I don't pretend to understand

We all pretend so much more than we realize.   We pretend that we aren't pretending.

Perception, reality, what are we doing here? What am I doing here? What do we take for granted? Do we take for granted that we take many things for granted?  Yes! we do.  Do we take for granted that we aren't pretending (is that pretending?  Yes it is), Yes we do that too.

I can’t believe it. The paradigm is that we pretend to accept, during each and every conversation, every communication, every meeting of the bodies, that there almost always is a meeting of the minds.  We pretend that we are using words that have the same definitions for both speaker and listener. We accept and believe, or pretend to believe, what we hear – IN ORDER TO BE BELIEVED.  Or at least in order to pretend that we are believing. And we have to unless we want to be outcasts. We compromise our vocabulary and our standards of precision of communication.  Social interaction demands it.

Recall the myth, the "fairy tale" of the "honest man", the person that refuses to "lie", to tell a single falsehood? It always results in a tragedy. A bad end. An irony. A result that doesn’t seem to match the sentiments of the effort. The desires of the one striving to be "pure", honest, in other words – the one who stops pretending can't get along, can't be accepted.