Bluntness and honesty vs. politeness and white lies

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Just food for thought... but what if you had been told beforehand, and you employed the information?

As it was, there were maybe some, in your audience, who failed to attend closely to your presentation, as they remained distracted by your apparel throughout the session. (I'm easily distracted.)

You could have gone in front of your audience and immediately said: "I'm sorry about the dress colour - it was a quick buy in a shop, under fluorescent lights, and I know it makes me look ill! (big grin)".

It would have defused the problem entirely. Whether any of your audience had noticed the problem, or not, they would have promptly forgotten about it. You could have proceeded with even greater confidence, having "broken the ice" right at the start.

The audience would have unanimously received an excellent presentation from a woman with a dress and a sense of humour.

==

I'm afraid I fall into the camp of people who find all lying difficult to cope with. To me, the "justifications" for white lies always sound like badly thought-out excuses.

Honesty, and rudeness are two different animals. What that woman said was rude. Unless you asked her what she thought of your appearance there was absolutely no need to say such a thing.

Thats what I thought too, years ago I would not have even understood she was being rude, and, I am not even overweight, just gone from a very slight build to a fuller build. If she had known more about me and my health problems, she would have known it was due to an allergy that made me look bloated at that time.

I find the honesty and bluntness issue quite difficult and I do get it wrong myself but no malice is intended and people's reactions are often very surprising to me

Still the same as ever I see. [epithet removed by lau].

Good idea! That would have worked fine. Oh well. Twenty-twenty hindsight.

I would rather people be blunt than give me the "silent treatment".

Honesty and rudeness are two completely separate things.

Not immediately stating a fact when it has not even been asked for is not lying.
Outright calling someone fat may sometimes be honest, but it is also rude. There is no need to say it when it was not asked for.


Now if someone does ask, "Do I look fat?", (and they do, indeed have a somewhat fuller figure than when you last met), replying, "You certainly have a more curvaceous figure," is also very honest, and less likely to be taken as offensive.

Or it could be taken as a 'sly' comment, and be even worse.

Thanks CleverKitten.

This is one of my blind spots, sometimes it seems obvious to me and sometimes it doesn't. Mind you, I had extensive lecturing from my mother over it so I have plenty of examples to weigh things up against

I think the original comment was probably sly, and loaded with hidden meaning, but I couldn't tell you what exactly since I don't know the context that it was said in, nor do I know the the person's personality that said it. Civilized people don't blurt out hurtful, unsolicited comments during a reunion with a friend. Especially, since I can see Kaleido's pic and I can see that she's lovely, and doesn't look overweight. It could've been that this person was jealous, or possibly Kaleido said something completely unintentionally that hurt the her friend's feelings, so it was one of those get back at you kind of comments. I am personally guilty of doing the latter all the time, from what others tell me. It's not what I say, but the way that I say it. My body language, and tone often conveys emotions that I'm not thinking, or feeling, but nevertheless NTs misunderstand my meaning. I don't know how to change that, but I'm working on it. I don't know why that I seem to come across as irritated, or judgmental, but I know that I do, and NTs mirror that back to me, as that's what they naturally do.

Thank you Serenity

I am fairly sure I didn't say anything except hello before the rude remark. She seemed friendly because she asked where if I would be going back to church, I did explain that I worshipped somewhere else now and she asked where but I didn't want to tell her, though I think the remark was before I refused to say where I was going. Oh well, when I see her coming now, I don't stop to talk, I just smile and say hello since she is nice but I don't really want to talk further with her now.

I do know something though and that is that people often think I am younger and because I am easygoing it gives them the impression that they can say anything to me, which is ok if they have something worrying them but not if they use it to be rude to me.

You're absolutely right, it's the sort of scenario where they should keep it to themselves unless explicitly asked.




Yes, 'truthful' and 'rude' are not synonyms - just as NTs often justify hypocrisy in the name of social niceties, some aspies (and come to think of it, some NTs) justify rudeness in the name of 'honesty'.
I think along the lines of 'if you don't want to hear the answer, don't ask the question.' The sort of rhetorical question asking yo to lie convincingly is something I have no patience for - adults should have the maturity not to ask such questions. It happened to me at a conference that someone explicitly, directly asked me what I had though of his beloved boss' talk - I answered, truthfully, 'I found it disappointing.' If he had asked how I had found the talks, I would have answered something like 'I was well impressed by X's talk', if he had asked nothing I would not have given him my opinion - politeness has its limits though, I wasn't about to wax lyrical on how much his boss' talk had enlightened me.
To point out an extreme example of rudeness I witnessed, somebody walked into an office, went to one of the girls there and said 'Hi, X - you're dressed like a prostitute.' It may have been what the person honestly thought, but it was still rude, obnoxious and uncalled for (nobody asked for an opinion).

That's the way the world works. I didn't make it up, I just live in it. I'm sorry the white lie business gets on autists' and aspies' nerves, and I'm very glad to be sensitized to that fact. A month ago, I knew nothing of these things, as indeed most NTs don't. This thread has been painful, but also, I hope, a learning experience.

Incidentally, the way the world works gets on my nerves too, just in other respects. Things are tough all over.



I'm not used to being challenged in situations where I am told my input will be welcome, especially not by the person who asks for that input in a friendly way.



True, and I think she got a distorted concept of my work as a whole because I described one particular difficult incident out of the thousands of mostly rather positive things that have happened in my interactions with my students.



I'm almost completely certain that I was the only one in the room that morning who didn't know the difference between a market segment and a market niche. As I wrote above, that's their field, they learn about it in their other classes. It wasn't their first semester in that university.

The ironic thing is, I'm nearly always happy to be corrected by my students. I would suggest that being corrected on that particular difficult morning was analogous to a situation described by another poster: telling a woman who's about to give a presentation that she looks terrible in her dress. It's true, but it makes her feel bad, and you get a lower quality presentation that way. If she's very skilled, sure, she can laugh about it, and that's the ideal way to respond. I would have liked to respond with a smile and a joke, too, but I wasn't strong enough at that moment. Are you strong all the time? Do you ever respond to things in ways you later wish you hadn't?



NTs can challenge pretty harshly, and I've been challenged by some of the best, but you're right, I didn't come here for an argument, and it was an ugly shock to find myself caricatured as one of "them", the phonies, the ones who make trouble for autists.



Exactly.



No comment.



Everything I came up with, she dismissed.



I felt duped. I felt she brought me to this thread under false pretenses, just because she wanted to publicly bash an NT.



If what I said stung, it's because there was truth in it. If there's no truth in it, it doesn't sting.



And you've certainly never said anything so deliberately mean yourself.



I don't want Greentea's friendship; I haven't wanted it since she switched from the warm and friendly tone of the 18 email messages that we exchanged to the bitter and dismissive tone of her attacks on my comments here.

As for respect, whether you respect me or not is your business, not mine.

Last edited by Arkadash on 18 Jun 2009, 3:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That too, on the asking for an opinion thing. If "what do you think of this outfit?" means "tell me I look good," than what does one say to get an honest evaluation of whether or not the outfit compliments that person's figure, skin color, etc? If I'm lied to when I ask how something looks on me, how am I ever going to know what actually looks good on me? (OK, granted, there are mirrors.. but sometimes you want an outside perspective. An analysis of fashion. Whatever. There's always that answer of "I don't really like it, but it's not my style, you should ask someone who likes that style what they think of it" if it's just a style that the person being asked isn't fond of.)

Serenity, you taught me something new with your outstanding post. Thank you very much for sharing. It opens a whole new world to me. I did have a vague idea about it, but I had no idea how it worked in detail as a process. I was fumbling in the dark. Your post is in my file of WP inspiring quotes, ranking first now. Not that it solves much, because as you say, we can't do much about it, but at least I know what's going on.

Re: honesty vs. criticism - a subjective terminology / body language / tone can never be honesty, because it's just that - a subjective appreciation rather than objective truth. Eg. "You're fat" is a lie (how fat is fat is very relative and subjective, so you can't truthfully claim that you know if I'm fat or not), whereas "I think you've put on some weight, am I right?" is honesty (additional weight is a provable, objective fact). "You're irritating" is a lie meant to cause self-doubt in the receiver (you can't know how irritating or not I am to anyone except yourself, you certainly can't speak in general for the rest of the world population with any truth in it) whereas "I feel irritated by your behavior." is truth. Any message where we pretend our subjective feeling is objective truth is a blatant lie. Just measure yours and others' messages against this rule, and you'll always know if a message (yours or another's) is honesty or attack. It's that simple. Same goes to all the stupid-, lazy-, irritating-sayers.

Most people, NT and Aspie, have no idea what truth is, therefore they don't know what to expect as honesty. They just imagine this big monster with a foul, loud mouth telling them all the horrible subjective, negative opinions they have of them and pretending they're TRUTHS. Honesty, truth, is something else. Truth is Nature, it's love, it's God. It's caring enough not to mislead someone. And when you mean it with love, it can't come out as an attack.

My challenge is still on, by the way. Does anyone have an example of when a lie is preferable to the truth?

Last edited by Greentea on 18 Jun 2009, 9:22 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Sorry to jump in where I really didn't have too much say as it already was, but I do have to say one major thing dude:

one word you kept repeating over and over again: "feel"


Feeling and thinking are two entirely different things. Thinking uses logic, and feeling uses emotion. From where I stand, it appears that most people seem to use emotion over logic, and that's why white lies are so acceptable. I think it's utter crap, but then I think most of society's ideals are utter crap.

And half the time, when "someone's feelings have been hurt", it's mainly because they didn't have a very good opinion of themselves to begin with. I mean, in certain cases it's understandable, but in most cases the people who were "hurt" didn't think too highly of themselves to begin with; in my mind, that ain't my problem. The minute you start doing everything in your power to avoid offending people, you're left with nothing, cause something will always offend something else.

That doesn't mean criticisms can't be constructive, but even then, many people can't take it due to their own emotions of self-worth.