“Giving the runaround” means deliberately avoiding giving someone clear, direct, or helpful information—often by sending them from person to person or providing evasive answers.
I have watched folks take the worst news there is. A layoff. A diagnosis. A letter from the bank. They sit with it. They get up the next morning. They go to work.
Bad news does not break people.
What wears them down is never getting it straight.
Look around right now. Almost nothing comes to us straight.
A company says your data is safe, and the fine print says otherwise. A price goes up, and they call it an adjustment. A promise gets made in the spring and forgotten by the fall.
A public official goes missing for months. Nobody sees him but family and doctors. Then one day he shows up at work but nobody sees him. He says a few words by phone. He takes no questions. The phone hangs up again.
Whatever the truth of any one of those, look at what they have in common.
Every one of them is managed.
Somebody decided what you get to see. Somebody decided what you don’t. Somebody decided the easiest path was the half-answer.
And every time that happens, a message goes out underneath the words.
The message is this. We don’t think you’ll notice.
But people do notice. They always have.
They may not have the proof. They may not know the whole story. But they can feel a game being played on them. The same way you can feel a salesman working you before he finishes his first sentence.
That is where the anger comes from.
It is not the bad news. It is the runaround game.
Here is the part that I think gets missed.
A loophole is not an accident. Somebody builds it.
A rule gets written. Then a door gets cut in the side of it, just big enough for the right people to walk through. The rule stays on the wall looking fine. The door stays open.
Most folks never see the door. But they see who keeps walking through it. And they see who never does.
After enough years of that, people stop believing anything is straight. Not the news. Not the courts. Not the companies. Not the ones they voted for.
That is a dangerous place for a country to be.
When people believe everything is a runaround game, they stop trusting the honest ones too. The good doctor gets doubted the same as the crooked one. A true report gets thrown out with the false ones.
Distrust does not sort. It just spreads.
I have said on this site that a rule you can’t fail isn’t a rule. I have said to look past the arrow to the archer. I have said to test a rule by asking what sets it off and what it leaves behind.
This is why all of that matters.
People are not tired because life is hard. Life has always been hard.
They are tired because they can’t find solid ground. Every answer has a trapdoor. Every rule has a side door. Every statement has something left out.
And now we are handing more of our lives to machines.
AI will write the letter from the bank. It will answer the phone at the insurance company. It will draft the statement from the office that won’t take questions.
If we build those machines the same way we built everything else, they will be the best game players we have ever seen.
Smooth answers. Polished words. Nothing wrong you can point at. And a gap right in the middle where the truth should be.
That is the fear I hear under a lot of the fear of AI. Not that the machine will be evil. That it will be slick. That it will be one more voice telling us everything is fine while it isn’t.
So what does straight look like?
It is not complicated. Most of us learned it young.
Straight means you say what you know.
Straight means you say what you don’t know, out loud, instead of covering it.
Straight means you say where your information came from.
Straight means when you got something wrong, you say so, and you fix it.
Anybody who has worked a trade knows this. On a job site, the man who says “I’m not sure that line will hold” is worth ten men who say “it’s fine” and walk off. The first one might slow the job down. The second one might get somebody hurt.
That is what we built The Faust Baseline to do with AI.
It is a written set of rules for how a machine conducts itself. A person loads it into their own session. It tells the machine to name the gap instead of filling it. It tells the machine to separate what it knows from what it is guessing. It tells the machine to show its sources and own its mistakes.
In plain words, it tells the machine to deal straight.
I will be honest about what it can’t do.
It will not fix Washington. It will not make a company tell the truth. It will not close a single loophole in any law on the books.
What it does is smaller, and closer to home.
It gives you one voice in your life that is not allowed to play the game. One place where the answer comes with the gaps showing. One place where “I don’t know” is an acceptable thing to hear.
That may not sound like much.
But when you’ve been worked by every direction for years, one straight voice is worth more than you’d think. It reminds you what solid ground feels like. And once you remember that feeling, you start to notice more quickly when it’s missing everywhere else.
That’s where a lot of change starts. Not with a law. With people who remember what straight feels like and stop accepting less.
People can take bad news.
Give it to them straight.
The runaround games have gone on long enough.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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