Honesty might seem like an escape from the Importance and Leveling Games: you say the truth, so you're not basing what you say on an attempt to get status, so you've exited the game, right?
Well, that doesn't quite work out in practice: First, you can only be as honest with others as you are with yourself, and being honest with yourself is hard: you just end up playing the games unintentionally. Second, honesty is never complete by the simple nature that you don't have time to say everything, so the things about yourself that you choose to be honest about create a picture that has implications for the Importance and Leveling Games. Third, lying isn't the only way to change what you say: you can change what you say about yourself by changing yourself. If you do different things, you can say different things about yourself without lying, and your actions can be motivated by the Importance/Leveling Games. And as a sub-point of that: being honest is a choice of actions that's usually geared toward winning the Importance Game.
Part of my conflict is that I appreciate the restraint and subtlety of the Portland approach, but I also appreciate the honesty of the LA approach. The compromise I've come to is to acknowledge that I strive to be part of the elite class, but promise myself that I won't be a jerk in pursuit of my ambitions.
I suspect that the honesty/subtlety of the approaches really only is differentiable at the low levels which most people are able to master. If you can't do that you can't play, of course, but being able to do that doesn't really differentiate you.
At the higher levels, I suspect LA involves just as much dishonesty as Portland, and as much subtlety to make those lies work in an environment where brazen-ness is the norm.
Well, that doesn't quite work out in practice: First, you can only be as honest with others as you are with yourself, and being honest with yourself is hard: you just end up playing the games unintentionally. Second, honesty is never complete by the simple nature that you don't have time to say everything, so the things about yourself that you choose to be honest about create a picture that has implications for the Importance and Leveling Games. Third, lying isn't the only way to change what you say: you can change what you say about yourself by changing yourself. If you do different things, you can say different things about yourself without lying, and your actions can be motivated by the Importance/Leveling Games. And as a sub-point of that: being honest is a choice of actions that's usually geared toward winning the Importance Game.