INCONVENIENT TRUTH IN FAMILY SETTING

We all harbor deep feelings towards our closest family members – some of these feelings are love, affection, respect, emotional connection; the other feelings are resentment, disappointment, annoyance, sometimes even hatred and fear. We don’t always show our true feelings to our family out of fear of being shamed, out of fear of being hurt, out of a desire to preserve peace with people close to us. How do we tell our aging parent or parents how we feel now about childhood trauma they caused to us when we were little without causing more family drama? How can parents confront their rebellious teenage daughter with the truth about her choice of a drug addict and dangerous boyfriend? Should spouses be honest with each other about some minor romantic escapades on the side that weren’t meant to be a replacement for their stable relationship? What about the relationship between boyfriend and girlfriend when they can’t live without each other but one is no longer sexually attracted to another? When is the right time to open up about it and break up or adjust to a new reality? Who has the courage to break someone else’s heart with the inconvenient truth?

“I swear to tell the truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth…. “ “Honesty is the best policy”….” Level with me …”, “You can’t handle the truth”… Our society seems to value honesty above convenience, but what happens when we tell the inconvenient truth? “Victims of Compassion” is dedicated to telling the inconvenient truth that is offensive to cheaters. “Victims of Compassion” is politically incorrect because reality is politically incorrect. “Victims of Compassion” was written to shake the fake moral foundations of our society that are leading us on the path to extinction.

Some people choose to lie and pretend for the sake of harmony. Others just can’t lie and tell it like it is, causing massive heartbreak, hurt feelings, and high drama.

One thing is clear: telling the inconvenient truth is rarely appreciated by those on the receiving end of it. If you cheat on your significant other and are trying to come clean and promise to never do it again, most likely they won’t thank you for this difficult confession and won’t trust you again. If you confront your parents about the past, they will get angry or dismiss you and will consider you ungrateful, delusional, and irrational.

True justice brings less happiness than fake harmony! But should it really be like this? Can justice and happiness coexist? For that to happen, people should be more willing to accept inconvenient truth and adjust to living with it. Your spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend will have to forgive you for cheating and trust you that you won’t do it again and you would have to develop enough self-restraint to keep your promise. Your parents would have to admit they didn’t understand you when you were little and hurt your feelings and perhaps ask for forgiveness and try to make the best of the time that’s left for you and them to be closer than ever. Lack of sexual attraction should not immediately kill a working relationship if both accept it as just another challenge to overcome and find other ways to love each other.

A rebellious teenage daughter who accepts the inconvenient truth might want to re-examine her passion for a dangerous drug addict no matter how attractive and cool he is and listen to her parents for once…

Accepting inconvenient truth and learning to live with it might at the end bring real happiness, not fake harmony!

WORK SETTING

How many employers would reward you for showing them a blank but honest resume? You can promise to learn the skills really quickly and try really hard but without requisite experience, they won’t give you a chance. On the other hand, if your resume is embellished and contains phone numbers of some friends who will pretend to be your former boss that will give you an excellent recommendation, then perhaps you have a chance of being hired and then you’ll just have to learn on the job before they realize you lied on your resume (and regardless you’ll still make some money by the time they realize it and even if hired you’ll walk away with a couple of paychecks for doing almost nothing).

If you are an employer and you openly criticize your worst employee for being negligent, having a bad attitude, coming late, absenteeism – she will fabricate a workers’ compensation stress claim to keep her position and not work or if you fire her, she will sue you for wrongful termination.

If, on the other hand, instead of telling her the truth, you will just abruptly let her go while the relationship was still ok, it’s highly unlikely she will be angry enough to file her frivolous claims.

If you hate your coworkers for trying to bully you and constantly confront them for every mini-injustice and annoyance they are causing you, they will gang up on you and you will be considered a troublemaker by the boss. However, if you secretly report them one by one to the boss for all kinds of minor wrongdoing and get them fired one by one, you will come out a winner…

Inconvenient truth at work doesn’t pay off either, just like in a family setting, but wouldn’t it be better if it did? Employers giving a chance to a very motivated but inexperienced employee to intern for free and train, rather than dismissing them as unqualified without experience… Employee accepting criticism and trying to improve her performance rather than retaliating against her boss… Coworkers hearing you out and changing their attitude to you and making conscious efforts to get along to remedy your hurt feelings…

SOCIETY

Why do politicians lie so much? Because they are such awful unscrupulous people or because voters WANT THEM TO LIE? Voters want promises, voters want miracles, voters want a politician to do something that will “help” voters without any regard to whether it’s realistic, doable, and how it will affect other people with opposite views and interests. Union members don’t care that their company might close or flee abroad – they want to extort as much money and benefits from the company as they can without regard to consequences for their employer: “we hate them anyway, they got deep pockets, nothing will happen to them if they pay us more”. As a result, union members vote for the most populist politicians who promise them to squeeze more and more from the “evil corporations”. Some of those populist politicians who are a bit smarter, don’t keep their promise to squeeze the corporations because they don’t want to kill the golden goose. They understand that the economy will crash if they do, but others do proceed with more pro-labor regulations and so companies raise prices on the consumers to offset higher costs of labor as a result…

Voters want freebies, free healthcare, free education, free housing, so an honest politician who tells them that giving it all to them will not make them self-sufficient, is unsustainable and will ruin the country, is considered to be evil. Maintaining the standards of honesty and integrity in politics would require politicians to tell the inconvenient truth to their voters, debate on the issues and prove to the electorate how exactly they will accomplish their goals. Since voters don’t reward honesty and integrity, politicians are forced to attack each other’s character, personal life, use politically biased media to smear their opponents and appeal to voters’ irrational feelings instead of appealing to their rational mind: “I represent the bright future and my opponent represents the evil past” instead of specific well-justified plan, “joyful vibes” instead of specifics, refusal to discuss one’s own shifting views “my values haven’t changed” etc..

If voters believed in self-sufficiency, good work ethic, private property more, were smarter and truly wanted to help themselves they would not care about politicians’ personal vibes, they would not trust any media propaganda on both sides. Instead, voters would educate themselves about the issues and would look at the actual record of each politician to see if they actually made their lives better or worse. Voters who motivate politicians to be honest and hold them accountable benefit the most!

MEDIA

Social media and mainstream traditional media have been taken over by people who don’t care about the truth and objectivity. Journalists are not at liberty to speak their mind, write and post their own opinions and offer honest, but politically incorrect and offensive to some evaluation of reality. Journalists are censored by their editors, hired based on political bias, told what to write and how to write to promote the biased narrative of the media outlet. Truly independent journalists who say whatever they want to say get censored, shadow banned, fired from mainstream outlets and get smeared by the establishment media. Investigative journalism genre, instead of targeting the establishment like it used to do, has become a political tool to get rid of political figures inconvenient for the establishment.

Endless stream of illegal leaks of confidential information and explosive embarrassing and scandalous details about pre-selected public figures and pre-selected institutions is only helping parties to gain an upper hand in a political struggle, but not helping the quality of governance in any way. Our population that gets the news from their phone knows that most of the media on their phone are establishment media speaking in the same voice, but still consumes the biased content. In fact, mainstream audience is often to blame for low quality of mainstream media because mainstream audiences do not question the official narratives, and are too lazy to read what the opposition has to say and too apathetic to seek the truth. Also, mainstream audiences like sensationalism without substance, their attention span is too short to perceive any content that takes more than a minute to read. Essentially, the sorry state of the media should be blamed both on the content providers unwilling or unable to tell the truth and the audiences unwilling or unable to handle the inconvenient truth!

When our population, especially those with high education, realizes the importance of knowing the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be, it will demand to hear the truth from the media. A true intellectual will always listen to the voice of the opposition especially if mainstream is trying to suppress that voice. Journalists who believe in integrity should insist on adopting the code of ethics and licensing for journalists that will impose strict rules of professional conduct strictly forbidding the use of any leaks of confidential information about any public figure or private person for political or financial gain. When self-serving government develops some integrity, it will begin to prosecute any journalists who use unethical and illegal methods to obtain confidential and embarrassing information about any public figure or private person for financial gain or political purpose, especially when the damage from defaming that person by far outweighs the benefit to the public from the disclosure of confidential, embarrassing, or damaging information.

SUMMARY

Honesty is for mature people who can handle the truth and adjust to it. White lies and pretense are for those who are too scared of reality. Truth can be very inconvenient and often offensive to many, but knowing it and being realistic in life may deliver better results in any setting – family, work, society, media, and many other spheres of our lives. When a true reliable friend sees that you are in denial about your rapid descent into a personal crisis of dysfunction and emotional breakdown, he/she will confront you about it and will try to help even if you get massively offended by them giving you a reality check. Let’s get more mature about offensive reality and the inconvenient truth and learn how to handle it with dignity and work with it instead of running from it!