Sweet little lies

My son has a tremendous interest in ethical questions. He’s particularly fascinated by the ethics of lying, such that this has been a significant topic of conversation lately. Now, the simple answer here is that lying is unethical. But of course there’s the line ‘If Hitler is at the front door and Anne Frank in the attic’. There are times when the only honourable thing to do is to lie. There are many people who lived and escaped persecution only because someone hid them and lied for them. Everyone who helped a Jewish person flee the Nazis. Any movement that resists oppression and tyranny depends on subterfuge to some degree. The underground railroad. When the state itself becomes evil, following the law is not the most honourable choice.

Most of us will not find ourselves in a Hitler/Anne Frank scenario. I hope. But every day presents us with opportunities to be more or less honest. Lies by omission are common. The things we let slide, don’t mention. The little injustices we allow to pass unchallenged. The little mistakes we cover up. Most of the time, these don’t make a lot of odds in the grand scheme of things, but when they do, situations can suddenly run out of control and either you have to fess up, or their follows a process of having to tell more lies to hide the first one. Not a good place to be, not an honourable solution, and frequently, not something that allows for a fix. The person who can admit to a mistake has the space to learn, repair, improve. The person who denies ballsing things up cannot redeem themselves, and cannot learn. Appearing to be right, at the expense of actually being right, will cost you dearly in the long run, more often than not.

Then there are the lies we tell to spare someone’s feelings. The theory being that a lie to avoid pain is kinder. That is true sometimes, but at others, it sets people up for a fall. The person whose failings are not pointed out to them can have a seriously inflated self opinion, and sooner or later will run into a bit of reality, and find they aren’t the best novelist who ever lived, after all. I gather current TV shows frequently make ‘entertainment’ by laughing at people who think they’re far better than they really are. The kinder thing to do would have been to point it out sooner. Thinking you are something, and finding you are not, can be far more traumatic than dealing with the truth early on. And again, there’s scope to change. If someone points out where you are failing, you can learn, improve, become what you want to be. The person who wrongly believes they know it already is being denied all kinds of opportunities to really achieve.

There are the lies of convenience. Most people, when they ask how you are, want a short, reassuring answer. It can be tempting to give that. I spent years lying to everyone around me, by saying  ‘a bit tired’ ‘just a bit under the weather’ when I visibly wasn’t ok, rather than saying what was going on. I did it to spare the people around me, and I did it to protect the person who was depriving me of sleep, undermining my self-esteem and abusing my body. Crazy. But like a lot of women in my situation, I didn’t want to face up to the implications of what was happening to me. Easier to blame myself, than the father of my child. Had I spoken the truth, someone could have pointed out to me that things were not ok. I couldn’t bear the idea of anyone thinking ill of my ex back then. And I also wondered if people would just agree with him, that it was my fault for being too demanding, too emotional, too… whatever it was that week.

When I started being honest about what had happened, I found warmth and support. I found versions of me that weren’t deemed useless, ridiculous, over reacting and unreasonable. I was told that the things I felt, wanted, needed, were the least a human should have. I wish I had dared to trust sooner.

One of the things I learned from this, is that if you consider yourself to be an honourable person and do not feel safe in being honest, it is time to question the situation you are in. It may not be Hitler at the door, but something external is quite probably awry. If you have a mindset that leans towards taking on responsibility, then it can be easy to internalise blame, to carry things that are not yours, and so forth. When honesty feels dangerous, there is serious work to do, somewhere.

The decision to lie should never been taken lightly. If it’s to avoid inconvenience, or for some other short term gain, it’s worth weighing up what the bigger picture looks like and what the ultimate cost might be. Difficult truth can be handled with tact and care. Mistakes need to be owned. And if it’s not safe to be honest, start thinking about an exit strategy.

For myself, I’d rather tell the truth as far as is humanly possible, come what may. But I do not currently have an attic, much less any Jewish girls depending on me for their lives. In that scenario, you can bet I’d be lying my ass off.

Ethical Revenge

There’s nothing like someone else acting in a shoddy way and messing you about to make a person want to get their own back. A little poetic justice is a natural enough thing to want, or some chance to even the score, get one over… The worse the treatment, the pain or humiliation inflicted, the more intense the desire to backlash may be.

It’s a circumstance where the innate response and the honourable one don’t always sit well together. What I might want to do, and what I would be comfortable with having done, are seldom the same. I know people who will lash out in anger and who feel that being angry entitles them to lash out in whatever way they please. In terms of people I would like to get even with, these represent some of the cases most on my mind at present. But if I do the same thing, lash out in anger and frustration, I’m replicating their behaviour, I’m reinforcing it as acceptable. I am no better than them. So where does that leave me?

What I want to offer today is a concept I have stolen from my other half, Tom. It’s a beautiful, ethical, responsible model for revenge that can be fine tuned to fit any circumstances. The gist of it: I will have my revenge by being better than them.

More often than not the person dishing it out doesn’t notice if you’re being a far more decent human being than they are. Part of what motivates the desire to settle scores, is the desire to have the other person recognise that they have wronged you and deserve their punishment. In the short term, being a better person is unlikely to deliver this. What it does give, with absolute reliability, is the smug satisfaction that comes from knowing you did the right thing. Calmly walking away rather than shouting back. Doing what you were supposed to do despite the trouble you are given. It’s the kind of response that won’t give you sleepless nights.

Now, let’s go on to imagine that other people are aware of what’s happening. Party 1 has behaved badly, party 2, despite this, has persisted in behaving well. You don’t have to ask people to take sides in that kind of scenario. You don’t even have to mention what’s going on. Actions speak for themselves. If how others see you is important to you, then recognition that you act well even when under attack, is a prize worth having. The measure of your attacker will stay with them. There can be consequences to this, and they can be far reaching, and they can include other people making it clear to the one who wronged you, that they are indeed out of order. A little justice can sometimes then ensue. And even if it doesn’t, you’ve still got room to imagine it. Sometimes the idea of justice is the closest we can get to the actuality of it.

By behaving well under attack, there is always the possibility that the person giving you a hard time will be shamed and/or inspired into doing better themselves, which is a win for you.

Most of us who have dared to even inch off the beaten track will at some point very likely encounter ridicule and derision. Pagans and creative people alike get a lot of unpleasantness from people who see no value in our dreams and aspirations. Of course we can’t be full time druids, or authors, of course we will never find publishers or success. The best route to revenge here, is to prove them wrong. Stick to your values, your dream, and prove that you can make it work. Your success will speak for itself.

Last but by no means least, be happy. Enjoy your life, take pride in yourself, know your own worth and smile a lot. If you encounter people who are determined to put you down and give you a hard time, you can be sure that the one thing they most want to see is you laid low. You are to be defeated, abject, at their mercy, grateful for any small thing they deign to bestow upon you. You are to prove them right. By undertaking to be happy, you deny them this, and if you want ethical revenge, your own refusal to be beaten, cowed or diminished is the best solution imaginable. This way, you can only win.

Druid Ethics

One of the responses to my Daily Devotions post raised the issue of being guided through the day by your ethics (thanks Bish for the prompt there!). What are druid ethics? Are they simply the ethics held by individual druids, or are there going to be values held in common? I’m tempted to say it’s usually going to be a bit of both. Perhaps the defining quality of druid ethics is that we collectively think we should be ethical, and we take individual responsibility for figuring out what that means, one moment to the next.

Where the common ground lies, is in the things we value. Environmental protection, peace, good relationship, community, beauty, truth, and justice are all things that druids prize. So ethical behaviour, is behaviour that supports those ideas and manifests them in the world. Where it gets complicated, is in how we understand ‘best’. A good example of this lies around food. Some druids are vegans because their ethical stance demands a life that does not feed upon the lives of animals. Some druids are vegetarians because that best reflects their ethics and beliefs. However, other druids prioritise local sourcing, or producing their own food in which case they may be omnivorous. It can be argued that mixed farming is more sustainable than only growing plants. In England, we have moors and meadows that have evolved alongside thousands of years of animal husbandry. To step away from that would be to damage a whole eco system. There are no simple, clear, right answers. There are however plenty of answers we can agree on – food waste is abominable. Over packaging is not a good thing. We should not be paying slave wages to producers in developing countries. Artisan foodmakers are preferable to big factories turning out insipid and banal edible foodstuffs. Whatever our precise ethics, the druidry underpinning it will push us towards trying to find sustainable, fair, healthy, creative ways of feeding ourselves and our tribes.

We can apply the same ideas to any aspect of our lives. How we shop, how we travel, how we speak to those around us, how express our emotions, what we expect of others, how we run our households, raise our children, interact with our neighbours. Every moment is an opportunity to explore and express our ethics. Which calls for high levels of awareness. For me the most interesting issues arise around conflict and error. When everything runs smoothly, it’s easy to express your ethical intentions. But what happens when you misjudge? Or when your strongly held ethical convictions do not sit at all well with the strongly held ethical position of the next druid (that food example being a classic). You can be passionate without being a fundamentalist. You can argue and discuss without attacking another person. If we are serious about peace as an ideal, then what we do around our other beliefs must be guided by this at all times.

For me, what enables this most, is doubt. Of all the values I hold as a druid, doubt is perhaps the one that serves me best. I am never oversure about anything. I do not believe I have any kind of monopoly on truth, or wisdom. I know what my own experiences have taught me, but I don’t imagine that will all hold true for all people in all situations. There’s always the possibility for something else. I hold my doubt very closely. And with it, I am open to hearing what other people think. I am willing to be proved wrong, to be talked round, or shown a different perspective. That doesn’t mean my position is infinitely malleable or that I have no opinions of my own. More that I recognise everything I hold as opinion. I’m conscious that this century’s indisputable ‘fact’ is next century’s laughable mistake. I do what I can from the position of what I know, very aware that I can be wrong, and that situations change, and that nothing is certain. Most ethical positions seem to be based on a certainty of knowing what is best, not only for yourself, but for everything else. The more work I do with my own doubt, the more I appreciate what it has to teach me. I can’t say it’s the best way of exploring, but at the moment I think it’s a very powerful tool to have in your hands.