17
“To be honest, as this world goes,
is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”
– Hamlet
Issue 17
October 24, 2015
Hamlet was right. If you spend much time reading the news, you spend most of that time reading about deceit in one form or another. (Think Volkswagen.) If you deal much with others, you deal with pretense and false appearances. (Think Madoff.) If you move about much in this world, you move about in distortion and exaggeration. (Think advertising.) If you want to be up to date with science and technology, guard your computer. (Think hackers, identify theft, and cyber crime.)
The news is unrelenting; one incident after the other. Cheating, deception, bribery, influence for sale. We honor yet abandon integrity. We praise honesty but cheat on expense accounts. We expect our colleagues and leaders to practice truthfulness and probity, but we will pad our résumés and profit from non-profits. We will cheat and lie for gain, and we will fabricate and cover up to protect our public image. Why so?
Nothing new; it has always been thus. Since the garden, the dominant force in our lives has been, is, and will be interest in our own welfare. Obviously and naturally. That’s how we survive. Self-interest guides and directs us, and that is why the world is the way it is. By itself this is natural enough. But when that self-interest is threatened, subtly or violently, natural and innocent self-interest turns into strife and aggression, into graft and corruption, into deceit.
That seems to be the human condition on a large or small scale, with groups and individuals. Groups may and sometimes do achieve admirable aims and intentions. Certainly individuals are able to and do intentionally rise above self-interest to practice an ethic of integrity, but generally we are not honest people. Maybe one out of ten thousand!
Honesty is not natural. It does not find roots in the material world in which we live and move and have our being, for ethics are not a matter of DNA or instinct or a proper diet. They are matters of choice, and overall, choice is guided more by self-interest than by moral and ethical codes. For an honest life, we must, as it were, strive to be unnatural.
