Black and White (or not?)
Haze
O RLY? Join Date: 2003-07-07 Member: 18018Members, Constellation
O RLY? Join Date: 2003-07-07 Member: 18018Members, Constellation
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">Your Outlook on Life - what is it?</div>People often look at life with two different perspectives: black and white...or not. It's sad to say that my relationship with my father was not always as well off as it could have been simply for the fact that he viewed things on a black and white basis, while I did not. Something to him was either wrong, or it was right, while to me there were gray areas - different severities of right and wrong. Several arguments we had boiled down to the fact that our outlooks were simply different and we could never agree.
For instance, I had a terrible argument with my father my junior year of high school during spring break. My family had gone down to Florida, as they did every spring break and summer, while I insisted on staying home by myself to spend time with my friends (something I never had the chance to do on any previous spring breaks). My father had to go on a business trip and only stayed for one day, attending to business for the others and finally arriving home on Wednesday. He stayed Thursday, and then left again on Friday, for business. Before he left he asked me to vacuum the house. I said I would, but ultimately forgot, and when he came home late Saturday we got into an argument about something else (which doesn't concern this topic ;P) but during this argument, when he had become infuriated with me (I was and still am a stubborn little git that would <i>never</i> agree simply because they "were my parents" - I <i>always</i> needed a reason or I did what I thought was right) he asked me if I had vacuumed. <i>Not</i> wanting to get in another stitch with him, I lied, and said I had. He went upstairs - where it had obviously not been vacuumed - and then returned, more angry than ever, because I had <i>lied.</i> To me, it didn't matter that I lied, because it was about such an extremely small thing, and to be honest, I had a very good reason not to tell the truth. To him, truth is everything (as it is to me, but I have my gray areas), and my lying was an absolute travesty. He grounded me hardcore and stripped me of my privileges for simply lying about vacuuming that night.
I won't ever forget that argument simply because it was when I learned how incredibly different I really am from my father.
(As an honest bit of info, I would have fessed up and vacuumed in a heartbeat had we not been knee deep in argument. I didn't feel like hearing him rant about how I was selfish and lazy anymore than he already was - so I lied. I'm not a lying type of person and I'm typically very honest, just forgetful! (in that case, of vacuuming))
So what's your outlook on life, and why? I don't look at things black and white (as you could have guessed by now) myself, because there is a difference between lying about vacuuming and lying about murder. There are severities and extremes that things can happen in, and its not worth getting your undies in a joint if someone lies about vacuuming when you grossly detest lying in general. Its only vacuuming.
For instance, I had a terrible argument with my father my junior year of high school during spring break. My family had gone down to Florida, as they did every spring break and summer, while I insisted on staying home by myself to spend time with my friends (something I never had the chance to do on any previous spring breaks). My father had to go on a business trip and only stayed for one day, attending to business for the others and finally arriving home on Wednesday. He stayed Thursday, and then left again on Friday, for business. Before he left he asked me to vacuum the house. I said I would, but ultimately forgot, and when he came home late Saturday we got into an argument about something else (which doesn't concern this topic ;P) but during this argument, when he had become infuriated with me (I was and still am a stubborn little git that would <i>never</i> agree simply because they "were my parents" - I <i>always</i> needed a reason or I did what I thought was right) he asked me if I had vacuumed. <i>Not</i> wanting to get in another stitch with him, I lied, and said I had. He went upstairs - where it had obviously not been vacuumed - and then returned, more angry than ever, because I had <i>lied.</i> To me, it didn't matter that I lied, because it was about such an extremely small thing, and to be honest, I had a very good reason not to tell the truth. To him, truth is everything (as it is to me, but I have my gray areas), and my lying was an absolute travesty. He grounded me hardcore and stripped me of my privileges for simply lying about vacuuming that night.
I won't ever forget that argument simply because it was when I learned how incredibly different I really am from my father.
(As an honest bit of info, I would have fessed up and vacuumed in a heartbeat had we not been knee deep in argument. I didn't feel like hearing him rant about how I was selfish and lazy anymore than he already was - so I lied. I'm not a lying type of person and I'm typically very honest, just forgetful! (in that case, of vacuuming))
So what's your outlook on life, and why? I don't look at things black and white (as you could have guessed by now) myself, because there is a difference between lying about vacuuming and lying about murder. There are severities and extremes that things can happen in, and its not worth getting your undies in a joint if someone lies about vacuuming when you grossly detest lying in general. Its only vacuuming.
Comments
Of course in the case of your vacuuming lie, I would say you were clearly wrong but it wasn't as big of a deal as your dad made it out to be. My parents were similar raising me. I thought they overreacted to everything. But in the end I think turned out to be a pretty moral person so maybe that helped, I don't know.
While there are moral grey areas, I also believe there are also moral absolutes. Some things are wrong whether or not society says they are. (eg., a lot of german society in the 40s thought the killing people based on race/religion was ok, but that doesn't mean it really was)
-Becoming and beeing a grownup is ultimately about taking responsibility for your own errors. And the fact, that you lied about something irrelevant as vacuuming which was also easy to check was pretty dumb. If you want to lie to someone in order to avoid further enragement you better make shure, that your father is not able to check it up within 20 seconds.
As for the classic black and white argument.
I personally believe that humanity sees things as black and white and I also expect people to act accordingly. Simply because it is easier and you can avoid having to make your mind up about the next thing pushing the grey area a little bit further.
Lets just say you are against piercings. Thats easy, piercings are bad!
But if you are only against certain body-parts beeing pierced you will eventually beeing pushed into either the black or white corner. This is also an effect that constantly happens to every society. Pierced ears have been common for quite sometime. The 90 then brought us the mass use of percings as well as to acceptance of bellybutton and nipple percings. In 20 years intimate piercings might be accepted among more than 50% of the population.
There are also more serious subjects that are victims to this greyzone pushing. Starting with the fact that murder is not accepted by most people, but yet there is quite a number of states with the death penalty.
So is killing people right or wrong? The state does it, so it cannot be THAT bad. Another classic grey area is of course self-defence killing people is as usualy frowned upon, but if you kill someone in self-defence it is commonly accepted (meaning you wont be punished by society).
So, whats all the fuss about? Quite easy: As long as your views are neither black nor white your definition of acceptable will constantly move between these two extremes. This is actually a good thing, because it makes you more survivalbe but it also means, that a society as a whole is always on the move when it comes to their ethical point of view, which of course means also that you will never reach a state of stability and that their will always be inner conflict!
As for black and white... It depends on the scale... Most people have a relative sense of right and wrong, and are able to put things into right and wrong categories. The less egocentric of us will recognize that our relative scales aren't objective, and we will inject shades of gray over our initial reaction with rationalities. The unsettling truth is we really don't understand right and wrong in a very rational way at all, even the most expert thinkers and philosophers among us. For the longest time I used to believe in all shades of gray, but I realized that because we understand so little it's sometimes impossible to rationally analyze a situation in any meaningful way, so I reattached in part to the relative point of view that I was so determined to ignore before. Now I weigh the rational against the relative. When the weight of the rational outweighs the relative I go with the rational, when the weight of the the relative has no rational conflicter I have no choice but to accept the relative assumption and hope that I may understand the rational side of it better later. There's no point in making up rationals on a topic if you really don't know remotely enough to analyze it in detail.
How many people here can actually put into words exactly what their rational sense of righteousness is anyways? From my experience it's pretty rare for a person to be able to describe what "right" is.
Lying is frigging serious. Don't trick yourself into believing it's "just little white lies". I have a habit of lying to protect people from truths I believe they won't like, and I couldn't hate myself more for it. It's a HORRIBLE habit. If you're going to rationalize lies then use the rational to fix the problem, not to create an excuse for the behavior.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree with you full-heartedly on this point. I made the mistake in doing that with minor stupid stuff in my last relationship which caused her to not trust me 100% which of course was one of the (many) contributing factors which lead for us to break up.
Take my word on it lads, lying never helps in the end. You may get away with something simple and stupid and have done it out of good intentions, but you're not infinitely lucky: your luck will run out and then you'll shoot yourself in the foot and wish like hell you'd never done it.
I agree with you full-heartedly on this point. I made the mistake in doing that with minor stupid stuff in my last relationship which caused her to not trust me 100% which of course was one of the (many) contributing factors which lead for us to break up.
Take my word on it lads, lying never helps in the end. You may get away with something simple and stupid and have done it out of good intentions, but you're not infinitely lucky: your luck will run out and then you'll shoot yourself in the foot and wish like hell you'd never done it.
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Well, just think of it like this... If you always tell the truth to someone and they always tell the truth to you, it MASSIVELY simplifies the way the relationship runs. You can simply listen to what they say and know what is happening, what is going on, and likewise they can do the same to you. 2 people who lie to each other, in order to coexist efficiently they have to be able to analyze what the other person is saying, figure out what it actually means, figure out the likelihood of truth/flaseness then they can act on the words of the other person. While occasionally a lie can ease your personal ability to get what you want at an immediate point in time, trying to exist in a relationship with another person where both work for the benefit of both in all things makes lying back and forth massively MASSIVELY decrease the efficiently of the sum total machine.
For those of us who have played some TWG. How much easier is it to say what you mean, and figure out the motives of other people, when you are a human rather then a wolf. Being in a situation where you are striving to get your way by lying excessively is WAY more difficult to successfully manage then being in a situation where you are telling the truth and trying to get your way successfully. When you are dealing with other people, especially many people in the long term, you have all the cards in your hand when you don't have to hide anything.
Could you imagine how your computer would work if sometimes when the CPU asked for data from the ram the ram just lied to it?
Could you imagine how your computer would work if sometimes when the CPU asked for data from the ram the ram just lied to it?
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Windows Millenium lies to your hardware and that's why it always crashes!
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
(sry I had to)
But in all seriousness, of course nobody's perfect. Don't kid yourself, everybody's lied about something. If they say they haven't then that's a lie itself. the point is that you got to make a concious effort to not take the easy way out. Honesty will reward you in the end. It's really quite suprising.
I agree with you full-heartedly on this point. I made the mistake in doing that with minor stupid stuff in my last relationship which caused her to not trust me 100% which of course was one of the (many) contributing factors which lead for us to break up.
Take my word on it lads, lying never helps in the end. You may get away with something simple and stupid and have done it out of good intentions, but you're not infinitely lucky: your luck will run out and then you'll shoot yourself in the foot and wish like hell you'd never done it.
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Lying certainly does cause a lot problems, but so can telling the 100% truth. There are shades of grey in lying too I suppose.
For example, if you girlfriend had asked you what you thought of <insert clothing/hairstyle etc. here> and you thought it was absolutely hideous, you wouldn't want to say that. You might tell a half truth and say its not your thing, or that she looks better in blah blah. There's a difference between honesty and BRUTAL honesty.
Lying certainly does cause a lot problems, but so can telling the 100% truth. There are shades of grey in lying too I suppose.
For example, if you girlfriend had asked you what you thought of <insert clothing/hairstyle etc. here> and you thought it was absolutely hideous, you wouldn't want to say that. You might tell a half truth and say its not your thing, or that she looks better in blah blah. There's a difference between honesty and BRUTAL honesty.
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Correctly using your language isn't lying. Many people in that situation would say "I like it" or "it looks good". This is the origin of the "white lie", in other words a lie told to prevent from hurting someone's feelings. IMO you really shouldn't be referring to anything about your girlfriend as "absolutely hideous" especially not to her. You use positively spun language because you like and respect her, and you tell her the truth "I don't like it" "it's not really my thing" because it's important to be honest.
It's not really a valid argument that you are concealing meaning, because why would you use harsh language "that is absolutely hideous" in reference to something attached to someone you love? Another example, if someone asks you how your day was you probably don't start chattering off a huge series of events and evaluate in depth how they made you feel, you just summarize. It's not dishonest to not relay more information then necessary... However, being intentionally vague as a method of avoiding attention is something else that should be kept in check, especially the people who we have close relationships with. It isn't as universally risky as lying though.
I'd definetely have to agree that there are moral grey areas. For example, lying to manipulate people=wrong. But if for example, someone wanted to murder your friend and asked you where he was lying would be the right thing to do.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
How about refusing to tell?
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I agree with you full-heartedly on this point. I made the mistake in doing that with minor stupid stuff in my last relationship which caused her to not trust me 100% which of course was one of the (many) contributing factors which lead for us to break up.
Take my word on it lads, lying never helps in the end. You may get away with something simple and stupid and have done it out of good intentions, but you're not infinitely lucky: your luck will run out and then you'll shoot yourself in the foot and wish like hell you'd never done it.
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Yeah lying can be a slippery slope that once you start down there is no way back up, everything becomes easier the more you do it an telling lies is king of this. I've made a point in my current relationship to never lie however I've let myself slip and lied a couple of times just avoid an argument but trust is everything in a relationship you burn that and it's very difficulty to get back.