underneath the yoke of that authority. People absolutely love stories about tricksters who topple tyrants, and phrases like “snitches get stitches” arise from an understanding that honesty to authority is subservience. But authoritarians and people who want to use their power over others are even worse than to just expect honesty from their subjects. Because fundamentally, the “TRUTH” does end up being subjective, and so the power to make people repeat a lie until it becomes true is a measure of control that can even exceed the power of making people be honest. In other words, the situation of “how truthful should I be in this situation?” is not really a question of individual values and respect, it is an entanglement of power and what truth or reality can be created within the context of a relationship between two or more people. To say that “honesty” stands alone as a value, separate from its place as just a tool that can be used to shape relationships and define how power is shared within them, is almost always a commitment to uphold existing power structures. This is because of a fundamental reality about hierarchy. Values can have an infinite variety of personal meaning and nuance, but shared social values are always enforced most heavily against those with the least amount of power in a society, and their enforcement amongst the most powerful is often so lax as to be nonexistent. Thus the values of a society or nation are almost always directed at controlling the least powerful, not about expressing the actual character of a society or nation. Saying “Murder is a crime punishable by death,” doesn’t make that universally true in the nation where the law allows for capital punishment. It means that being accused of murder is a very serious threat for those without the power or authority to challenge that accusation, and, the more byzantine and expensive the process of challenging that accusation, the more wealth and privilege it takes to succeed in that challenge. This also spills over into interpersonal relationships.
This is why I am actually very sympathetic to anyone who wants a value like honesty (and loyalty) to be important and respected in a relationship. Dishonesty is absolutely a method of exerting power against the interests and desires of another person/group/institution. In an interpersonal relationship, especially one like a romantic partnership, everyone should want power to be so equally distributed that anyone using a tool of power-over would stand out as an abusive, bad partner.But for that to work, all the members of that romantic relationship have to fully and actually believe that it is a relationship of equals, and that exerting power over your partner(s) is wrong.
This is just not the default position of romantic relationships in the United States (the place I am most familiar with). From popular media, to religion, to the pressures of family, friends, and other community influences, there are incredibly gendered expectations (in heterosexual relationships especially, but also in homosexual, pansexual and queer relationships) on how power within romantic relationships develops and is used; power dynamics that often walk hand in hand with class and race, even when those things might otherwise appear homogenous. I recognize that this is a massive claim, and while I think I thought I was going to be able to wrestle with it in this post, I now think that thought was a little naive, and this conversation about gendered (as well as classed and raced) expectations in relationships probably deserves future posts of their own. For this conversation, about whether honesty can be a fair value to universally apprize, I think it is enough to just point out that power within relationships can be very complicated and while honesty can be tool of sharing power equally, it is very often a bludgeon, used by the powerful against those with less power, because only one party can innately know whether it is being fully honest, and testing another person/party for their level of honesty requires the power to invade their privacy without their consent.
Anyone keeping secrets is going to try to keep those secrets in a private and contained space, otherwise, they are not actually secrets. Lies are one thing that people generally tend to keep secret unless there is great compensation for revealing them, but there are many other things that people might not feel comfortable or safe sharing with everyone, or anyone. A demand for honesty within a relationship is essentially a demand for any privacy barriers within that relationship to be removed. Some people might feel comfortable with that idea “ a romantic relation is a place with no privacy,” but that is going to be the most true for people who feel like they have no experiences in their pasts, or aspects about themselves in the present, that they fear being shared with others. And not just the romantic partner(s), because we live in a world where most of our forms of communication are being surveilled. Placing too heavy a burden for honesty on a romantic partner can very much mean placing an expectation on them that they not only have nothing they want to keep secret from you, but that they have no secrets that could place them in jeopardy from anyone, especially forces that have the power to invade their privacy with easy, like powerful corporations and nations. Prioritizing honesty as a value can be much more invasive into some people’s lives than others, and not being aware of that can create the kind of environment that is incredibly exclusionary for people who can’t feel safe in an environment where everyone can gain access to their their most personal and private information. This is a much bigger social issue than just about whether it is generally good to have honesty in a relationship, hence why I realize I haven’t yet put it all together in words all that effectively just yet, and why I understand why prevailing attitudes about honesty as a value tend to be pretty monochromatic about whether honesty is good or bad. Saying, “I want to be a partner with whom my partners can feel safe and comfortable sharing any secret with me,” is a very wonderful attitude to have for anyone entering a romantic relationship. However, I don’t think most people consider how much work that can entail, especially if that partner has things that they absolutely do not feel comfortable sharing with the world at large, or very many people in it, and if they have any experience being hurt by people who made similar promises in the past, it is very reasonable for someone to not actually value honesty in the same way that it often gets presented.
To some up why this all feels like something worth talking about in a blog that is supposed to be about addressing the spread of Patriarchal Misogyny: living in a nation that espouses the value of honesty publicly (even while its leaders completely mock it) while simultaneously creates environments very hostile to very many people, can make valuing honesty to be a tool of oppression and social control. And it can be very easy to say, “well that doesn’t apply to me and my romantic partner(s),” but you can’t really know that, except for yourself. So placing that expectation on someone else might not be as egalitarian and power-sharing of an expectation as you might believe it to be.A better way to enable egalitarian and power-sharing relationships than pushing a value like honesty or loyalty would be to demonstrate a commitment to creating a world where people are not attacked, harassed and judged for being themselves.