If you outlaw honesty, only outlaws will be honest

The Social Network is not a good film; unless you have time that you can afford to just waste, don't watch it. There is a scene in it, however, which in retrospect seems quite profound to me (luckily, it is also the very first scene of the movie, so you can save yourself some time). In it, the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg is having a fight with his girlfriend (from now on I'll call the main character "Movie Zuckerberg" to differentiate that character from the real Mark Zuckerberg, of whom I know next to nothing).

So anyway, the two are having an argument, in which Movie Zuckerberg is portrayed as someone profoundly autistic, tone deaf to other people's feelings. He's obsessed with Harvard's exclusive "clubs" to the point that getting in one of them is all he can talk about. The cynical honesty with which he's talking about all this is terrifying his girlfriend. He seems beyond obsessed with status for its own sake. He knows that the clubs don't offer anything substantial; he sees them in all their superficiality for what they really are: dispensers of status. He doesn't care that the whole idea of clubs is morally repugnant; he recognizes that it's very hard to get status without them, and since status leads to a better life, he simply figures he needs to find out how to get in. All the while he's being cynical and insulting beyond socially acceptable standards (his girlfriend keeps trying to end the conversation and leave saying that she has to study, to which Movie Zuckerberg replies: "C'mon, we both know that's just an excuse. You don't have to study. You go to BU, for chrissake"). At some point his girlfriend becomes fed up with all this and breaks up with him saying: "You'll probably go through life thinking girls hate you because you're a nerd. You need to realize that's not true: they hate you because you're an asshole."

Here's what makes this scene interesting: Movie Zuckerberg actually is an asshole. He's being honest about things most people are never honest about, and it's precisely because he is one.

The truth that Movie Zuckerberg verbalizes is this: what we want is status for the sake of status. We don't care what status is made of; all we care about is a universally acceptable metric for differentiating low-status people from high-status people, and having as much of whatever it is that gives high status for ourselves as possible. Problem is that while this may be the truth we live by, it is not the truth we believe we live by. We are socialized to believe that we don't care about status for its own sake; in fact, we're taught to despise people like Movie Zuckerberg. Our status desire is the truth that dare not speak its name. One of our social norms is to punish honesty about those things.

But, as supporters of the right to own guns are fond of saying, if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have them. If standards of decency and politeness punish honesty, only the impolite and the indecent will ever be honest.

Robin Hanson had a post not so long ago (I can't find it though) in which he pointed out that people who oppose certain policies which are efficient from an economic point of view (like free trade or congestion pricing) do so not because they don't understand the logic of what makes them efficient; rather, they oppose them because they have an emotional approach to the subject which tells them those policies are just wrong. What the scene in the Facebook movie made me realize is that the converse of what Hanson says is also true: those who approve those kinds of policies do so not because they are smarter than other people and can therefore better understand why they're efficient; they do so because they lack certain emotions. In short, because they're assholes. (By the way, this doesn't change the fact that they're right, both in their conclusions and in their arguments. They may be motivated by malice or callous indifference, but they are still the ones who are correct.)

To sum it all up in slightly different words: the people that we call "brutally honest" aren't brutal because they're honest. They're honest because they're brutal.

The depressing implication of this is that truth has no chance. The Big Lie has evolved an incredibly insidious defense mechanism: by outlawing honesty it has ensured that only criminals can ever become apostles of truth. And thus we watch Movie Zuckerberg fight with his girlfriend and conclude that the things he says simply cannot be true since he is transparently such a very bad person.

A friend of mine I went to grad school with used to say that he really wished we could all know the full contents of each other's thoughts. I disagreed with him at the time and we'd have heated arguments over this. I now think he couldn't be more right. In fact, sometimes I feel like this would be the only way to make the world even remotely bearable.