Honesty, Our Great Social Cancer

There's a scene in the film Revolutionary Road where Frank Wheeler (Leonardo Di Caprio) tells his wife April (Kate Winslet) that he's had an affair.
She asks him why and he starts explaining that he felt unappreciated by her and lonely, etc. April says that's not what she's asking. She wants to know why he's telling her he had the affair. He is stunned by the notion that she wouldn't want him to come clean, that maybe she prefers him to lie—in this instance, by omission. 

Admittedly, the movie is set in the mid-50s in an era that predated our national obsession with openness and honesty. It is our great social cancer. Most of the time when people are being honest they're either displaying reckless disregard for another person's feelings or indulging in cruelty gussied up as moral virtue.

No one is more abused by this wretched forthrightness than actors and indeed all artists who put themselves out there. The point was driven home to me recently when I attended a play featuring a friend of mine who was pretty poor. To put it bluntly, she was as stiff as a Popsicle stick.
A mutual friend who attended the performance with me came back stage afterwards and said to the hapless actor, "Thank you for inviting me." She said nothing more and it was appalling. But she is one of these individuals "who will not tell a lie."
Undoubtedly, it took a bit of effort on my part to come up with something positive without being wildly inauthentic, but I did. And even if there was absolutely nothing I could say that was complimentary and genuine, I'd invent something. (I can hear tongues clucking in horror). That's more than social grace. It's humane.
A line we hear all too frequently in fiction, film, and self-help books is "Don't you care enough about me to be honest?" The truth is (forgive me) "Don't you care enough about me to lie?"
-- Simi Horwitz