What's the Difference between Sincerity and Sincericide?

The best thing to do is use truth to help and sincerity to build, and never to destroy other people or knock them down. Always remember that the truth is a powerful weapon, and you need to have empathy and social intelligence to use it right. 

And even if you’re not telling lies when you commit sincericide, even if you’re telling the truth, when you do that without thinking of the other person, or just to take a load off of yourself, you’re not helping them or using the truth like you should. What you’re doing is expressing objective realities that hurt other people when you bring them up at the wrong moment.

So does that mean you have to lie to avoid hurting people? The answer isn’t as simple as lying or telling the truth. There are times the truth won’t help or will make things worse. The best thing you can do is to communicate whatever it is you want to say, but with sensitivity. Find the right moment and context and figure out the best way to express your thoughts.

What happens to my brain when I lie?

A study published in  the journal Nature Neuroscience showed that when we lie, our amygdala (the part of our brain that’s active when we do it) starts to turn on less and less as we tell more lies. That is, telling lies over and over desensitizes your brain.

So we can conclude that when you lie, your brain relaxes and gets used to not telling the truth. But your goal isn’t to lie, your goal is to learn to pick out and communicate the truth. Your social relationships won’t last too long if you don’t put some kind of filter on the things you say. It doesn’t matter if the message you’re sending has a basis in reality or not.

As we’ve mentioned, sincericide doesn’t increase your abilities in anyway, or boost your self-esteem, or help you improve your social relationships. What actually does help you is sensitivity. There are certain truths you have to communicate with featherlike delicacy. And then there are others that you have to hold in until the right time, others that you should never share because they’re not so important, and others that you have to communicate bit by bit, so the person can take their time to absorb the information.

Is it good to always tell the truth, or is that sincericide?

The psychologist Claudia Castro Campos did a study about lying and got some interesting results. She showed that we all tell at least one or two lies throughout the day. And it doesn’t matter whether they’re big or small lies, the point is that we use them to shape reality in our favor. 

There’s a saying about how drunk people and kids never lie. That happens because your brain’s systems for inhibition and censorship relax, which is common for both drunk people and kids. It doesn’t serve the exact same purpose for kids as it does for adults, because they’re still developing, but our society and brain capacities prepare us all to hide the truth or put a nice face on it to soften its impact.

The people with good social skills are the ones who know how to be sincere without hurting anyone. It’s not lying, it’s just communicating the information the right way. It’s not about trying to be the most sincere person, it’s about being the person who communicates the truth best. And the best thing is to be faithful yourself without forgetting the harm you can do to others. Truth, communicated intelligently and with good intentions, will always be productive.