I was struck by a quandary earlier while I washed dishes. I think a lot when I wash dishes. Washing dishes is a Zen activity of disconnection. My mind, my essence, disengages and all that remains is a lucid wakefulness untouched by ego or memory; a simple stream of reality gushes in, unrestrained and unblemished by my conscious willfulness.
I was washing dishes and I thought, when do we accuse someone of lying, and when do we accuse them of being dishonest?
Is there a difference?
Why yes, my conclusion is that there is a difference, a subtle, nuanced schism that those of us with deliberate patience and keen senses can discern as long as we value the blurry intellectual infarction.
Let’s assume you have a girlfriend.
Better yet, let’s assume you have conversations with her, at least periodically.
One day, she does something that draws your ire.
You accuse her of lying to you.
A lie revolves around one specific incident or chain of events. This is what makes it a lie. A lie is demarcated by a beginning and an end. A lie an be delineated by boundaries and as such, presents a focal point that allows you to direct your anger/hurt/frustration at a specific moment in space-time. When accusing her of lying to you, you essentially are putting her on the spot (literally) and it’s as if she is a defendant in the court of law. She must give her side of the story and do her best to refute your accusation, to demonstrate that she was not lying, usually by explaining the peripheral events in such a way that minimize the inconsistencies present in her words. A lie can be fought on its own ground.
But if you accuse her of being dishonest with you, the sense of betrayal digs deeper. Dishonesty is more hurtful and damaging. On the surface, accusing someone of being dishonest is merely saying that they are not telling you the “whole” truth. But there is so much more involved in the accusation of dishonesty when pointed at a loved or cherished acquaintance. Implicit in the stream of dishonesty is the subtle disregard for mutual respect and openness that marks close relationships. This is a transgression against the relationship as opposed to an action against you, singularly. Whereas the reductionist nature of the lie is an attack against a person, it does not attack the basis for the relationship in the same way a long-standing habit of dishonesty does.
When you lie, you tell someone “I am disrespecting you.”
When you are dishonest, you tell someone “I am disrespecting what we are together.”
I know there is a third and even more but you can’t get passed the “I” to understand
The 3rd path is oblivion. If I find it, I’m no more.
Completely OT, but I have cable TV now where I live, with Telelatino, and I saw a cheesy porny Mexican soap opera called Bellas y ambiciosas. Standard Skinemax soft-core stuff, lots of boob shots in bad lighting (thus ‘erotica’ rather than porn, since women love the former and hate the latter), no pussy nor cock views. (Not like Anapola Mushkadiz in Battle in Heaven, for example.) But the Canadian Latino community laps this stuff up, apparently, as presumably Mexican audiences themselves do…
LOL the Canaidan Latino community!!! All 7 of them? Actually, I read that Canada has a very logical guest worker program in which they ship the workers back home once the season is over and they don’t let them breed or frolick.
That’s right, though now we still seem to let in everyone who wants to come here, so it’s kind of pointless being so scrupulous about agricultural workers.
I once worked at an apple orchard, and these two Jamaican guys who were migrant workers hit on these two Canadian sisters, coworkers of mine, quite transparently hoping to marry them so they could stay. Despite having wives back home, too, far as I know…
Will, you actually have a CONSERVATIVE government, that is why. I do not know what you think of PM Harper, but I would be willing to trade our Dear Leader, Obama, for your PM, Harper. I know, it is not a fair trade. But neither was getting Manhatten way back when!
Indeed, Mark, we are certainly blessed to have the Conservatives in power, rather than the Liberals. But if the Tories were more consistent in their adherence to their professed ideals, we’d have a bit more of a stringent immigration policy, which would be in better accord with having such a strict migrant worker policy…
Hmm, CanLats for short?!
LOL, that just sounds weird.
In the bigger cities, like Toronto here where I am now living, there are a sizeable enough minority of Latinos to make a TV network like TeleLatino viable.
I feel a certain amount of UGH about what you say regarding Toronto. I mean, if there is a huge drawback to Canada it is the forced bilingualism due to the Quebeckers-is that right?! It is what I fear will happen eventually here. And from what you say, at least Canada has SOME semblance of an immigration policy.
The bilingualism is mostly annoying in terms of its skewing of the make-up of the federal bureaucracy, which ended up dominated by French-Canadians, since (a) they have always been more likely to learn the opposite official language than English-Canadians, and thus ended up being preferentially hired, and thus (b) they end up hiring more of their own, so it became a self-sustaining inequity, and has remained one ever since.
That’s irritating and annoying.
For your sake, I hope you all don’t follow us down that road…
BTW, I was wrong; Latin Lover 2: Beauty & Ambition (Bellas y ambiciosas) isn’t Mexican; it’s Venezuelan and Peruvian.