What’s Your Relationship with Honesty?

If I asked you how honest you are on a scale of 1–10 right now, odds are you’d answer pretty high. You might be a little bit honest and admit that it’s not quite a ten, but there’s no way you’ll mark yourself on the lower end of the scale. If I dug a little deeper, though, and asked you how often you made excuses for yourself, how often you took the easy way out knowing that you shouldn’t have, how often you did what was good for you at the time instead of what was right, I bet the score starts dropping pretty fast.

That’s because the notion of old Jiminy Cricket, our conscience, doesn’t get much attention anymore. Sure, we’re all told not to lie to people as we’re growing up, but even then, that’s caveated with “it’s ok to tell a little white lie to protect people’s feelings.”

Even when we’re telling kids they shouldn’t lie, we’re doing it dishonestly.

This is reflected in the media and culture at large right now too. Honesty is seen as a value no longer worth having. The prevailing sentiment is that you do whatever it takes to win because that’s what the other guy is doing. He’s going to try and screw you, so beat him to the punch and get what’s yours.

Lying is bad enough, but right now, the biggest problem isn’t the lie we tell other people; it’s the lies we tell ourselves. That’s so worse because you aren’t trying to spare someone’s feelings or prevent an uncomfortable situation. No, you’re intentionally veering away from what you know is right and squashing the resistance of your conscience when it tells you that you’re doing the wrong thing.

It’s why the founders of Google could espouse their motto of “don’t be evil” with a straight face, even while they were helping the Chinese government censor the Internet from their entire population.

This topic has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, but what really brought it into focus is the current wave of Covid that my city is dealing with. It’s become increasingly clear that honesty is in short supply at all levels of our population, from politicians to the media to everyone else. In short, we’ve been in lockdown for 5 weeks now with no end in sight.

Let’s look at some of the behavior we’ve seen here:

• I know a woman who works as a public servant — entirely from home-sent her child to school because the guidelines said she was an essential worker and wanted a break. The rules made her technically right, but she‘s smart enough to know that it’s not the right thing to do at the moment.
• Despite public health orders, people have continued to visit family in other households, causing superspreading events. They know they aren’t supposed to do it, but they lie to themselves that either there won’t be any consequences or that it won’t be that bad.
• Infected people have lied to contact tracers, delaying them from isolating new cases.
• The media’s dishonesty is unbelievable. They’ll report on any complication from a vaccine while asking politicians in press conferences why more people aren’t getting vaccinated.

In every one of these cases, people knew what the right thing to do was. Instead of doing it, they took the route of dishonesty and found a way to excuse it. For those of you that, as a reflex, respond along the lines of “you don’t know what their situation is, you can’t judge,” this is exactly the problem. Honesty and doing what’s right isn’t about what your circumstance is right now. You’re either being honest, or you’re not. It’s that simple.

You know it in your gut, and don’t tell me otherwise.

The problem with all of this dishonesty isn’t just that it’s dishonest; it’s the fact that people will wash their hands of it afterward because they don’t want to feel the guilt. That only makes it easier to do the next time. And every time you give in to that temptation, it’s going to make your life harder. Maybe not right now, but all that dishonesty is going to pile up, to the point that your life is substantially worse as a result.

It’s going to stunt your growth as a person because instead of facing your mistakes honestly, you turn away from them. It’s going to make it impossible to improve your life because you won’t improve yourself. Everything you do will be cloaked in deception because dishonesty is going to start to become your norm.

Because that’s what dishonesty does, it prevents you from seeing and interacting with the world, and more importantly yourself, clearly. You find that you can make an excuse for just about anything and that nothing is ever your fault. You can even turn it so far around that you’re a victim, that you’re just doing your best and that you had to be dishonest.

We see honesty as a weakness…it’s not.

We’ve always seen the honest guy as the sucker, taken advantage of by the Wall Street shark ready to fleece them of their money, or the manipulative co-worker using them as a stepping stone, or the lover who cheats while your back is turned.

The problem is, it’s just not true. If you go through life with that attitude that everyone is out to take advantage of you, so you’d better do the same, that’s how your life is going to turn out. You’re going to bring it upon yourself because that’s the way you engage with the world.

I’ve always been a fairly honest guy, but I’ve bent the truth on occasion like anyone. In the last couple of years, though, I’ve made a conscious effort never to lie — whether it’s to myself or someone else, even when it’s difficult, even when it makes me feel vulnerable, even when I feel like it might not turn out well for me.

And you know what? I’ve learned that honesty isn’t a weakness; it’s a damn superpower.

It’s a superpower because you’re telling the world, “this is me. This is who I am. You might not like it, but you can trust that it’s real.” It’s better for your relationships, career, and goals; it’s better for every part of your life. It robs the manipulators of their chance to hurt you because you’re not hiding anything or engaging in dishonest behavior.

It’s actually like protective armor because whatever might happen to you, you know that you control your soul and that it can’t be corrupted by people or circumstances or lured by the easy win.

You know that you make decisions not because they’re easy but because they’re right. Most importantly, you become acutely aware of your shortcomings and what you need to fix to be a better person because you listen to your conscience and don’t make excuses when you’ve made a mistake.

What being honest is not.

While I’ve talked mostly about being honest with yourself, something else bears mentioning here. Too many people think honesty is obnoxious and in your face. You have to tell people how it is all the time; that’s not what it is at all. Honesty, as I said above, is like armor. It protects you. It’s not a damn sledgehammer to wield indiscriminately. Here’s an example:

If a work colleague is giving a presentation and they ask how it was, I’ll tell them the truth, but here’s the key: I’ll tell them the truth, recognizing that it’s the truth as I see it. I’ll tell them the truth in the most caring way possible, knowing the effort it took them and how hard it might have been. I’ll tell them the truth in a way that I feel will help them the most.

I’m not going to bluntly tell them that it didn’t land for me or that it could’ve been better, or any number of insensitive ways of doing it. That’s not being honest; it’s a jerk.

And for that reason, I’m not going to offer what I see as the truth either. If someone asks my opinion, I’ll give it to them honestly, but I’m not going to push my honesty on them when they don’t ask for it.

So, are you going, to be honest with yourself?

For some of you, this might hit hard. If you’re the introspective type like me, you’ll probably sit there for a while stewing over this. That’s good. If you get up from your chair and move on without giving it a second thought, without doing any self-reflection, I hope that pesky conscience rears its head from time to time and niggles at you. I hope eventually you’re forced to acknowledge and deal with it.

Because the truth (in my eyes) is that the world needs to repair its relationship with honesty, and that starts with you.