dear almeria 2

Dear Almeria,
I'm not saying it's inconceivable that you and your family are in some heightened state of grace, free of all untruth. I'm just saying i don't think i've ever met any family or group who had ascended to that level.
It's not about truth. It's about manipulation.
People use lies to manipulate. People also use truth to manipulate.
Sometimes a considerable level of non-manipulation is possible. This happens because we all gravitate to people who affirm some part of ourselves (and generally avoid people who don't). But there may be moments in your life when you have a flash of insight over the subtle ways we all manipulate. You may observe a friend interacting with someone else, in a moment when they don't know you're watching. It may strike you that your friend is behaving in a way you don't recognize. It doesn't mean that they aren't truthful when they're with you, just that they like certain parts of themselves that your company affirms, so those are the parts they constantly re-affirm with you. With other people, they seek different affirmations (or similar affirmations differently-flavored).
Is this dishonesty?
Or you may have a flash of insight into yourself...you may meet someone you want very much to like you, and you may realize that how you present yourself is flexible. In your choice of word and action, your mind is capable of incredible subtlety in how you present yourself, in order to be treated the way you wish. The way you present your truth, or the aspect of your truth you choose to present, has an enormous manipulative effect on the world around you. We're all too broken and scared to not take complete advantage of that (even when we don't realize we're doing it).
An example...when i gave my description of why i'm anti-religious, it was entirely truthful. But i could also have talked about invisible rabbits. If someone says there is an invisible rabbit who speaks to them, just about everyone would agree that there are no such rabbits. But if someone says they have an invisible father figure who is going to make them immortal, far fewer people in this society would call them a lunatic. Strictly speaking, both people are equally lunatic. Did i give you my anti-intolerant religious views instead of the invisible rabbit story, because i suspected the rabbit story would make you defensive and lessen the chance i had of ever hugging you? Probably. Were both equally truthful depictions of my thoughts on a certain topic? Yes.
Here's a more subtle example. Did i just go back four sentences, and change the word "holding" to "hugging"? Yes. Why? Because "holding" is just a little more intimate, and even though my naked revelations to you have perhaps dashed any chance i had of holding you...i still can't quite let go of that dream. So i changed holding to hugging, because it's more innocent and less likely to make you defensive.
Was "hugging" a dishonest choice? How can it be, when i do desire to hug you?
I realize, however, that the word "hugging" makes it imply that we've never hugged. Sigh. A flawed sentence not easily fixable. That's what happens when people use words to manipulate (which is virtually all the time).
So if you think your family operates free of lies or manipulation, you're perhaps underestimating how complex each of them are...and how deeply-ingrained lying is in this society. The average person commits dozens of lies each day, and hundreds of selectively-honest manipulations. And what of truths that are unspoken? Can you be so sure there isn't some hidden aspect of just one member of your family that might alter the way that person was perceived?
There's a part of me that hopes you will be made immortal, so that one day in another life you may realize that no one was ever truer for you than me.
love,
wrob