Zinnia Jones

awkward-time-lady:

We had a discussion about this in my school’s GLBTQ center earlier this week. And we all agree, that something like this cannot be said from someone who holds a celebrity status. Her stating this sends us back decades in the fight for equality. 

But her personal view of her sexuality has to be taken into account and why she said what she did. Cynthia Nixon has chosen not to label herself. She is attracted to both men and women, that isn’t something she chose. However, from what I understand about what she said, she stated that at this point in her life she’s chosen to just be with women. Not that she chose to be attracted to them. The attraction is there, but she is actively choosing to only act on part of her sexuality. 

No one can define anyone’s sexuality but them. And for some, the choose to act on one aspect rather than another. However, care must be taken when stating things publicly because not all people (especially those who are anti-lgbtq) understand that sexuality is a very personal matter. 

Whenever someone says “Even if this is true, we shouldn’t acknowledge it publicly because it would put us at a political disadvantage”, or otherwise advocates lying and dishonesty (like omitting true things) in order to achieve a certain goal, they’re implicitly presenting themselves as being omniscient, even if they may not consciously realize it. They’re assuming that they will be able to anticipate any and every change of events that may come up in the future, and that they will be able to account for it adequately. They’re acting as though the parallel virtual reality of lies and half-truths they’ve constructed is so infinitely extensible, and they themselves are so skillful at shaping and adapting it for every contingency, that it will always remain just as believable as the real world of actual truths.

But you do not have that ability. No one alive does. The people who choose to deceive others in this way are banking on not being caught, whether through their own skill or the simple inattention of anyone else listening. Such lies may pass muster on the small scale, in matters involving only a handful of people who don’t care to verify the issue at hand, or couldn’t even if they wanted to. But when scaled up, cracks inevitably emerge. Using lies to control the beliefs of a few people on a narrow topic may seem easy, but it would be an enormous mistake to assume it’s just as easy to control the beliefs of an entire globally networked society on a hotly debated social and moral question. It is difficult to articulate how significant a mistake this is. It’s almost like assuming that, because your tennis shoes are sufficient to take you to the corner store and back, they will also enable you to walk through a lava flow as wide as the moon. In the latter circumstance, you simply will not survive. Neither will your lies - they will be destroyed by reality.

If you had instead chosen to present the truth to the best of your knowledge - without reservation, without leaving out aspects you feel might be inconvenient to your goals - then, should you be wrong about something, you always have the option of admitting you were simply incorrect or misinformed or mistaken. What options does lying leave you with? Should you be caught up in your deceptions when they visibly fail to correlate with reality, you’ll either have to generate more lies to give the impression that the contradiction has been resolved, or admit to something much worse than having merely made an error in good faith. You’ll have to admit that you actively worked to deceive people, to plant false beliefs in their minds, in the pursuit of your own ends.

Adhering to the truth endows you with the benefits of correction, openness, and simple honesty. Concealing the truth by constructing falsehoods condemns you to secrecy, suspicion, further deception without end, and perpetual wariness that your lies will be exposed by something you didn’t see coming. Lying means making yourself responsible for the stewardship of an alternative reality, and for ensuring that everyone believes it is reality. Do you really think you can do that on a civilization-wide scale? You can’t. You shouldn’t even think of trying.

Relevant reading: Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Protected From Myself”:

Because, when I look over my history, I find that my ethics have, above all, protected me from myself. They weren’t inconveniences. They were safety rails on cliffs I didn’t see.

I made fundamental mistakes, and my ethics didn’t halt that, but they played a critical role in my recovery. When I was stopped by unknown unknowns that I just wasn’t expecting, it was my ethical constraints, and not any conscious planning, that had put me in a recoverable position.

You can’t duplicate this protective effect by trying to be clever and calculate the course of “highest utility”. The expected utility just takes into account the things you know to expect. [emphasis added -ZJ] It really is amazing, looking over my history, the extent to which my ethics put me in a recoverable position from my unanticipated, fundamental mistakes, the things completely outside my plans and beliefs.

Ethics aren’t just there to make your life difficult; they can protect you from Black Swans. A startling assertion, I know, but not one entirely irrelevant to current affairs.

And Sam Harris in “Lying”:

Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

But the liar must remember what he said, and to whom, and must take care to maintain his falsehoods in the future. This can require an extraordinary amount of work—all of which comes at the expense of authentic communication and free attention. The liar must weigh each new disclosure, whatever the source, to see whether it might damage the facade that he has built. And all these stresses accrue, whether or not anyone discovers that he has been lying.

Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a direct accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons that they might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem like someone who is always dancing around the facts—because you most certainly are. Many of us have known people like this. No one ever quite confronts them, but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.

(via irrevocably-a-timelady)