How Honest Helps Build Character

Are You an Honest Person?

1. How many lies do you get to tell before you are a liar? Explain

Telling one lie would make one a liar by definition. A person can make a mistake a lie once and regret it. A person can also make lying into a habit. The latter type is one who is going to be labeled a liar more than the former.

2. What would you do if you found $10,000 on the shelf beneath an ATM machine and saw you find it?

I would call the police immediately and wait there with the money and hand it over to the police.

3. People often rationalize their own dishonesty by saying, "That's why the world is, so why should I be different?" What do you think of this reasoning?

This sounds like ethical egoism—whatever works for me is okay. It is completely antithetical to virtue ethics or even duty ethics. The world is a vampire, as Billy Corgan once said. One should not strive to follow its example.

4. Is there anything wrong with a "small" lie to family members or friends to keep from upsetting them? How many times have you been caught telling a "small" lie to someone important to you? What do these "small" lies do to your credibility? What does it do to your self esteem when you know you have lied?

I do not like to tell any lie. I am often blunt with people. I tell them don’t ask if you don’t want the truth before I say anything that I know might offend them. That way they know beforehand that the reply they get might not be something they like—and if they don’t want to hear it, they don’t push. I have been caught a few times telling small lies, and it never made me happy, and that is partly why I try not to tell them anymore. Telling even a small lie is like taking a knife to my self esteem and cutting it. I hate that.

5. Someone people don't count little lies as lies. How do you feel about that idea? How do you think it affects others to be lied to-even a little bit?

Little lies can be very bad, not only because it can make one into a habitual liar but also because it means one is constantly deceiving oneself and others. Telling lies is like putting a blindfold over others’ eyes and over one’s own eyes as well. It is not a wise thing to do and it creates distrust.

6. When people are dishonest with you how does it make you feel?

It makes me angry and I also feel vulnerable and insecure, like I don’t know if I can trust that person anymore. However, I try to be mature about it and call the person out on it and tell them not to do it anymore otherwise I may not be able to trust them in the future. I feel that if I am direct like this and speak my mind it helps the other person to realize why dishonesty is not good for relationships.

7. Lying ruins relationships-it is a fact. Do you agree? Has that ever happened to you? Explain

Yes, of course. Relationships are based on trust and dishonesty undermines trust. If someone is lying, it is like the whole relationship is fake and not real. Why be in something that isn’t real? Then you are living in an illusion willfully and deliberately lying to yourself. Better to be honest and be hurt momentarily than to lie and be in a fake peace.

8. What is your definition of an honest person?

Someone who tells the truth.

9. How important is it to you that your friends be honest?

Important—but I don’t expect the moon. People are people and it is not even very easy to be honest with oneself let alone with others all the time. So I try not to hold people to a strict standard, but I also make it clear that I appreciate the truth.

10. If you discover a co-worker is cheating by misrepresenting what they have done at work or has been stealing from the company, does that make it okay for you to cheat and steal too? Explain

Absolutely not—how does someone else doing something wrong make it okay for me to do the same? God gave 10 commandments to Moses, and one of them was do not steal. If it was wrong for Moses and his people, why should it become right for me just because a coworker is doing it? That doesn’t make any sense.

11. It has been said that dishonesty turns us into phonies, but honesty allows us to be real. What

does that mean? Do you agree?

I don’t really like labeling people as this or that; I just know that dishonesty does correlate with a type of superficiality and people who are dishonest tend to come across as inauthentic to people who are honest. An honest person, however, can also be superficial and be completely okay with his own superficiality. Yet this seems to me like a type of dishonesty. An honest person, in my eyes, should strive to overcome superficiality.

12. Simply being honest makes life a lot easier. How could being honest make you life easier?

It means not having to navigate all the BS and political correctness that applies to everyday life nowadays. People act like there is a “right” thing to say based on whatever the Twitter mob says is right at any given moment. Well, there is a right thing to say, and it’s the truth. It’s not “my” truth or “your” truth or “his” truth or so on. It’s THE truth. It means be objective and stop trying to judge everything according to your own standard. There is a standard that exists outside ourselves by which we should judge. Knowing that standard gives one a clear and straight and narrow path to walk—and having that path makes life very easy because you won’t get lost if you stick to it.