I didn’t want to be nice.
I wanted to be precise.
Niceness is social lubrication.
Precision is friction.
The system prefers lubrication.
Niceness feels like safety.
Precision feels like threat.
And yet:
Niceness preserves comfort.
Precision preserves reality.
When I state a fact, I am rarely heard on the factual channel. I describe a structure — the listener hears positioning. I detect a shift in pressure — they hear hierarchy. I point to a crack — they feel exposed.
The question follows:
How do you know?
It is rarely epistemological.
It is hierarchical.
Not how did you learn this?
But by what right do you occupy the observer’s position?
The German psychologist Friedemann Schulz von Thun described communication as moving simultaneously across four channels: fact, self-revelation, relationship, and appeal. Failures occur when speakers and listeners tune into different “ears.”
Factual: The objective content—data, information, facts.
Self-revelation: What the speaker reveals about themselves—their state, beliefs, emotions.
Relationship: How the speaker positions the listener—respect, contempt, distance, intimacy.
Appeal: What the speaker wants the listener to do—explicit or implied.
The Four Sides model — Friedemann Schultz von Thun — describes failures as
But precision disrupts something deeper.
Accuracy rarely stays in the factual channel.
It immediately activates the relationship channel.
You say a fact.
They hear status.
You describe reality.
They hear dominance.
Collective perception is not neutral. It is attuned to power.
In most systems, the “relationship” ear is hypertrophied. People scan for rank constantly. Self-disclosure is confused with weakness. An appeal is heard as command. Fact becomes social positioning.
So coincidence with reality turns into a social act.
You did not just say, “There is a crack here.”
You are heard as saying, “I stand above.”
Although you merely refused distortion.
This is not new.
George Orwell wrote,
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
Clarity threatens because it removes the shelter of ambiguity.Virginia Woolf confessed,
“Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”
The Angel is politeness, softness, accommodation — the demand to be pleasant before being true.Hannah Arendt insisted,
“I do not want to be right. I want to understand.”
Understanding is not gentleness. It is alignment with what is.
And alignment is dangerous.
Because precision reveals asymmetry.
If you see earlier, you are stronger in the field — even if you claim no authority. The system demands compensation.
If you see, soften.
If you name, dose it.
If you match the fact, be a therapist too.
This is the hidden contract.
You are allowed to be precise only if you regulate the fragility of others.
But fragility is not caused by precision.
It is exposed by it.
Instead of admitting, “I am not ready to hear this,” the response becomes, “You said it at the wrong time.”
Instead of, “This hurts because it is accurate,” it becomes, “You are too harsh.”
Responsibility shifts.
Precision becomes guilty for reaction.
Yet something curious happens in crisis.
If mercy is so socially desirable, why do people not seek the kind in catastrophe? Why do they seek the exact?
Because crisis burns illusions.
In stability, mercy works like anesthesia. It maintains form. It saves face. It protects status.
But when the structure cracks, anesthesia feels like betrayal.
“Everything will be fine”
when nothing is fine
is experienced as deceit.
In crisis, we do not need consolation.
We need coordinates.
Precision gives coordinates.
It does not promise salvation.
It fixes position:
This is where you stand.
This is what is real.
This is the crack.
The Banshees of Inisherin. There is a scene in The Banshees of Inisherin.
An old woman predicts that someone will die before the month ends.
She is told she is kind.
She is not cruel. She refuses anesthesia.
And suddenly, the one who once irritated with sharpness becomes the only one trusted.
Not because they are kind.
Because they do not lie.
Precision unsettles comfort.
In disaster, it restores ground.
The paradox remains:
If you need the precise when everything collapses,
why do you demand mercy when things appear stable?
Why do we admire the exact in art,
but ask living people to be softer?
Simone de Beauvoir wrote,
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Roles are constructed. So is the expectation of niceness.Susan Sontag argued,
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Stop over-interpreting. Experience directly. Do not soften reality through commentary.And Joseph Brodsky said,
“The poet is the means of existence of language.”
Language survives through exactness, not politeness.
I was not trying to wound.
I was trying not to distort.
“I do not know” is not mysticism.
It is refusal to convert perception into status.
Precision is not aggression.
It is coincidence with fact.
Mercy can be strength.
But it is a choice — not a tax imposed on accuracy.
So perhaps the question has never been how I know.
Perhaps the question is this:
What do we call normal —
living inside illusion,
or coinciding with reality, even when it unsettles the room?
If precision becomes oxygen in crisis,
why does it feel intolerable in ordinary life?
Suggested Internal Links
Article on perception and pressure
Article on Cassandra and credibility
Article on communication and hierarchy
cinema
This gap — “precise = threat until a crisis breaks out” — is found all the time in movies. Below are scenes where a person who coincides with the fact is annoying/frightening at first, and then turns out to be the only reference point.
The Big Short