I once went on a date with a fairly heavyset girl. I met her for coffee, and she was funny, outgoing, vibrant, intelligent, open-minded, and just enjoyable to be around. She was so great I asked her out again and then on our second date she blindsided me hard:

“Does my weight bother you?” she said

I almost spit jack n’ coke out of my nose. Quickly, I fumbled for a response to avoid lying.

“Don’t ask me that,” I pleaded.

She was having none of it. She looked my straight in the eyes and asked again.

“Yes.” I followed up by telling her that even though it bothered me I was trying to look past it.

We didn’t have a third date.

I think back to that occasion every so often and try to make sense of it. I know it means that I’m shallow. I also like to think it means that I’m honest.

Now, if one has any values whatsoever, shallow or not, one will be confronted on a daily basis between decisions to withhold judgment for the sake of social compromise. The more one’s values deviate from the norm, the more frequently this happens.

When this happens a person has two options. He either lies to the group (and himself) or faces the social consequences of moral deviation.

In a of social clones, such a problem would never exist. But in such a strikingly pluralistic one, like American society, people encounter it on a daily basis. Most people have an easy solution to this problem, they lie. They lie through their teeth, all day, and every day in order to avoid the social penalty. “Sure your tie looks great; I wish I had one myself.” “Oh I love your present Johnny.” “No, I don’t think there is anything wrong with driving a gas guzzler.”

And what happens to people who tell the truth? It’s simple, we hate them. In the English language, we have a word for honest people, they are called assholes. The more honest the person is, the bigger the asshole.

All of the previous examples have been relatively superficial. When someone tells the truth, however, about deeper issues, we hate it even more. If Suzy does not like to hear she looks fat in that dress she is going to go absolutely apeshit when Bob tells her that God doesn’t exist and she has the ethical awareness of a two year old.

So, when Socrates searches for truth and finds that the politicians imposters, the poets don’t understand their own work, and that the craftsmen are pretentious nonknowers , it makes perfect sense that the Athenians would have him put to death. Socrates was one severely engorged asshole.

I’ve never met a single person in my life who said that they liked to be around liars, but I’ve only known a handful that could tolerate the honesty of a Socrates, even from close friends.

The truth sucks, the more you seek it, the more people will hate you for it, and Philosophers are assholes.

In response to the above, one may say that a person could choose not to express his opinion in any of the above cases and avoid lying. Well, that’s fine, except not challenging the status quo amounts to passive acceptance and also imparts partial responsibility. If one sees a person drowning and chooses not to act, we may not blame him for the death, but he’d certainly have some questions to answer. If a person passively accepts a situation, when he holds values to the contrary, then at the very least he is lying to himself.