I can’t believe you just said that: The truth about why people are so rude

In early 2015, a man named James Allen went for a job interview at a regional PVC windows installation company.

He emailed the company for feedback, and must not have done it quite right because he was surprised to receive the following reply.

James,

Sincere apologies for not replying to you today, as it happens I actually have a job, and other things to do with my day other than reply to you, when I already had the misfortune of wasting 30 very long minutes of my life speaking to you; not only the most inappropriate person for this job role, but probably for any job role you will spend the next few years applying for, only to get rejected as soon as they meet you.

You are without doubt one of the most irritating, rude, obnoxious and arrogant people I have [had] the misfortune to meet, and your email just solidifies this. Also, for an old, aesthetically challenged guy with no teeth you have an unbelievable amount of confidence!

So you say, you didn’t notice the word ‘professional’ on our website … believe me, if I had been anything other than ‘professional’, I would have told [you] what I was actually thinking which was ‘this guy is an absolute cunt, get the fuck out’. But no, alas, I stayed ‘professional’. I only wish I’d have seen your CV beforehand, to save us both the time, as I would probably have noticed your main job role was ‘professional prick’.

The woman who wrote that email was Sarah Haseler. She runs the windows company and is a successful part-time weddings and corporate events singer too.

She had already taken against James Allen for the way he’d acted in his interview. When she then received a terse and critical email asking why she was yet to contact him – presumably to offer him the job – she had just that day read an interesting article suggesting that when you get angry, it is a good idea to write down all your feelings and what you’d like to say. Better out than in. So she did.

She wrote her email and it felt good. Her fingers must have tapped away at the keyboard in blind, glorious, cathartic fury. It was therapy.

And then she wrote a proper one, full of business-like phrases along the lines of ‘Unfortunately, on this occasion’, and so on.

James Allen received the above email and probably had to read it a few times to make sure it was really happening. He started to show it around. The papers picked up on it. ‘Is this the rudest job response ever?’ asked the Mirror, and just about everybody else.

At least if you go by the teachings of Dr Brad Blanton, self-confessed ‘white trash with a PhD’.

I first became aware of him in 2007 when I saw him interviewed by Nazanin Rafsanjani on Showtime TV’s This American Life.

In Virginia, Blanton was running for Congress. He was a psychotherapist who practised ‘radical honesty’ – a form of only telling the truth, no matter how harsh, believing that to do anything else is to trap yourself in a web of self-deceit.

RAFSANJANI: Can I ask you any question, and you would tell me the truth?

BLANTON: Sure. Shoot.

RAFSANJANI: Have you ever had an affair?

BLANTON: Yes. I was also one time in a group marriage. I’ve had homosexual experiences, a number of homosexual experiences. I’ve actually literally slept with hundreds of women. I’ve had, like, gonorrhoea, like, five or six times. I’ve had herpes for like 30 years.

RAFSANJANI: Have you ever tried drugs?

BLANTON: Yes I have. I’ve done heroin, I’ve done cocaine, I’ve done speed, I’ve taken peyote cactus, I’ve taken a lot of acid.

RAFSANJANI: Do you think America is the greatest country in the world?

BLANTON: No. I think America … I’m not proud to be an American. And I think anyone who says they’re proud to be an American these days is an idiot.

It might surprise you to learn that Brad Blanton did not go on to become a member of Congress.

But what a startling and refreshingly direct route to take. In the end, Blanton’s downfall seems to have been less about his insistence that anyone proud to be American is an idiot, but more the fact that in some of his workshops he’d been asking people to take their clothes off in order to discuss not just their bodies, but other people’s too.

And not in a ‘nice’ way, because being ‘nice’ is a road to nowhere. Being truthful, open and blunt is the only way truly to be free, says Blanton. Diplomacy is lying.

And he is right, to an extent. Diplomacy is the art of finding a smoother way. It is ‘the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions’, to quote Churchill, whom you could never really accuse of being Britain’s most polite man himself.

At first glance, the Radical Honesty website looks like it might be a cult of some sort. There are video testimonials, in which bright-eyed, perma-smiling converts talk in awe about how ‘being here and now with your own truth’ is the only way to be.

Recently, Blanton also did what lots of great leaders do and decided to start his own country: the United States of Being. He asked people to forever pledge their ‘lives’, ‘sacred honor’ and ‘fortunes’ to his cause, and so far 52 have thought that was absolutely fair enough.

But there’s demand for radical honesty. There are people who feel they need it in their lives. A nine-day workshop costs $3,000 per person. Each participant gives a detailed account of their sexual history, then ‘stands naked in front of the entire group, who are also naked, recounting these details while being recorded on video’.⁷⁵

Then the next day, they all sit around and watch the videos together, looking at their bodies and pointing out the flaws.

I admit I have mixed feelings towards Blanton’s work, because I feel it gives genuinely rude people an immediate get-out clause. A way of distancing themselves from their behaviour. That get-out clause is admittedly genius: whether famous or at school, rude people have found a way to say whatever they like, so long as they then claim it as honesty.

But it’s not honest. Sandra is not a bitch. You’re saying Sandra is a bitch.

With the ‘honesty’ clause, we have tricked ourselves into thinking that we somehow have to take other people’s opinions as fact. But it gets worse. Because we then have to applaud that person for having the guts to call it like it is.

You’re not Only Being Honest – you’re stating an opinion and shutting down the conversation. It shows a lack of confidence in your own argument. You don’t want to talk about it any further, you just want that cathartic release and to reach for the high ground. You have nothing more to say. You’re not Just Telling It Like It Is – you’re being a dick and asking people to praise you for it.

And more often than not, these ‘honest’ statements aren’t challenged, and that is something that can only come from fear. Fear of being the next person to receive an ‘honest’ assessment. Fear in our own, less strongly held opinions in a world where suddenly everyone’s got to have one about everything and they must be heard. Fear in putting our head above the parapet to offer an opposing view from a far weaker standpoint.

We admire those with confidence – we invite them to be our bosses, to lead our countries – but a whole lexicon of stock phrases has developed from this unpleasant conceit.

If you’re Only Saying What Everyone Else is Thinking – then consider the reasons why they’re only thinking it.

If you’re someone that says I’m Sorry, Don’t Suffer Fools – then you must have a very hard time when you’re on your own.

And if you end by waving your hand around and saying That’s Just Me, It’s Who I Am, I Won’t Change for Anybody, then well done, Kanye, but please know that everyone would like you more if you did.

One day, when I am in charge, anybody who has ever written or tweeted #justsaying will be gathered together, quickly executed, and forgotten – and yes, I fully realise I sound like Jeremy Clarkson talking about nurses.

For each and every statement I have just made, Brad Blanton would give me a small sticker to wear, on which he’d written ‘I am a repressed moron’.

I freely admit I don’t want to be videoed naked talking about my body with strangers or having to comment on theirs. I think I would struggle, focusing on whatever positives I could: ‘you have terrific nipples, sir!’; ‘what wonderfully smooth shins!’

Fact is, I probably do worry too much about other people’s feelings. But Blanton thinks I should hurt them. Because by hurting their feelings, I will be able to help them get past that hurt. He is on record on the Radical Honesty website as saying we should actively offend one another because ‘on the other side of that reaction is a conversation in which your mutual honesty creates an intimacy not possible if you are hiding something for the sake of someone’s feelings’.

So in my world, you’re a friend if you look after your pal’s feelings. But in Brad’s, you’re a far better friend if you call it as you see it and trust you’ll be able to take the friendship further and deeper.

It is such an intriguing idea with a real logic behind it that I find myself wondering if I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.

It isn’t just towards friends and family either. Brad says that if he sees someone – a stranger, say – whom he finds tremendously ugly, he will stride up to that person and say, ‘I find you tremendously ugly.’ Not just that, but he will then go on to give his detailed account of precisely why he finds that person so hideous.

Not because he’s a sociopath, but because he truly believes that while everyone else dances around the topic, the person he’s telling needs to hear the ‘truth’ and that their life will be better for it.

Free to say what you want, and free not to care when someone else is rude to you.

But what if I could immunise myself against rudeness? Or understand that I shouldn’t worry too much about it? What if I am a repressed moron?

Seminars espousing Brad’s teaching have sprung up all over the world in recent years, taking their inspiration from his book, also called Radical Honesty.

I find one happening soon in Dortmund, Germany, and then I realise that if I’m going to end up naked and videoed, I think that is an experience I should like to share with a friend. So I book two places on a three-day intensive radical honesty workshop taking place in a small room above a shop and then face the unusual task of convincing my friend Marc to accompany me.

The first night is what I imagine will be a cheese and wine and chit-chat evening in which the participants – about ten of us, it seems – will get to know one another.

The following two days will be made up of eight or nine hours of solo exercises, one-on-one sessions and intensive group confessions.

A week or so later we arrive in Dortmund, and it’s only now that I’m in the taxi on the way to the seminar that I begin to feel nervous.

I want to talk to Marc – who still doesn’t know he might end up naked this evening, talking eloquently about his genitals to strangers – but our driver is extremely chatty and angry about the amount of genetically modified food he predicts will soon be pouring into Germany.

As we speed through the streets, he tells us many intricate details surrounding international meat-based trade deals. Over and over. And every time he repeats a fact or finds some new meat-based trade deal fact to get all worked up about, I keep wanting to shout SHUT UP, YOU BORING MAN.

‘Yeah man!’ he says, shaking his head in fury. ‘To get a “made in Germany” stamp on your food it must have 80 per cent domestically produced content!’

THAT’S AN ODDLY SPECIFIC EXAMPLE! I want to shout, but again, I say, ‘God! How terrible’, and hope he won’t start again, but of course he does, almost every time saying one of the same three things in a slightly different way.

The problem is, Marc and I still haven’t sorted out our story yet. What’s our excuse for turning up to a radical honesty workshop in Dortmund? In reality, I want to see radical honesty in its purest form. By admitting I’m investigating rudeness I worry I might dilute that. I am beginning my radical honesty lessons, ironically, on a lie.

On that note, I will tell you what happened in this workshop, but out of complete respect I will change the names and identities of the people involved and anything at all that might identify them to others. What I will remain absolutely true to is what happened, what I learned and how it made me feel.

As we walked into a narrow beige hallway in what appeared at first to be a flat, we were welcomed in by our course leader, whom I shall call Horst.

Horst was wearing a joyless Aran jumper and he talked very quietly. He did not seem particularly pleased nor displeased to see us. He was entirely nonplussed by our presence. In that moment, I realised the radical honesty had already begun.

Horst led us into a small tiled kitchenette and pointed at a small plate of sliced apples.

‘You can have some,’ he said, with all the enthusiasm of someone pointing at a turd. Then he waved a bored hand over a jar of instant coffee, to which he said we were free to add thick, beige, vegan milk.

I began to realise this wouldn’t be a cheese and wine night. It’d be a coffee and sliced apple and beige vegan milk evening. And it was then that I noticed how silent the place was, which was all the more unnerving as through a door in the hallway I now saw six or seven men and two or three women sitting in complete silence on small plastic chairs. One guy wore slippers, but apart from him, no one wore any shoes.

Sitting in silence wearing no shoes, apparently, allows you to feel the floor, and if you can feel the floor, says Horst, you are more aware of your feet. Being more aware of your feet is really important, they say, though at no point does anyone explain why.

As we take our chairs in a room that looks a lot like the TV room from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had it been furnished by IKEA, it quickly becomes apparent that this evening will not be a casual meet and greet.

‘So ladies and gentlemen, we will begin by going around the room, and you will tell us your name, what you are scared of, how much per year you earn and how many sexual partners you have had,’ says Horst, and his deputy – Anders – gets his notepad out.

The room bristles. I bristle. I can feel Marc bristling next to me. I don’t think he realised I was taking him to Dortmund so he could tell people how many sexual partners he’s had.

But this is good. This is getting stuck straight in. I have never really known precisely where my comfort zone ends. Now I know for sure it ends somewhere just before Dortmund.

A young man decides to go first. He’s travelled a hundred miles to be here, and he says he can’t understand why people have a problem with him. He is very direct all the time, and tells them exactly how he feels. This, I suspect, is why people have a problem with him. Anders does not write down any of this, which I find odd. But as soon as the guy talks about how much he earns and how many people he’s slept with, Anders writes it down so quickly I worry he’ll break his wrist.

The next guy is in his fifties. He’s nervous. Finds it difficult to speak at first. But when he begins to talk of his colleagues, something crackles and slowly opens up inside him.

‘I can’t talk to them,’ he seethes. ‘I can’t tell them how I feel. I just remain silent.’

‘I want to say …’ begins the man, and then he grimaces and starts to wildly mime violently slapping his colleagues from left to right. ‘You are STUPID! You are BENEATH ME! I don’t talk to you BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING.’

The man goes on to say how many people he’s slept with and Anders nods a thank you, before – out of nowhere – the man goes one step further and tells us a very clearly defined thing he likes to do in private involving bottoms and it is so shocking that even Anders forgets to write it down.

But the man is scared. He has been truly open with a roomful of strangers. And it is oddly inspiring because we tell him how well he did and how difficult we knew that was.

People take their turns, talking of prostitutes, homosexual experiences, regret, loneliness and lost love. Of losing jobs because they didn’t speak up when it mattered. Of relationships with parents based on lies and despair. Of what they wished they’d said when they’d had the chance and what they’d like to say now.

One man pipes up to say he was doing a crossword puzzle recently and around 14 minutes in became sexually aroused, ‘which, I must be honest, I’m still working through.’

At this point I became a little suspicious of Anders and his motives. Why wasn’t he writing down people’s feelings, or why they’d joined the course? Why was he only writing down things that people might naturally feel could be weighted towards blackmail? Was he going to get his video camera out in a minute?

But perhaps it was a trust issue. By being honest about these very confronting, personal things, why not be honest about everything else, to anyone else? Why not tell the world exactly how you feel?

‘Hey!’ says the younger guy suddenly, pointing at the man on my left with an accusing face. ‘Why are you wearing shoes?’

Everyone looks at the man’s feet. It’s the slippers guy. He is immediately caught off guard. He looks at everyone else’s feet and realises with absolute horror that he’s the only one wearing shoes.

‘The email said we could wear haus-schus!’ he replies, panicking, looking around the room for support, hoping he hasn’t ruined everything by wearing haus-schus.

‘It did,’ I say, supporting him. ‘The email said you could wear slippers.’

‘No, I’m just saying, is there a reason why you are wearing them?’ says the young man. ‘I am just interested in why you are wearing shoes specifically.’

‘These are haus-schus,’ replies the other guy again, and you get the sense that he is almost welling up, that he is always under attack. ‘I went to the store and they were in the haus-schus section!’

‘They are haus-schus,’ says the man. ‘The sign above them said “haus-schus”!’

The young man sits back, confused that he’s offended someone yet again. He wasn’t trying to be rude, he thinks, he was just being direct. Why is everyone so touchy?

The offended man scowls and stares at his haus-schus, thinking ‘Why me? Why are people always rude to me?’

‘On the way here there was a taxi driver, and he was so boring, he just kept going on about genetically modified food. And I wanted to say, “SHUT UP! I did not ASK you about genetically modified food. I am NOT INTERESTED in your talk of trade deals. I want you to BE QUIET and LEAVE ME ALONE.”’

‘But I didn’t. I just kept saying, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And so did my friend Marc here. And both of us let the man dominate our journey, instead of just being honest and a bit rude and letting him know he had to stop.’

And as I speak, I begin to realise that I’m not actually making up an excuse for being here. This is genuinely how I feel. I’m talking about one journey but, really, I’m talking about all of them. I’m talking about my whole life. I was more concerned with being polite to that man than I was with creating a situation that would more deeply benefit me and my friend. I should have told him to shut up, or come up with a way of letting him know on an honest level that I was not interested in engaging with him right now.

Okay, I’m not revealing that I’m investigating rudeness, but it was rudeness that brought me here, and maybe it’s rudeness that will help me when this is done.

Because how many days of my life have been wasted with interactions like the one in the cab? Listening to opinions someone’s copied off the radio? Enduring tedious tales from a guy I’ve only just met and will never see again? Going out of my way not to appear rude?

‘I think I need to learn how to be more honest for my own sake,’ I say, and this is where it gets a bit weird for me, because I do start to feel a bit emotional. All these stories I’ve listened to – yeah, they were a bit weird, like the crossword one, but they were from the heart and they’ve opened up something in me.

‘And in the spirit of honesty and openness,’ I say as I end, holding up my coffee cup. ‘I have to say that vegan milk is fucking disgusting.’

It gets a laugh. Horst nods at me with a dead smile, acknowledging the stab at ‘humour’, then quickly looks away.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean, it was just there, I assumed it was all I could have?’

He’s offended. He’s the leader of a radical honesty workshop. He’s supposed to be unoffendable. He’s supposed to be encouraging my honesty.

Horst is acting like this milk was his milk. Like someone milks him before every session.

‘But thank you for sharing how you feel about it,’ he adds, which is definitely something he’s read off a radical honesty techniques pamphlet.

We move on. Throughout the milk exchange, one man has been looking my way the whole time.

He has an open, honest face. He looks like a really nice guy. Someone with whom I’d like to be friends.

‘Good,’ says Horst, though part of me thinks he’s probably had enough of the group’s honesty by now. Anders gets his pen ready.

‘I have been with very many women,’ he begins, leaning forward and for some reason now ignoring everyone else but looking straight at me. ‘I have been with many hundreds.’

I nod at him, as if to say ‘okay’, though I’m confused by why he’s aiming this at me.

‘I tell you my type,’ he says, and he tells us a very specific type of woman.

‘And of these women,’ he says, before going on to spell out exactly what happens when he is with them, for a very long time, in great detail, while never once taking his eyes off me.

It’s like I’ve been mistaken for the course leader or some kind of ‘woman’ expert, and now I just have to pretend I am. And because of this, because of these very intimate details being directed solely towards me, I can feel Marc next to me beginning to shake with silent laughter. But no one is looking at Marc. Everyone’s looking at the guy. And the guy is looking straight at me.

‘Sometimes they want me to do these strange things with them and I’m not into that,’ he says, and then he tells us what these things are, and I can sense Marc gripping his mug tighter.

‘Okay, sure,’ I nod again, like really, it’s just horses for courses, and we’ve all faced that dilemma, and all us woman experts know that.

And when the guy finishes, he looks straight at me and, welling up, says the thing he’s most scared of.

‘Okay!’ I say, at about ten o’clock that night, in the hallway, to the small group of radical honesty candidates with whom I’m standing. ‘See you guys tomorrow!’

‘And that,’ he says, putting his hand on my shoulder, ‘is the only lie you told this evening.’

I couldn’t discuss it with Marc in the room for obvious reasons, but there was no way we could return for a further 16 hours of intensive radical honesty.

The selling point for the idea is being open with others and getting all your feelings off your chest.

‘We all lie like hell,’ Blanton has said. ‘It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. It kills us.’

I see the value in that now, far more than I did when I first started looking at rudeness. I was dismissive of what I saw as pointless honesty in its entirety. How could you live that way? You would have to be sociopathic, unfeeling, uncaring.

But none of the people I met in the workshop were truly there for that. It wasn’t about dealing with other people. It was about dealing with themselves. I ended up genuinely liking every single one of them and going back would have compounded my own dishonest reasons for being there and stood in their way.

I don’t believe in radical honesty, though; I don’t believe that your life will be better if you disregard the feelings of others. I don’t believe slapping your colleagues from left to right and telling them they’re beneath you will really help you. I don’t think we should think it’s fine to be as direct as we want the whole time with never a thought to the other person’s feelings, even if they are wearing hausschus. I don’t believe we should encourage a scheme that propels a new rudeness to dominance.

What I think I found was that many of the people there that night were looking for ‘how to be’. They’re trying radical honesty because thus far they’ve lacked the tools that we’ve evolved over time to smooth out our relationships.

Diplomacy is lying, Blanton asserts. But diplomacy works. A world without diplomacy is a world at war. A society without diplomacy is just a load of rude people walking around insulting each other in the hope of being ‘free’.

Perhaps, though, I could take just an element of what I’d discovered and apply it.

Maybe it was time to be not radically honest, but just a little more forthright.

CHAPTER 17

The Honesty Clause

Should I just have told her to fuck off?