Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Sadistic Honesty or Truthtelling?

1. 00:00 People extol truthtelling. They eulogize and acclaim and lord honesty. They praise these qualities and actions. They tell you you should always say the truth. You should always be honest. But like everything else, there is a malignant form of honesty. Brutal
2. 00:24 honesty. Honesty weaponized. Honesty leveraged sadistically to hurt people, to cause them discomfort, to shame them and humiliate them. Honesty and truthtelling up to a point are positive traits and positive behaviors which contribute to social cohesion and interpersonal
3. 00:50 relationships. But beyond that point, when as I said, honesty is weaponized, when honesty is catapulted and leveraged to hurt people, that’s when truthtelling becomes a sadistic pursuit. My name is Sam Baknin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve, narcissism revisited, and
4. 01:11 a professor of psychology. And today we’re going to discuss the difference between truthtelling which is a positive social commodity and sadistic honesty when honesty is used to cause people
5. 01:29 extreme acute discomfort especially in public settings. So what are the differences? I think there are basically three. When your honesty or your truthtelling is focused on the vulnerabilities, frailties and shortcomings of other people, it’s usually sadistic.
6. 01:50 When you point to, when you emphasize, when you drill down, and when you double down on the identification, amplification, magnification of other people’s mistakes, errors, bad decisions, horrible choices, vulnerabilities, chinks in the armor, frailties, shortcomings, foibless,
7. 02:22 when you point to other people’s imperfections, when you demean other people and denigrate them by enumerating and listing all these, most probably your honesty has much more to do with sadism than in any set or system of moral values and beliefs. The second point of difference is
8. 02:53 whether your discourse, whether your exchange is public or private. If you’re being honest with someone, if you’re [clears throat] telling the truth in private, usually what you’re trying to do is to induce some kind of transformation. You share a truth with a good friend.
9. 03:14 You tell your spouse what you think of her behavior, choices and decisions, actions. You confide in your peers and
10. 03:26 friends about things you may have done wrong. You all these situations where you’re being honest in private usually imply some kind of attempt at self-improvement or the improvement of others. And that is a ludable goal that is not only socially permissible and
11. 03:49 acceptable but socially praiseworthy.
12. 03:55 The difference is when you are being honest in public, when your truthtelling is being megaphone, amplified, copied, replicated. When you make sure that the truths and the observations that you make are disseminated widely, when you publicly shame people and
13. 04:22 humiliate them, when you expose people in public, when you embed your truthtelling and honesty in a pro-social ostentatious setting, when your truthtelling and honesty is a club to bludgeon people with a weapon to be used. When your truthtelling is and honesty is
14. 04:47 intended to inflict pain, to harm people, to hurt them, to cause them acute discomfort, to humiliate them, to denigrate and demean them, to degrade them. When you misuse or abuse your honesty and truthtelling in these ways, as a display, as a theater production,
15. 05:10 as a movie for public consumption, when your truth and honesty are public facing, they are sadistic. Sadism is when your truth and honesty become public commodities, public goods. The only form of truth and honesty which is acceptable is when it’s communicated in private or
16. 05:37 through [snorts] agreed upon sublimated channels. But when your honesty and truthtelling go wild, when they’re ecstatic, when they are coupled with negative effects such as envy and anger or hatred, when they are intended to take people down, to pull them apart, to ruin them.
17. 06:04 This is not honesty. This is not truthtelling. This is sadism. And finally, the final point is when your honesty and truthtelling is about yourself, not about others. When you compare yourself to other people favorably, when you need to take people down, when
18. 06:23 you need to expose them, when you need to humiliate them in order to feel better about yourself, when your honesty and truthtelling are comparative, ostentatiously, and conspicuously pro-social, when you use your honesty, you leverage your honesty and truthtelling to enhance
19. 06:44 yourself for self-enhancement. or self agrandisement then there’s an element of sadism in your honesty and truthtelling. Honesty and truthtelling are coupled with modesty and humility. You need to be humble. When you speak the truth, you need to couple it with humbleness.
20. 07:12 You need to realize that other people are not perfect. Institutions are not perfect. Humankind is not perfect. And you are not perfect. You need to accept imperfection as the organizing principle of reality. And by accepting imperfection, by embracing imperfection,
21. 07:37 you need to share the fate and destiny and common environment of all other people. If you compare yourself to other people favorably, if you elevate yourself, if you aggrandise yourself, if you enhance yourself, if you claim to be superior and supreme, then this is not honesty or
22. 08:00 truthtelling. This is counterfactual grandio narcissism. It is only by accepting that you are no different to other people. It is only by putting a mirror not only to others but to yourself. It is only by regarding yourself through other people’s gaze. It is only by
23. 08:22 putting yourself in other people’s shoes that you can be truthfully honest in a way that makes the world a better place.