Truth and Trust: Absent malice?

In an earlier post I wrote about how we humans judge ourselves on our intentions, but judge others on their behaviors. We can't avoid this: we can only judge based on what we have access to, and we just don't have access to others' intentions.

When we see unfamiliar behaviors, we have even less than usual to go on. We flail around for some sort of theory about what could be causing the behavior. This is a big part of “culture shock”: whole groups of people are behaving strangely — what could they possibly be thinking? The stranger the behavior, the flimsier the basis for our theories. We try to understand the strange behavior based on our own default understandings of what might cause it. This explains my frustration and sense of betrayal at being “lied to”: in my familiar environment, only a certain kind of malicious intent could have generated the “lying” behavior. It was only over time, as I gradually came to understand more about Chinese relationships to “truth,” and my own, American, different ideas about “truth,” that I was able to see non-truth-telling as anything but malicious.

In order to have trust, I have to believe that your words are sincere. Before I got to know Chinese ideas of truth, and therefore of sincerity, I simply wasn't capable of thinking it was possible that a person could say something that isn't true and be sincere at the same time. The equation in my mind was simple: saying something untrue = lying; lying = insincerity; insincerity = malice. From one angle the logic is impeccable. The problem is that this is a distinctly American angle; inside the Chinese system we've been discussing, it just doesn't add up.

Take the case from an earlier post where someone tells their dying father he's going to be fine. In a Chinese context there's nothing at all insincere or malicious about this. Quite the opposite: it's a person's way of showing that they sincerely and compassionately care about their father's emotional well-being during the final days of his life.

From long and sometimes bitter experience I know how deeply ingrained American notions of truth are. Laying it all out in a blog post is easy; dealing in the moment with our own reactions to being told an untruth is entirely different. It requires an attention and a focus that needs serious practice over time.