Self-Help Review 5: Radical Honesty

Self-Help Review:
Radical Honesty
1996
By Brad Blanton, Ph.D.

I have always had an opinion that the smarter someone is, the more miserable they are. This theory has always been nothing more than self-indulgent drivel, and backed by no concrete evidence. My thinking is this: if you're smart, your powers of analysis are more sophisticated than those of dumb people. The more emotional situations are analyzed, the more the results come back negative, since you can always find a problem in any given situation, and emotions are not logical. When using logic to make sense out of something that makes no sense, you fall into a state of total confusion, leading to feelings of sadness and depression. After all these years, I have finally found a book that kinda sorta proves my arrogant assumptions to be true.

"Radical Honesty" is a book with a mission: The author is determined to get you to cut the crap and start telling the truth, no matter how painful you think it is. To Blanton, there is no downside to being totally honest, since holding back the truth can lead to any number of problems, and the anger you hold back will seep out in other forms that you will have no control over. What can this lead to? At this point in history, we are capable of destroying entire countries of people with very little effort, and a nation of angry, passive citizens will find a way to release these pent-up emotions in potentially life-threatening ways.

The strangest thing about this book is that even though the author continuously points out bullshit, he embraces a bizarre, almost New Age idea of who we are as humans. The "being" that we are supposed to get back to in order to be happy is who we were when we were about four or five months in the womb, when we first had the sensation of experience. It came over us slowly, like dawn, and it was a total experience of the senses. His theory is that all major religions are trying to describe this indescribable feeling, always present in our memory but impossible to put into correct words.

The enemy of our being is our mind, and the major idea of this book is that we are trapped in the prisons of our minds, and that the associations we make from life and judgements we place on those associations form our morals, and to Blanton morality is a disease which we all have. The core message is to stop analyzing life and placing judgements on it, and just live. Life doesn't make sense, our emotions don't make sense, we are all petty assholes, and striving for the best possible life is bound to create more disappointments for us. It sounds pessimistic, and Blanton even goes on to call the power of positive thinking "the biggest load of bullshit of our day," but the book's tone is optimistic and sure of it's message. Even though we can't live out our best possible life, we can certainly enjoy the life we have and have fun creating.

I don't know how much I agree with settling for a shit life if it's possible to have a better one, but I do like this book, even if I won't be taking most of it's advice. For example, Blanton promotes "abnormal honesty," which would mean if, for example, your wife/girlfriend asks you if her ass looks fat, you would not only say "yes" if it does, but go on to say, "and that is why I jerk off thinking of you're friend's ass instead of your's. I imagine sticking my tongue in her perfectly-shaped ass and it feels good cumming to that image." Now, that isn't an example from the book, but he actually does want the reader to tell their lover that they jerk off thinking of her friends if he does, and to go into as much detail as possible about what they think of and how it feels. There is no holding back, because we have no good reason for holding back. He even recommends having conversations where the two people tell each other "I resent you for" and giving every detail about the resentments, regardless of how the other person will feel. It's pretty damn hard to argue with telling the truth, and he says that you, the reader, are probably a coward and won't tell the truth in the way that he advocates. Any truth that's colored with nice language will be bullshit, and you'll still be holding back and won't receive the full benefits of telling the truth. For Blanton it's either all or nothing, and the tone of this book is appropriately angry.

Interestingly enough, even if you do tell the truth once, it doesn't matter, because another major point of this book is that the truth is always changing. Loving someone one day doesn't mean you're going to love them later, but that doesn't make your love at the beginning false. Most people I know of who has been in a shit relationship talk about their ex's like they never loved them, and that they only invested all of that time with them because they didn't know better. That's a crock. At the time, it was true that you loved them, and because it's no longer true, it doesn't mean that it was NEVER the truth. It just means that the truth changed, and the truth always changes. I've lied my ass off about my ex, but the fact is that at one point, it was true that I loved her, and no matter how much I bitched about her laziness and just in general her being a worthless cunt, I stuck up for her if anyone else commented because it was true that I loved her. Same for any reader who tries to say they never loved their ex. So we can never be finished telling the truth, because once we speak the truth, it is probably no longer true, and we have an endless amount of fuel because the mind constantly creates more bullshit for us to burn.

There are various tips and rules of thumb for telling the truth, but I won't list all of them because they are just elaborations on the main point of the book. The author recommends a variety of methods for getting back to our being and wiping clean the bullshit that our mind creates. Two recommended methods are the Landmark Education program (a group which has received lawsuits for supposed cult-like behaviors) and Transcendental Meditation, even though he tells you to ignore completely TM's advice on handling anger. He also holds truth-telling workshops, and I would probably attend one if I didn't value my own bullshit and prefer to receive the secondary payoffs I get for feeling shitty and holding back. See? Self-Help HAS helped me, because now I'm admitting my own shortcomings. Let's hear it for being fucked up!

I finished this book a few weeks ago, but I had to reread it in order to write this review. I have been content to tear through books and pump out a review because there are so many different books I want to read, and I sacrificed taking notes in order to get more done. That was a dumb idea, because when I started writing this I realized that there was a lot in this book that I was forgetting, and it was only after the second time around that it became clear. This book is repetitive, but it's a good message to have repeated to you. Even if you don't take the book's advice to the extent that the author would like, your life can only improve if you incorporate at least some of it into your life. That said, at this point this is probably the best Self-Help book I have read, and I recommend it to everyone. Just don't tell me your masturbation fantasies unless I ask.