{"id":1752,"date":"2010-09-15T19:33:35","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T00:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2010-09-15T19:33:35","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T00:33:35","slug":"honesty-as-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1752","title":{"rendered":"Honesty as Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the local Socrates Cafe meeting, the group recently discussed whether honesty is still the best policy. Almost everyone made the point that 100% honesty is not possible. Fine, said the fellow who proposed the topic. But the real question, he said, is whether honesty should be the preferred<\/strong> policy, the general rule to which exceptions will sometimes occur . . . <\/p>\n

That idea sounded good to me; if you couldn’t trust anything you heard from anyone, social life would break down; civilized society would eventually collapse. There could be no schools, no economy, no employers, no government, no organizations of any sort (other than bands of thieves who know what to expect of each other). <\/p>\n

Someone replied that truth is a luxury of an affluent society; poor people have to lie. What else can you expect? To which I replied: affluence is a luxury given to the truthful culture. I’m not saying here that truthful people are always rewarded; but as a general rule, the more that a society values truthfulness (thus fostering trust), the more wealth-creating economic activity will occur.<\/p>\n

There is a book by Tamar Frankel called “Trust and Honesty: America’s Business Culture Crossroads<\/a>“, which makes the point that American society is becoming more accepting and resigned to fraud and dishonesty on the part of its business and government leaders. And this is eroding trust and causing lots of drag on our economy. Perhaps this didn’t directly cause the financial collapse of 2008 and the resulting mini-depression that we are still experiencing. But people like Bernie Madoff and businesses like Enron and WorldCom certainly did not help! <\/p>\n

When you meet poor folk who are honest, you know that they or their kids still have a chance. And when you read of the widespread petty corruption in the poorest countries in Africa and Latin America, you get the feeling that they aren’t going to emerge from their poverty anytime soon. And finally, when you encounter affluent people who are dishonest, you know that they or their kids are in for a fall, eventually. <\/p>\n

The bottom line: truth is still a good thing to stick close to, even if that isn’t always easy or possible, 100% of the time. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the local Socrates Cafe meeting, the group recently discussed whether honesty is still the best policy. Almost everyone made the point that 100% honesty is not possible. Fine, said the fellow who proposed the topic. But the real question, he said, is whether honesty should be the preferred policy, the general rule to which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,23,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1752"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1756,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions\/1756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}