Honesty IS Sacred (SIM #75)

There were a few responses to last week's SIM on hypocrisy (#74). I wanted to share a couple of them in the spirit of making us think; here was the first, almost in its entirety:

The "gotcha" form of the hypocrisy trade has been around for a long time. "See! He/she doesn't follow his/her own principles!"

Trump made that game obsolete. His intentional acts of hypocrisy are power displays. "See!  I don't even follow my own principles! No one cares! There's nothing you can do about it!  Ha!"

Some of Trump's opponents get hung up on the fact that he is a hypocrite (or a criminal) and they can't believe he gets away with it. They don't understand that he's not playing that game anymore. Every audacious transgression is a demonstration of his power over his base. They understand what he is up to, intuitively, and they cheer him on.

Sometimes politics is about showing that you are right on a moral or an intellectual level (for example, that you are less of a hypocrite than your opponent). Sometimes it's just about raw power (I am going to do this because I want to and you can't stop me). Republicans seemingly understand this dynamic better than Democrats, possibly because a disproportionate number of Republicans (as compared with Democrats) are born into positions of power that is not the result of any kind of moral or intellectual superiority (e.g., inherited family wealth/business ownership).

Trump is like a CEO who has control over his board of directors. He isn't going to be removed. That has nothing to do with the moral or intellectual quality of his leadership or his ideas. It's all about power.

Another friend's response leads directly into this week's musing.

It’s the breakdown of cultural norms and ideals. Power persuades, convinces and sells! Honesty and integrity are (unfortunately) not a sign of strength and analogous with success!

If this is mostly right, and I tend to think there's good evidence for it, then it's no wonder we're seeing such a breakdown in trust within our communities, from local to national to global. In addition to dancing around it the past couple of SIMs, I've written about honesty previously, most substantively in SIM 10 - Intellectual Honesty, SIM 29 - Efficiency of Trust, SIM 57 - Lies & Damn Lies, and SIM 61 - Winning with Trust (a hopeful counterpoint to honesty and success being at odds).

I seem to value intellectual honesty more than most and it likely constrains me at times, as I attempt to hold myself to an unobtainable standard. But if I drop the intellectual part, it's the importance of honesty that I think needs to be elevated back to its proper status as truly sacred. One of my biggest frustrations as a seeker of balance and peace, is how frequently I think we misconstrue and/or misapply what should be sacred. I can't envision a sustainable humanity without some form of trust. I believe trust ultimately depends upon honesty.

I believe there are benefits to many of the traditional, underlying values stemming from religion; educating and promoting those things that should be held sacred is powerful. I'm not religious myself and also see the use of religion as frequently attaining levels of blatant hypocrisy, so I’m not suggesting a return to religiosity gets us closer to valuing honesty. Yet, in what's become a more secular society, I believe we should work to be more intentional about the values we treat as sacred. To me, sacred implies that we set expectations and standards for holding ourselves and neighbors accountable and if truly elevated, we admire and aspire to resemble the people that most embody the sacred.

Tying back to my friend's comment about honesty not being analogous with success, it seems to me that we're often treating success as more sacred than honesty. This is a perilous path. Within a small community, we often figure out who's trustworthy fairly efficiently and tread carefully when we suspect dishonesty and/or disingenuity. We naturally develop local-level accountability. I think this is extremely difficult to navigate when we move away outside our familiar communities. I view cancel culture as an unfortunate byproduct of trying to hold people accountable within a large community. Making it particularly unfortunate, this accountability is often for views on individual topics, with very little attention paid to honesty. I'd much prefer if cancel culture tied its intolerance to dishonesty, although even then, I believe we should be appropriately forgiving for ignorance and mistakes; I've always found intentions to be important, albeit leaving much ambiguity in interpretation.

We need to find a way to elevate honesty within our social, economic and judiciary systems; we're allowing dishonesty to be overly effective and powerful.

Josh