Disclosure is cheap
My godfather, bless his beautiful ratchet soul, has a penchant for saying shocking things that turn out to be very clear observations of human behavior. On the topic of talking, he has a lot to say. Much of it shakes out to an assertion that verbal communication is an attempt to manipulate.
He’s not wrong and immaterial as it is, there’s a ton of uncomfortable human science results to prove it. We don’t open our mouths unless we’re trying to get people to do something. The sincerity of what we say is entirely, he remarks, beside the point.
I’m pretty comfortable with this message, having observed far too many people talking not to have noticed that we can be very sincere, very wrong, very destructive, and very cruel in the same breath. Hell, we can do it in the same word. Think here of an outraged lover who completely didn’t mean it that way, you’re just taking it wrong, you suspicious-minded person.
We can also very sincerely lie. Some of us are so good we can lie to ourselves at the same time. We believe it.
Sincerity is an ass test for truth, and I’m skeptical that we have any idea what truth is in the first place. Far too many “universal truths” have so many contingencies and require so much historical context that they are, at best, an exercise in wishful thinking.
He has a beautifully reasoned—and I say this as someone who used to teach logic—exercise in thought on the topic of good, evil, and the desire to categorize which I won’t reiterate here, but can be boiled down to the fact that a whole lot of what we think of as good, true, and right boils down to the things that make us uncomfortable and the doomed attempt to ensure that we won’t experience uncomfortable thoughts. We’re completely comfortable with inconsistency and wildly unethical/bad/wrong/etc behavior, as long as we aren’t made uncomfortable in the process.
It takes the piss right out of ethical debates. A side effect of this is that when we disclose, when we try to share our truth, we both are doing nothing of the sort and trying to get people to do something in our interests. Words, intended to manipulate, another bleat of sound in our species’ endless babble.
Vodou is, for a ton of good historical reasons and even more reasons anchored in current events, a religion of secrets. It’s a religion of “keep your fucking mouth shut,” sometimes because you’re trying not to get lynched by Christians, killed by enslavers, or driven from your job by the incredibly racist view of African religions.
Sometimes you keep your mouth shut out of respect.
I keep a print of a woman with her finger to her lips beside my front door, a reminder I make eye contact with on the way to work: there’s nothing cheaper than disclosure.
