In our culture, appreciation and affection are implied rather than spoken outright. Two guy friends call each other names to reinforce their friendship; men and women tease and make fun of each other to imply interest. Feelings are almost never shared openly and freely. Consumer culture has cheapened our language of gratitude. Something like, “It’s so good to see you” is empty now because it’s expected and heard from everybody.In dating, when I find a woman attractive, I almost always walk right up to her and tell her that a) I wanted to meet her, and b) she’s beautiful. In America, women usually get incredibly nervous and confused when I do this. They’ll make jokes to diffuse the situation or sometimes ask me if I’m part of a TV show or something playing a prank. Even when they’re interested and go on dates with me, they get a bit disoriented when I’m so blunt with my interest. Whereas, in almost every other culture approaching women this way is met with a confident smile and a “Thank you.”
This is something that has puzzled me for a while: Why are Americans so indirect about
everything? It’s impossible to tell
people directly how you feel about them.
You can’t tell a guy you love him or that your glad he’s your friend
unless you preface it by saying something stupid, like “no homo.” You can’t simply tell a girl you think she’s
pretty and you’re interested in getting to know her better without her freaking
out. Every meaningful interaction has to
be couched in a thousand layers of irony, qualified into oblivion, and hidden
behind vagary, so that if someone takes you too seriously or misunderstands
you, you can simply claim that you were kidding. Quite simply, we can’t be honest with each
other.
This pathology, it seems to me, extends beyond just
emotional directness. We lie to people
about everything, for fear of offending them.
I cannot even begin to count the number of times where I pretended to
agree with someone just so they wouldn’t get angry. I know that there are many people who tell me
only what they think I want to hear just so that I will feel good about
myself. It is almost impossible for me
to find anyone who is able and
willing to give me constructive criticism about anything because most of the
people I know are simply too afraid to say anything that might even begin to
appear to be ever-so-slightly confrontational.
There is also the general tendency to suppress facts that
are less than savory to some people’s minds.
Gavin McGinnis refers to such facts as “hatefacts,” a rather clever of
pointing out the undesirability of some aspects of reality. The reality of
female sexual desire, for example, has been suppressed for decades, leading
many men to believe that women want deferential nice guys as
husbands/boyfriends/fill-in-the-blank.
The reality of modern black culture is often suppressed, and even
occasionally denied so that no one has to think about the disproportionately
high number of murders, rapes, thefts, and other crimes that blacks
commit. Even the reality of the male
nature is denied or suppressed, as well as a host of other issues, like the
underlying reality of free trade, fiat currencies, bank fraud, and so forth.
This modern American society, then, is founded upon a
culture of lies. The fact that we cannot
be honest with how we feel about one another is but one microcosm of all the
big lies we have bought into. Dishonesty
permeates every aspect of our culture, and so we hide behind irony, false
insincerity, and false bravado. Nothing
is serious, even when it ought to be.
Fundamentally, though, we have deceived ourselves. We have, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul,
exchanged truth for lies. And now we act
upon an idealistic version of the world, instead of reality. In our ideal world, equality exists, and man
is perfectible. In reality, equality is
nowhere to be found, save in small, highly limited, comparative measures. And man remains as stubbornly imperfect as
ever. And so we cling ever more closely
to ideals, even though reality makes it increasingly apparent that our
idealized notions of the world are utter nonsense.
And what, then, is our response? It is to bury our heads deeper in the sand,
perhaps in the hope that this will stave off reality’s inevitable wake-up
call. It will not, though, and the eventual
shattering of our illusions will be a bitter day indeed. All because we can’t
be honest, with ourselves or with others.
