Massive taboos would quickly develop around asking embarrassing questions, due to the Mutually Assured Destruction side of things.
Journalist: Mr. Senator, did you really have an affair?
Senator: Yes, you asshole, now I hate you. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
Journalist: I’ve been embezzling from my newspaper for fifteen years. Ah, crap!
If you don’t want your potential victim to ask you a terrible question, be very careful about asking it of them.
People with power, as suggested before, would limit the opportunity of others to ask them questions.
Indirectly, yes it does. Companies (which in other venues, advertise) underwrite some of the programming for NPR. Indirectly, those same companies get daily or hourly name recognition on NPR - aka advertising.
On the small end, it will be wonderful. People are way too damn sensitive. If someone doesn’t like what I’m wearing, how does it harm me to know that? Either I’m wearing it because I like it, in which case it doesn’t matter - or I’m wearing it to please them, in which case it’s useful information and I can change into something more appropriate.
The only two real issues are objectivity and power.
Ideally the VVV should force people to say the objective truths. They should be making “I” statements, and relating factual experiences rather than disguising beliefs and opinions as facts. Everything subjective can be expressed more accurately in an objective way. This is how people should be communicating any way.
Unfortunately, while the VVV will eliminate the bullshit reasons and immoral reasons for lying, that being a very good thing, it can’t eliminate the one good reason for lying - unfair balance of power. It’s not really good to have to tell criminals information that will help harm you, or rich or otherwise powerful people info that helps them take advantage of you. Granted, they must confess any crimes or bad intentions, but this might not be enough to overcome their advantage.
Fascinating. Either the VVV doesn’t work or you’ve already taken the antidote. You’re not a Republic Serial villain. I don’t think you’d explain if there was the slightest chance of affecting the outcome. You did it thirty-five minutes ago. DIDN"T YOU, YOU BASTARD!!!
I voted smoking cinder. For some reason, even though people know we lie, we always seem surprised when we find out.
Humans don’t like the truth and we’re violent and vindictive. We’ve been at war since the first man-ape picked up a pointy stick. It was only a matter of time.
Lots of internal unrest and civil wars especially in dictatorships as it turns out that almost no one is really loyal to the regime. Probably not many successful revolutions since the revolutionaries grow to hate and fear each other too much to organize properly.
No fiction of any kind is produced or distributed for the year.
Torture becomes widespread, since now it works quite well.
Virtually every good marriage is broken up (the bad ones are more likely to hold together because in an abusive marriage the opinion of the victim doesn’t matter) and relations between the genders takes a long term nosedive as each finds out how little the other actually likes them.
Virtually every child is traumatized by adults forced to in effect verbally abuse them.
Business and political organizations fall into disarray as the people in charge make it clear how much hatred and contempt they have for their employees and how badly they exploit them. Probably a lot of murders.
He’s not the only one. Spider Robinson did it (I think the story was Satan’s Children; it had the “paradise” scenario), and I recall another short story called Omnilingual where the result was the destruction of civilization, mostly due to people losing interest in relationships of any kind, including their own children. But that was more extreme because people couldn’t even tell lies to themselves.
I would have picked an option between 2 and 3. I don’t think there will be that much wars than usual, but there will be initially lots of violence that is not strictly limited to the personal
The reason I think that is because despite what incompetent liars we all think governments are, I think most people working in government are of the sort who are in a wink-wink deal with regards to other governments. Meaning that governments know people do shit things and believe shit things about each other, but they pretend they don’t and act accordingly.
Why does staunch allies like the US and Israel spy on each other? Such a thing in the past would be an act of war, or at least require some kind of official retaliation, either by withdrawing ambassadors, or tariffs on goods, or whatnot. But nowadays, we know everyone’s spying on everyone else, and everyone’s got a doomsday scenario planned in case you need to blow up your closes ally. Govenrments know this, so having presidents call other presidents a jackass isn’t going to change much in the way of feelings except that this stuff will be out in the open. The US and China pretend to be buddies so that the global economy doesn’t crash, but if we could hear the Chinese government’s thoughts, they’re probably laughing it up as our economy goes down the tubes. Of couse, Hu Jintao can’t call Obama and laugh at him, or do something to offend the US population, but they all know this to be true
Personally, the rest of us haven’t gotten to that level of apathy yet, so we’re going to take a lot of things and turn them into personal attacks. I suspect many families will be broken, people will stop being friends, and divorces will skyrocket. Lots more murders too
I’m looking forward to the part where the ninja army unleashes a giant fireball and brings the robot dinosaur to its knees, saving Mars, Earth and the nude Amazonian alien women, all in one sweeping motion.
You missed an option. Far from paradise, but I think things can only get better.
When people can’t lie, they will realize that they better behave in a way that they won’t be ashamed to have anyone find out. This will be true at the individual and national levels. Politics will need an overhaul as voters will have to realize that they had better vote for the person who will do the the best job rather than the one who pretends to best represent their special-interest niche.
However, there will be many hurt feelings in social situations (Does this make my butt look fat?).
Since the OP’s premise specifies the whole truth (i.e., you can’t lie by omission), I suspect the complete breakdown of society and all the resulting chaos would result. A lot of courtesy is lying only we dress it up as trying not to hurt someone’s feelings. Without lying of some form I don’t think we humans would be able to continue socially interacting with each other. It would be a world of no one talking of above brief two or three word sentences, the death of most literary and artistic pursuits, and eventually we would dumb down our minds too afraid of our inner thoughts being revealed.
The American legal system will be in a whole lotta trouble. Police can simply ask a suspect “are you guilty” and they will be ncapable of lying or keeping silent. But this will be quickly ruled a violation of their 5th amendment rights not to incriminate themselves.
I’ve just realized that under this scenario if a thief asked me for my atm pin code I’d have to tell him what it is. So I predict that I’d immediately buy stock in a biometric security company.
