Benedict Arnold, Trustworthiness, and Deep Diving Into The Core Of Radical Honesty-Part Three-

Benedict Arnold was a traitor of the American Revolution, but not in the way you might think. The 13 members of Congress and the states they represented were notorious for gobbling up loyalist land and money. Whenever an American showed continued loyalty to the British, they were hanged or chased out of town. This was Joseph Reed’s job as a lawyer, who was living in the seized manner of Grace Galloway - an older woman whose husband had been convicted as a loyalist.

Joseph Reed led Congress on a witch hunt against Benedict Arnold, and when I say, 'witch hunt,' I want to clarify that most of the charges against Arnold were fully made up. All 13 charges were embellished, and some were just silly. Take being ungracious to a militiaman, for instance, or preferring a loyalist company to patriots. The two real charges that stuck despite having no evidence were the ones Benedict Arnold acknowledged. Those two were allowing a ship to leave Philadelphia while the port was closed because Arnold had money invested in it and using public wagons to move trade goods. And again, he was being accused by Joseph Reed, who would vacation in enemy-occupied territory three years earlier when it looked like Washington might not win the assault on Trenton just in case he needed to sneak off to join the British if Washington lost.

During the trial, Arnold tried to reach out to Washington for help. But Joseph Reed had anticipated this. Reed threatened Washington that he wouldn't call up the Pennsylvania militia to reinforce Washington's war effort if he wasn't given time to dig up dirt on Benedict Arnold. So, Washington stayed on the sidelines. Eventually, Washington would come forward, but not to defend his friend Arnold against Joseph Reed and Congress. Washington would come forward to use Arnold's defection to the British as a rallying point. Washington would publicly turn Arnold into the Judas of the colonial army. Washington, who had received letter after letter from Arnold warning that he was near his breaking point, called Arnold's defection treason of the blackest die. Washington even encouraged anti-Arnold parades in Philadelphia, where anything Benedict Arnold had ever done to help the American cause was rewritten or destroyed.

A few weeks after Arnold's treason, Washington would send an agent John Champ to recapture Arnold so he would be tried and hanged in public to add to the anti-Arnold pro-American fervor. That's a lot of action from a general who couldn't be bothered to help his friend during a trumped-up trial just a few months earlier.

_________________________________________________________________________

Reading through Benedict Arnold's letters, one gets the sense that he wore his heart on his sleeve. As we'll discuss, every word Arnold spoke on the battlefield seemed to be an honest, knee-jerk reaction. Good or bad, the man just didn't seem capable of censoring his thoughts, ambitions, or annoyances. So, what if we all lived like that? What if we are all more impulsive or couldn't lie, like the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar.

Did you know there's a name for that kind of honesty? It was pioneered by psychotherapist Brad Blanton and involved telling the truth no matter who it hurts. Today, we want to know what that would look like. What if Todd and I practice radical honesty? To answer that question, we have three myths.

 Myth One: Why do we even lie as humans? Wouldn’t our lives be better if we were just all straight shooters?

 **To read some of Benedict Arnold's letters, click here.

 Todd: Joe is a professional evaluator of speeches, and he's competed on a high level as well as given feedback. A lot of that is telling the truth, right?

 Joe: Yes, but you have to start with positives. You have to let them know that you want them to succeed, and you're on their side no matter what they deliver on. You want to learn from and tell them how they can improve gently.

 Todd: Why can't you just tell them? Why do you have to sugarcoat it?

 Joe: I don't think of it as sugarcoating, but you're right. If I was being more direct, I might start with what they could improve.

 Todd: The problem is if you just tell him the truth right off, they're not going to listen. And we have evolved a lot to become cooperative individuals. And humans are not the only species that do this; many different ones have an extraordinary capacity to cooperate, like bats and rats.

Joe: So, it's like a temporary cooperative altruism.

Todd: Now, humans share information. We talk and gossip to show our reputation and connect with different groups. It helps you get ahead socially.

Joe: Right, it's social grooming, and it's also a survival tactic. So, are you telling me that gossip, social grooming, and cooperation all tie back to lying and social lubricant?

Todd: It is. People will not listen to you much if you're too blunt, too honest, too upfront, or too transparent. It's important that you misrepresent yourself a bit so people will listen to you. The problem is a liar, someone who tells mistruths and starts to believe this deception themselves. They start to believe this is actually true, even though they just lied.  It's like they're putting a gloss on it, becoming like an actor or actress getting in character and playing this role out and seeing it all the way through because they've already represented themselves this way.

Joe: So, if Benedict Arnold had been socially agreeable, he might have gotten Horatio Gates on his side, and he might have gotten the generals to listen to him.

I value my interactions with people and how they feel when they're with me. I want them to feel good. I want them to like me. We talked about being an actor and having different voices in previous episodes (code-switching). I don't think that is dishonesty. A bad lie or being somebody who lies about themselves and their own accomplishments is, though. In this role, you're trying to make yourself more agreeable using gossip and trying to make it seem like altruism. The opposite of that is what radical honesty is about, living without lies. Psychotherapist Brad Blanton says the world would just be better if there were no more lies and thinks this is the only real path to authentic relationships. This is also not just being honest. It is shouting out what little things you're thinking at the time. He thinks that being polite all the time and not telling people the truth is soul-deadening.

Myth Two: What about our relationships? Wouldn’t our marriages be sublime if we had to say what we thought when asked, “Does this make me look fat?”

When we were preparing this episode, I found more negatives than positives to radical honestly, especially when it came to sexual thoughts being shouted or conversations of the sort. But the one positive one was the more honest you were to someone, the more honest they became with you. So, you can have authentic, deeper relationships than walking on eggshells worried about what everybody thinks, but I don’t think that entails being 100% radically honest. That tends to do much more harm than good overall.

Do you think practicing radical honesty is more likely to make people entrenched? Meaning, defend themselves rather than open them up? We think so. According to this article, the author said it was exciting to be honest 100% at first, but humans are not conditioned for this. A life of real radical honesty is filled with so many confrontations every day. They might not be huge ones, but they're relentless, and they just keep coming. Now, surveys often indicate that 9 out of 10 Americans admit that they lie regularly and habitually. In addition, 93% of people lie at work and 35% cheat on their spouses. So, this radical honesty hasn't taken over yet.

Myth Three: What about our personal finances or the business world? How would it look if CEOs had to stand in front of Congress and instead of answering, “I don't know” 90 different ways, they had to admit, “Yeah, we know we were gathering data on everybody, but we got so rich guys; it was awesome!”

Believe it or not, sometimes it pays to not be honest. If you're going to be radically honest, you end up being hanged as a traitor. Overall, honesty is a moral choice. One of the core values business people tell themselves is that if I do things the right way, people will trust me over time. It'll be good for my business. Now, we choose virtue to be honest. So, people close to us will trust and respect us. But what the studies have shown is when it comes down to the money part, if you must pick money or morals, most of the time people choose the money.

I wished this was the part in the podcast where we say we're all better off being Brad Blanton or Benedict Arnold because we're richer at the end of our life for it. But that is not actually the case. Overall, there are different buckets here, such as your personal life, love life, and friendships, which we believe are the most important buckets to be honest with. It's important to be honest because that will align you with people who have the same values as you. But on the business side, that's not really the case. So many times, cheating and lying pay off, such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

We talked about this in previous episodes, but honesty makes you healthier. It can lead to greater health and less stress. However, in business, not being honest can sugarcoat issues to make yourself look good. Keep in mind that lying about something in business will often come back to bite you in the long run, like getting bad reviews on a product. I think the only time in business you can't do that is when you have too much at stake, or you have a brick and mortar. If I go to a local teriyaki shop here in town and give them a bad (justified) review, you can literally reduce their business by 9% or something like that. In short, everyone lies, both personally and professionally. But some things you can do to cut back on lying is by monitoring yourself more and cutting it down 50% or more over time. This can significantly help your health, social life, and professional life. You can also try to do some level of radical honesty, but in business, I don’t think radical honesty can flourish here.

Joe: Do you want to get to how this radical honesty served Arnold? Arnold sent his last appeal to Washington Arnold, warning Washington what he was going to do. Again, when he “betrayed” America, he had a stake in the Charming Nancy, a ship that he allowed to leave port during lockdown because he had money riding on its cargo. But he had seen others like Phillip Skylar mix military dealings with business too, and Michael Troy from The American Revolution podcast says it just looked like it was his time at the trough. It wasn't illegal, and that lockdown was something he was ordered to do. He got himself appointed to West Point around the time where Peggy Shipman introduced Arnold to John Andre. He asks for a position after the trial (found guilty) of these two minor charges. Here, Arnold arranged to sell the West Point information to the British out of anger, weakening the area's defenses. When he goes to pass on that information to John Andre, Arnold doesn't screw up. It was John Andre who got captured and hanged as a spy. The British hated it because John Andre was a very popular man. And so, Arnold fled to the British. He becomes a British officer, even though he wasn't taken seriously because he was blamed for the failure of capturing West Point, not John. So, this is something else that I missed from history class; Arnold gets away and retires after being snubbed by British society. They think he's a failure. They think he is a mercenary and not a real patriot of either side, but Peggy Shippen, the woman who introduced him to John Andre, tells these little social niceties that Arnold is great at radical honesty, and he's been labeled a traitor for it.

Todd: She's good. She's trying to sell this guy to both sides as he is limping through the party complaining about his back. I mean, he's a tough sell. So, it's safe to say she may have told some exaggerations.

Joe: Once the war ended, he applied to be in the East India Company, and they say the purity of his conduct was in question. And again, they called him a mercenary. So, he became a merchant again, and he would eventually die living in London in 1801. He was 60 years old, and he was buried without military honors because the British saw him as a mercenary, not a military man.

Todd: I guess I thought he would have been captured and hung or something instead – buried in an unmarked grave.

Joe: Right. There is a grave for him, and there's still a grave for his leg at the battle that he lost it at. Nonetheless, he ended up alright. He was still bitter and hated Congress, though. I want to read this little quote from Time Magazine: “Arnold consistently maintained that he defected to save America from an ineffective Congress, a cause that had lost its way and a bloody protracted Civil War.” Even in the end, he didn't see himself as a traitor. He saw himself as fighting with Congress and lost against a money-grubbing body of state representatives. Arnold wasn't so much a great traitor of the American Revolution, but he sure as hell galvanized Congress at the end of it. Because when Washington and Congress went on their little anti-Arnold parade, it reminded everybody that they just almost lost the war to one man. If they had lost West Point or if they had lost Ticonderoga early on and all those cannons Benedict Arnold had captured, Arnold is one of those people that if we took out of history, we would immediately lose America. He tied everybody with his betrayal back together. So, his radical honesty and his traitor status really galvanized us as a nation.

Final Thoughts

To cooperate is human, and to trick people into cooperating with us by telling a good lie or spinning a convincing yarn might be even more human than the cooperation part. Living an honest life will make you healthier. Be honest, and you'll live longer. You'll enjoy better relationships and retire with more money. Radical honesty, on the other hand, maybe not so much. Telling the truth, blatantly and boldly, no matter who it hurts, might be exciting at first. But even Blanton admits it can earn you professional scorn and it won't save relationships.

Radical honesty is, at its core, the most well-meaning way to introduce thousands of micro conflicts into your life. Radical honesty is telling your parents you're bored of hearing their old rambling stories. Radical honesty is telling your boss you] resent being dragged into meetings. It's telling your commanding officer you've got traitorous impulses or admitting to your superiors that you think they're buffoons and you can do their job better. Radical honesty is letting your enemy know they're getting under your skin.

Our world is built for casual honesty and clever stories. When our way gets blocked socially, maybe we should try honesty first to open that door with sincerity and maybe the occasional white lie. When that doesn't work, go ahead and pick it with cleverness. And if you must lie, lie with good intentions in your heart. “No dear, that dress doesn't make you look fat.”