Theory #2: The Invisible Tangled Web. Part B: The Broken Honesty Chain

You can find Part A of this theory below. Part B begins with a story about poker.

If you have ever played poker online, you are painfully aware of how many really annoying people there are in the world. You have probably also noticed that the annoying people like to do much of the talking.

I was playing in a low limit hold’em game a couple of weeks ago when a player lost a big hand because someone playing 10-4 offsuit had caught a card at the end. In this case, the winner, likely a beginner, got lucky. I don’t care to criticize the beginner, as he can play any way he wants. We were all beginners at one point.

The person who took the loss, who I will thusly call “The Loser”, couldn’t let his misfortune go without some harsh commentary. The Loser began unleashing a barrage of criticism and anger. He actually said :

“Players like you who those play crappy hands should all be shot. They shouldn’t be allowed at poker tables.”

Any poker player who thinks he will profit from killing off all the worst players needs to seriously consider the expression “Be careful what you wish for”, lest he wake up and find himself dead.

The table, led by The Loser, than got involved in a ‘holier than thou’ discussion about the “correct” way to play poker. It was more of a sermon than a conversation, and plenty of it was what I would call “questionable” advice.

I am not a great poker player by any stretch, but I have played a fair amount and read a lot on the subject. I may not be good enough to give advice, but I am good enough to recognize bad advice. It astounds me how much misinformation and poor ideas are tossed around poker tables on a regular basis. People with a poor understanding of complicated concepts have no problem voicing their opinions very strongly. Bad advice is listened to and passed on. Misinformation flies through the universe because people are not being honest with themselves about how strong their understanding of the game is. They are more concerned with projecting themselves as good players than actually doing the work to become good players. As I discussed in Part A of this theory, people believe they are telling the truth, because they have already lied to themselves before they got into the conversation. They aren’t admitting to themselves that they might not know what they are talking about. They can’t bear to consider that truth, even though it is inside them.

(My example in Part A tells me that I am not above trying to project myself as something more than I am. Come to think of it, where in the hell do I get off talking on a Poker Podcast anyway?)

What frightens me is the impact that all of this has. Poker is one of the very few things that I am well read on, and most of the things people say in casual conversation are what I would call suspect. Is this true of everything else? Is the world full of people who don’t know what they’re talking about: about poker, about life, about their relationships, priorities, careers, political beliefs, personal philosophies? One person’s misinformation gets tangled with another’s, and the situation just gets worse and worse?

If you picture the game of broken telephone, information is passed on in a chain over and over again, and the information gets distorted as time goes on. My concern is that the information is often dead wrong to start with. The chain started with bad information. If not intentional dishonesty, then at the very least flawed or broken honesty. These chains of broken honesty get passed on, interact with similar chains, and all the misinformation get tangled up with itself.

Here is what I think happens as a result.

Remember Sir Walter Scott’s expression “What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive”? I love that line. You get trapped by your own lies, and you get stuck making choices that you would not otherwise make in order to protect your lies.

If most deception is not based on overt lies, but rather on subconscious lies, the tangled web of deceit takes on a whole new, and more frightening, meaning.

I believe that all of us get tangled and trapped in webs of deceit that we don’t even know exist. We are forced to make decisions we would not otherwise make because we are fooling ourselves about our own motivations and priorities. Trapped in a tangled web of lies that we are telling ourselves, we have no wiggle room, no flexibility for being open-minded about new ideas or major life changes, and all the people around us are affected. We commit to decisions, relationships and careers that are not right for us. Different people’s webs are all tangled together. The end result: Bad friendships; Bad marriages; Bad careers; and, in the worst instances, Bad Lives.

There is an expression in the IT database world for this: "Garbage in, garbage out". If you start with bad data, no matter what you do to try and fix things or build a perfect system, you end up with bad data. And we end up eating each other's garbage.

I want to get untangled. I want a life of flexibility. I want to leave myself room to maneuver, and to grow. And so, after all this repetitive chatter, I give you Theory #2:

“Don’t get tangled in an invisible web of your own self-deception.”

And be naturally skeptical of what others tell you.

All any one person can do is to is try to be completely honest with him/herself. I want to try and understand my own motivations, my own insecurities, and all of the strange and wacky things that really make me tick. (Most of which I will never talk about here.) I want to start these so-called chains of communication, whether with myself or others, with real honesty instead of what I have called “broken honesty”.

I guess I could have summed this up just by saying “Be true to thine own self.” I clearly just like the sound of my own keyboard. Also, sometimes I need to go on my own long self indulgent train of thought just to see the wisdom in things that have already been said.

So much for being original.