Truly Sincere, or Absence of Malice?

It is fascinating operating within a culture where the members believe very strongly in ethical rules governing behavior and interaction.

Obviously to those that know, I belong to a religion and so do many of my family and friends. The religion influences our values, obviously, but I think we also borrow many of them from the larger culture. Some evidence of this I saw recently was a survey circulated among some of my family about what character traits we least liked in other people. I was quite shocked that so many of them (and I very honestly can't remember WHO at this point so I am not thinking names) chose dishonesty or insincerity as the thing they most disliked of all the possible things there are to dislike. I think this would be a value borrowed from the larger culture--a Billy Joel song among other things-- because I honestly can't imagine specific prominence in terms of our particular religion.

Although in reality I don't know what good it would do at all, seeing as how any benefits of sincerity would be gleaned from primary reliance on benevolence, or the absence of malice, what I chose.

We are talking BAD character here--so I am not casting any votes for dishonesty or defending it. But this vote threw me me for a loop. In my mind, there is very little to fear from any person who goes around being dishonest or insincere with me UNLESS there is ALSO some kind of other factor to make it harmful to me.

Otherwise, why would it particularly bother me? What would I actually be worried about?

That is why the character trait I picked to most dislike is malice. Malice would be required for anything that someone does, even for things that are dishonest or insincere, to actually be harmful to anyone. So ultimately something like malice or its synonym must exist as the primary bad trait about others, because without it, pretty much anything bad they would do would not be that bad. I am certainly willing to consider various sides of this, and am actually asking for any perspective on the evils of insincerity as a real question and not as a rhetorical one because I haven't heard their reasoning. I know that we hear this mantra beat culturally, that is why I suspect it as another cultural myth of sorts.

But because I have been thinking about this issue so long, though, I have put a twist on the whole subject. One thing I was probably going to post on eventually was our recent discovery that I have a neurological problem where periodically my brain waves slow drastically (they have seen this on an EEG and my husband has pushed a button on a machine that bounds when it starts and stops so it is a fairly clear cut thing). It causes me to start doing bizarre things that I have no previous reason to do, I do not premeditate them, and do not often remember them afterward. These activities can actually be quite complex and seem like normal things that some people would do, at least in some contexts. This neurological state is called chronic sleepwalking, in its extreme form, though my brain waves don't always slow enough to put me all the way to sleep. Sometimes they just slow to make me act funny.

Before we started trying to figure out what I was doing, my way of existing was probably like that of most anonymous people day to day. Probably the things that most of us do from minute to minute are not checked up on by other people to see if we are doing what we think we are doing or what we thought we did. So a lot of the time if people do things that are strange, questionable, out of character, or even something like 'evil' and we really don't have any awareness of what we are doing, we wouldn't even necessarily ever know it.

I have known almost all my life that I have a sleep disorder but only lately did I figure out the rest of it by having my husband start paying attention to all the things I was doing and then checking them out with me afterward. It always seemed kind of like I had poltergeists that moved things from the place I thought I put them, and minor things like that.

Only recently did it seem like there were major gaps in my memory record and major inconsistent accounts between things I thought I had done and the things observed by others. So after a major episode was documented on an EEG machine (it is like Santa Claus, it knows when you are sleeping and knows when you are awake) Slade started checking up on me to see if I had done things intentionally or not. He will ask me if I actually remember things and during strange behavior he has some tests that he will perform. (Apparently if he says 'hey hon, why don't you take off what you are wearing and run down the block?' and I say 'OK' and start to do it (mercifully he doesn't allow me to get too far), rather than rolling my eyes or whatever I would usually do, he knows to start intervening in other things I have planned for the night, too.)

So that gets back to my initial point. Intention renders behavior either it malicious or benevolent. So honesty or sincerity, IMO, in interpreting someone's behavior is only important if we assume that we don't really know their intention and it would make the difference in whether or not what they were doing in some crucial respect.

So why do people think that sincerity is so important? Either they trust the people in their lives or they don't and this IMO has more to do with whether they choose to. They can see benevolence or malice in others' actions pretty much whatever they are.

Ironically because of my neurological disorder I am probably not to be trusted for a true account of my actions on occasion, and I would probably had anyone been watching me for evidence of this, be thought to be dishonest. But even dishonesty itself comes down largely to intention. Obviously if I have no memory of behavior I will not be able to account for it, but I think I am an extreme example of why this can't exactly always be held against people or seen as evidence of a character flaw. If people wanted to think that bad enough they could, but I will refer them to my neurologist.

Probably my ability to account for all my actions and wherabouts is not exactly threatening to anyone, so this is also an extreme example of why malicious intention is always the more basic fear.

And what about whether it comes down to being sincere or being nice? What would we choose in others then? Socially being nice is rewarded instead, for sure. When I am in control of my behavior on my end I choose to hang everything I think out there. Whatever else one thinks about me usually people know where they stand and they don't have to interpret the subtleties of what I do or wait to hear something I said about them. I don't say things behind people's back that I wouldn't say to their face if they asked. But I don't usually experience this trait being rewarded.

'Nice' people often engage in telling people what they want to hear at some point. This would be fine if some of them didn't eventually end up shocking us when we find out it isn't exactly how they feel all the time. But most of us are human, and respond to the humanness of others by acknowledging that occasionally reasonable people disagree. Disagreements are fine with those who trust in others intentions, however, and as I said, that is usually a choice rather than a result of their being inherently trustworthy.

One of the funny things about why insincerity is dangerous is not because people are insincere per se but because they end up communicating their real feelings to us in some other way, probably indirect, and perhaps again, as a suprise if they had first garnered our trust by doing the other. But the real problem was not them being insincerely nice it was them being genuinely not nice. If the reverse were true, that they tell us all the things they think that are critical to us and their behavior is benevolent we have no reason to fear them at all.

People love to talk a good game in terms of what their esteem of others is, but haven't we all had someone articulate how much they like and care about us (probably for the benefit of third parties and how they look) when they can't resist sending different messages under the surface? We all have some sort of feeling about what people feel about us whatever they say to us personally, and we usually don't prioritize directness in this respect.

And in terms of vauing honesty in others in relation being to my religion--it isn't. I think it interesting that the commandment that we have related to honesty specifically mentions bearing false witness of others--again, specifically making the true representation of facts only relevant to what we do to others.

(See my post on witchcraft for how if we have malicious intent toward others, we will see it, regardless of their actual natures.)