SINCERITY

Interesting excerpts from the book :

And thus we are conflicted over the value of sincerity today (Is it cheesy? Brave? Embarrassing?) because we find ourselves lodged between two moral feelings:

1) a privacy-liking tendency that recognizes the social mask as a necessary fiction (allowing for social or civil distance), and

2) the cloying Romanticism that longs to possess the self "underneath" the social mask.

If you go too far in the first direction, you get the radically superficial society of late seventeenth-century France, or the American 1950s, where everything was always great! Go too far in the second direction, of removing all social masks, and you get the bloodshed of the French Revolution or the over-self-exposure of our own age of revelation: Oprah, Springer, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Dr. Phil.

Insincerity pretends toward a democratic sympathy while engaging in aristocratic deceit. "Weak people cannot be sincere” wrote the aristocynic La Rochefoucauld. He was right- as he was about nearly everything else. Insincerity, while not intrinsically bad, exhibits an avoidance of confronting others and ourselves with uncomfortable frankness. It thrusts forward an image of how things are supposed to be rather than how they actually are. The bolder, more democratic move would be to simply offend. Among the well-bred, at least, it's increasingly hard to imagine a way back to that kind of civil directness. We're all trying to get ahead, and being nice is a big part of the recipe.

Being sincere is not always easy and it is by no means always good, appropriate, relevant, or even interesting. Timed right, sincerity can give rise to goosebumps and revolutions. Timed wrong, it can lead to uncomfortable silences and ruined careers. True, sincerity is not the best method for forward motion in business, law, entertainment, or politics. But for an individual person to have integrity and moral character-to exist as a being without wax, to feel that his or her inner life is a familiar and comfortable place - it is absolutely necessary.