brad blanton

Radical Honesty, The New Revised Edition: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

I was blown away by this brilliant book; it totally had me hooked. One of the things that I noticed when talking to Frank the natural was just how brutally honest he was, and that women found this trait very, very attractive. Even if they found him offensive at times, there was something about his disarming honesty that got under their skin. And this book explains what it is, and how to get it.

The author puts the boot straight into the curse of moralism as the cause of our obsessive self-critical thinking and resulting inability to be free to be ourselves, and act instinctively instead of regimentally. He cites two modern-day institutions as prime examples that perpetuate moralism: lawyers and the legal system, and the Catholic church; both of which are rich sources of clients in his psychotherapy practice. By pushing doctrines and sets of rules about what’s right and wrong, and how people should behave, these institutions and others like them enslave people to black-and-white thinking that goes against the inherent contradictions of life as a human being.

The result is that we end up stuck in our head, beating ourselves up over natural behavior and trying to work out analytically what behavior we think is right, rather than actually living authentically.… Continue reading…