“You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes,

And your smile is a thin disguise.”

Back in the day, honesty was a quality much admired.  To be thought of as a liar was to be avoided at all costs.  To be called a liar was to invite a fight.  With fists, and right now.  It grew out of the need for survival in a hostile wilderness.  When news of the day was carried by word of mouth, those mouths had better be accurate, or people could literally die.  When life and death decisions were made every day based on the word of a stranger, honesty took a prominent role in the preservation of the society.

But that was then, and this is now as they say.  Lying has been raised to new heights.  It has become even fashionable.  Misrepresenting who you are is now an art form no longer confined to the actors on a stage.  We’ve finally reached the era of Mr. Shakespeare’s prediction:  “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”  Yeah.  We’re there.  What role do you want to play today?

Perhaps you want to overcome cancer and win the Tour de France more than once.  Just do it dishonestly and lie about it.  What’s the worst that can happen?  You get caught and invited to star on Oprah! ?  Could be worse. 

Get good enough at it and you can get elected to important government posts where you have access to other people’s money.  Lots of other people’s money.  When you can get a Senator from your own party to tell the voting public that you are “an unusually good liar” they’ll hand you a second term on a platter.  After all, we expect our Presidents to be “unusually good”.  Run-of-the-mill is not nearly good enough for us. 

But it gets better.  The practice of lying has become an art form in the Congress of the United States.  It reaches its zenith with the naming of the bills they pass into law.  A recent favorite is “The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012”.  This Act raised income taxes on the “rich”, and payroll taxes on everyone else.  Some “relief”. 

Dear Cowboy:

We appreciate your command of the English language, so let us point out that you are simply using the wrong interpretation of the word “relief”.  To provide “relief” you must merely “relieve” them of some burden which they are carrying.  Our Act simply “relieves” people of the excess cash that they so carelessly carry around in their pockets. 

Sincerely,

The Select Committee for the Careful Naming of Bills in the Congress of the United States

I guess they have a point.  I mean, what might have happened if all that cash started burning holes in people’s pockets all at once?  We don’t have enough firefighters to prevent  a serious catastrophe.  So, I guess it really is a relief that someone was thinking ahead.

It’s bad enough that distrust and deliberate dishonesty are eroding our social contracts.  Equally concerning is our investigation of our own universe.  It was still early in my grade school career that I was taught “the scientific method”.  This was the approach that scientists used to discover the truth about the world around us.  Simply put it taught us to: “Ask questions.  Research.  Determine the facts.  Draw conclusions”.  It resulted in the elimination of polio as a significant threat.  It got men to the Moon and back safely.  It created technological and medical advances that have made us the richest and healthiest people to ever live on this planet.  But it too is falling victim to the lie.  The new version of the method says:  “Here is the conclusion.  Research and see what facts you can find to support it.  Don’t ask any questions”.  Fundamental dishonesty.  And it limits our advancement.

We hear lots of complaints these days about the “decline of society”, and dozens of reasons from video games to single parent families to Hollywood.  But the root cause is based in a simple question and answer:

Q:  “Can I trust you?”

A:  “Probably not.”

From celebrated sports heroes to false parish priests to lying politicians to pseudo-scientists who manipulate the “facts”, we’ve come to distrust almost everyone, and almost every institution.  The devolution will continue until we start back on the road to being honest.  “Yes”, means “yes”.  “No” means “no”.  And we quit arguing about what “is” is.

“A commentary on the times is that the word 'honesty' is now preceded by 'old-fashioned'”.

--Larry Wolters