“Honesty is the best policy.”
We’ve all heard this phrase before. But let’s start by being honest with each other: We all lie. Lies are easy to create. Most of the lies we tell have no repercussions. They cleanse narratives of undesirable nuance, they spare our friends and ourselves “avoidable” pain. We lie in many different ways. We lie by commission by telling untruths. We lie by omission by discarding inconvenient truths.
From a young age, we are told that it is wrong to lie. And yet, when are we ever held to account? As children, most of us realized on our own, by watching the world, that the risk/reward structure of lying was squarely in our favor. By their very nature, and the human bias to accept what we are told, lies are rarely caught, meaning we usually get away with whatever we sought to use the lie to do.
There’s little incentive for others to even seek out lies- The consequences of them are usually not plainly visible. In the cases that they are, they often can’t be correlated with the lie that originated them, and the social stigma of being seen as a distrustful person means that these days, “Trust but verify” has largely been replaced with “Trust first, and only verify after something bad happens”.
Now look at the risk side. As children witness the actions of adults in their lives, they witness their values. And mass acceptance of lying is baked into American culture. The message that lying will not be punished is baked into our political system, our business economy, and the news media. So it’s no wonder that we lie as much as we do: There’s little risk, and loads of reward. When the conventional wisdom of our parents told us “it’s not worth it”, the realities of the world plainly told us the opposite.
What does this mean for us? I’m not a doomer who thinks that humanity is fundamentally and irretrievably broken. I’m a management scientist who sees that visible advantages baked into us in our youth have outweighed the opportunity cost of morality. This balance can be tipped back in the opposite direction with careful introspection and self-care to the state of our soul. We practice skin-care routine, why not practice a soul-care routine?
Of course, we all have occasional moments of moral clarity in which we pledge to be better people, but this sense of righteousness is often lost in the moment of decision-making where the usual risk-reward convenience structure takes over by default from years of psychological programming. The real question is how, in these moments, we can override this structure with a moral one even when there is no incentive to do so.
In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus learns of the sirens, a race of creatures that appear and sound as a beautiful woman, capable of hijacking a man’s better judgement and leading him to his death. Odysseus had the foresight to know that even his own instinct would not be able to resist the sirens’ calls when he heard them, so he ordered his men to tie him to the mast of the ship and not release him under any circumstances.
The siren of dishonesty calls to all of us. The desirability of convenience and reward that lies can grant us is so tempting that we will often go out of our way to use them whilst continuing to justify our actions and ease our moral conscience with “greater good” arguments to convince ourselves and others that it’s okay to lie, if you’re doing the right thing. And we will perpetually justify whatever we want to do as being the right thing to do.
How have I escaped this? I “tie myself to the mast”. I allow myself no arguments that justify a lie. No matter the sleazy claimed virtue of my garbage justifications, I stick to my principle of honesty. Principles are all we have. They define who we are. And just as a cheap boat needs constant patching, we are cheap people if we let duct-tape, jerry-rigged, elaborate moral constructions outweigh our principles. No “greater good”, no “game of chess sacrifice”. I am tying myself to the mast. Odysseus’s men were not instructed to release him if he “gave a good argument”. In fact, their order was the opposite.
If we want a more honest society, the other side of the coin must be holding others accountable to this when it may not be convenient, and not allowing them the latitude to tell easy lies and get away with it. We may understand the difficulties of their position, and their incentives for lying, but we have ourselves been lied to when society told us that these are acceptable excuse for lying.
I’ve been lied to a lot lately. Our administration lies to us by omission when they wait until the fall to announce changes they knew they were going to do, in order to trick us into staying here and giving them money that, by virtue of their lie, they did not earn honestly. They lie to us when they tell us that there will be no impact to student life, when student services have been cut across the board and student jobs are eliminated. They lie to us when they promise us a seat on a committee and willfully ignore us more than 3 times when we come to claim it. We may understand their incentives for lying, or their justifications, but we cannot allow that to convince us that lying is the right thing for them to do, or that they’re entitled to any less accountability for it than anybody else is. In fact, we know in our hearts that their position of higher-ed leadership amplifies their responsibility to tell the truth. That’s what separates leaders who are scientists and engineers from leaders who are useless politicians.
You can still be a polite, agreeable, rational, intelligent, and cooperative person while still calling out lies to the liar’s face. That’s the balance. Anything more radical and less polite are the actions of a complainer, anything less radical and more polite are the action of a pushover. The balance is an effective, high agency person with integrity. And that’s what I intend to spend my life being. I invite you all to join me and build a better place for ourselves.