“People’s self definitions are arbitrary.”

A friend of mine once told me that they were honest.

And I believed them.  Until one day, they lied to me, and I confronted them about it.  And they told me, yeah, they are honest – I just didn’t understand what they meant by being honest.

Similarly, once someone asked me if I was honest about something, and I said, “no I lied” and I got myself in a bunch of trouble.

Until I realized that according to their definition of honesty, I was in fact totally honest, and that there had been no reason for me to get myself in trouble, except for the fact that my moral compass was so far to towards being honest.

The point is that when it comes to a person’s attributes, definitions are totally arbitrary and therefore have to be judged by our own standards when we are judging someone else, or if someone is judging us, we need to understand their standards.

Just a thought.

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