...then you may well have forfeited contextually relevant rights.
Sometimes people cause others to feel cornered or threatened, without knowing it. That doesn’t make them bad people, but it would explain what might otherwise be “bad behavior” on others’ parts. And if anyone finds that people seem to regularly lie to them about certain kinds of thing, they should seriously consider the hypothesis that they are misunderstanding the interaction.
I read Chris’s post, saw an undisclaimed second-person pronoun telling me to respect others’ right to lie to me, and was like: “But… I didn’t do anything.”
I know what that feels like. I’ve had that response to a lot of things that turned out not to be about me at all. It hurts at first. I try to read those things a second time, when I’m not feeling indignant anymore, to figure out whether it’s actually about me, or things I do. I try to avoid the generic “you” and “we”, and abstract pronouncements like that, for exactly that reason—I don’t want to be misunderstood in that way.
Sometimes people cause others to feel cornered or threatened, without knowing it. That doesn’t make them bad people, but it would explain what might otherwise be “bad behavior” on others’ parts. And if anyone finds that people seem to regularly lie to them about certain kinds of thing, they should seriously consider the hypothesis that they are misunderstanding the interaction.
I know what that feels like. I’ve had that response to a lot of things that turned out not to be about me at all. It hurts at first. I try to read those things a second time, when I’m not feeling indignant anymore, to figure out whether it’s actually about me, or things I do. I try to avoid the generic “you” and “we”, and abstract pronouncements like that, for exactly that reason—I don’t want to be misunderstood in that way.