Honest & Sincere

Is honesty the best policy?  Maybe ninety-nine percent of the time.  You know the classic example where honesty may be an exception.  A girlfriend asks her boyfriend, “Do I look fat in this dress?”  What’s the right response?

In the situation of telling the girlfriend that she does not look fat, I believe that the boyfriend is still being sincere.  There is a desire on the man’s part to want the girl to have a good self-esteem and to make her feel sexy.  The man is sincerely conditioning himself to love his girlfriend even more.

Honesty is a technicality.  Sincerity is about being whole and content with our words.  Sincerity takes into account feelings.  We can be brutally honest and really hurt others because we didn’t consider their feelings.

That’s not to say that we should compromise our honesty all the time.  Our society is built on truth, trust, and reason which all stem from being honest.  It’s funny how honesty is considered a virtue.  It’s more like a fundamental building block of civilizations.  Without it, there’s no progress, innovation, or prosperity.

Sincerity is built on top of honesty.  We must know the truth before we can exercise any discretion to consider what is right.  Without knowing the truth, how can we ever do what is right?  Thomas Henry Huxley says, “Learn what is true in order to do what is right.”

There is no absolute truth anyway.  Our truth is from a very exact standpoint which is different from someone else’s.  That’s why it is important to jump to the paradigm of sincerity for it helps us to see a bigger perspective.  Two people can both be honest from their own perspective, and they’ll continue fighting about what the real truth is.  But when they take on the notion of being sincere, then they can both look towards the same end.  Antoin Du Saint Exupery said, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.”

Let's love the world together...

Love,
Danish Ahmed, blind visionary