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only time an individual can be harmed by either telling the truth or by staying silent is if he is dealing with an immensely irrational and immoral other. Such a person is rabidly intolerantto the extent that he construes anything short of active support for his incorrect or destructive plans, ideas, and actions as a threat. Furthermore, such a person will go out of his way to punish an individual who tells a truth the irrational person does not like or even stays silent when asked what he thinks about the irrational person's ideas and actions. No honest man owes such a person the truth; he should simply minimize the damage such a person could deal to him by stating a falsehood once and avoiding the person subsequently.

In most cases, however, other people have both rational and irrational attributes to them and to their activities. The honest man can remain entirely truthful with those people, provided that he does not tell them every single opinion of his about the subject in question. When he praises those people for their positive, rational attributes, he commits no dishonesty; he does indeed see value in the attributes he praises. When he omits criticizing their negative, irrational attributes, he also commits no dishonesty; he is merely staying silent to others while being honest about those negative attributes to himself. The rational man is not obligated to improve other people or to correct their deficiencies; his responsibility to himself dictates that he make the best use of other people's positive attributes and address the negative ones only insofar as they harm him personally.

The rationally selfish approach to honesty contrasts greatly with the stereotypical "brutally frank" policy. The "brutally frank" person is really a believer in the truth/reality and mind/body dichotomies; he "tells it like it is," irrespective of the consequenceswhether or not it benefits or harms him. The extreme "brutally frank" person will tell the robber-murderer exactly where his family is hiding, because he thinks he is obliged to give the exact and full truth to everybody. The more moderate and more typical "brutally frank" person will broadcast his every negative opinion of other people directly to them; in doing so, he will rarely convince those people to change their ways, and he will usually alienate them and forfeit the positive values that those people could have given him. In worse situations, he will create enemies who will obstruct him at every turn.

When

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