How important is honesty in your life?

[MontyVeda]

But there are hard truths about everyone. The people who know them can weaponise them if the chose to, and wrap it in the disclaimer "I have to be honest".

Which is doubly ironic, because they are being dishonest with the person they are attacking, by pretending their motive is only "honesty", but also with themselves.

(My brother does this. Any vulnerabilities I share with him will be thrown back at me when he is angry. Bless him, sometimes he forgets I told him, and acts as if it is an insight he worked out himself. And yes, I did eventually stop sharing stuff with him.)

I had a friend who used to do that... and play his friends off against each other by revealing 'truths' told behind backs. Light the touch paper and stand well back, as he put it... i eventually ditched him as a friend, and as far as I'm aware, so did everyone else.

 

[Ian H]

I'd forgotten that, in moving house, I'd not brought any honesty with me.

 

[slowmotion]

I had a happy family background without any religious input, but I think that I'm reasonably honest. Morality doesn't enter in to it for me. I'm not on a quest to rack up Points with the Almighty, just trying to get along. I spent some years in boarding schools, and you quickly learn that you are almost certainly going to be found out by the other boys if you are not faintly honest. Some had the force of character to sustain being a sh*t, but most didn't. I've been fortunate in that I have not wanted some things that I don't have so badly that I have felt the need to bend my own rules. Also, I'm fundamentally lazy and I just don't have the stamina or memory to keep a load of dishonest balls in the air at one time.

Whatever honesty I may have is only a modus operandi that personally suits me.

 

[ADarkDraconis]

I strive for honesty in my work and my life. I am always up front with my clients, and any corporate accounts I have to deal with. Some of the higher ups do not like my straightforwardness, but I am not gonna misdirect or misrepresent anything whether they like it or not and I will call them out on their bullhockey. Honesty is very important to me.
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And that is why I can't stand our 'president' Trump. Just knowing he is the face of our country's representation and someone that our citizens and children are supposed to look up to makes me sick. Yes, most politicians lie at some points but his total blatent falseness and then denial in the face of evidence of it is sickening. Sorry to digress.

 

[swansonj]

I strive for honesty in my work and my life. I am always up front with my clients, and any corporate accounts I have to deal with. Some of the higher ups do not like my straightforwardness, but I am not gonna misdirect or misrepresent anything whether they like it or not and I will call them out on their bullhockey. Honesty is very important to me.
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And that is why I can't stand our 'president' Trump. Just knowing he is the face of our country's representation and someone that our citizens and children are supposed to look up to makes me sick. Yes, most politicians lie at some points but his total blatent falseness and then denial in the face of evidence of it is sickening. Sorry to digress.

On the contrary, what you say is not a digression, it gets closer to the heart of the issue. Lots of people seem to see honesty as a functional issue where the function is the effect it has on the recipient. But it also has an internal dimension. Once we abandon a sense of honesty for its own sake, we start sliding down the all-to-easy slope of giving in to self-delusion. And we end up convincing ourselves that the world really is how we'd like it to be not how it is, and we end up with Brexit, Trump, and runaway global warming.