“CAN WE CREATE A SOCIETY THAT IS CANDID AND HONEST”

Can today’s society exist with the concept of honesty, sincerity, integrity, ethical and without a façade of showmanship and playacting to impress others, without utilizing money and power to buy favors, distort the truth and twist justice, create injustice.

There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he’s crooked.

You’ve got to be honest; if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Is peaceful progress through rational improvement actually possible in our cruel, greedy world?

Urge to Honesty

The 'urge to honesty', as herein defined, refers to the internal nudge we feel that inclines us toward integrity. It includes: (1) a mental "pull" that draws us to prefer true over false; (2) private inclinations to choose valid over invalid reasoning; and (3) inner wants that crave fair play.

To expand this idea, the term 'urge to honesty' is a way to name our aspirations to know the truth, our predilections to tell the truth, and our inherent eagerness to learn. It means intellectual cravings that impel us to want to reason in a valid manner, to make efforts to arrange our knowledge in coherent order, and to apply what we know to what we do. It is an intellectual relish for sound rational thinking that prods us to acquire knowledge, cultivate commonsense, pursue unbiased critical thinking, and to practice what we preach. Viewed from another direction, our urge to honesty is our propensity to overcome ignorance, to avoid deceit, to reject manipulation, and to shun hypocrisy. All of these inclinations are included in the term "urge to honesty".

All rational people start out with a lively urge to honesty and most people keep a strong desire to live in an honest world. When talking to people face to face, it is a rare case to find someone with no candid responses.

Although normal humans, in ordinary circumstance, possess a strong natural bent toward truthfulness, honesty is not cultivated enough. Prejudice, conceit, cynicism, superstition, fear and con games frequently interfere with or squelch our natural impetus to be straight forward. The deepest and most far-reaching suppressions of our inclination to honesty stem from root errors promulgated through distortions in the rational style in society.

Honesty and Commonsense

Honesty and commonsense are counterparts. Learning the virtue of honesty requires the cultivation of commonsense, and the cultivation of commonsense presupposes a commitment to honesty. However, commonsense and honesty are not exactly the same. In commonsense, the emphasis is on ability and in honesty the emphasis is on resolve and action. It takes both to reach the quality of negotiation required to achieve a just society. Honesty and commonsense are so basic to building the trust required to make a good society that, without them, our creative efforts, time after time, bring the opposite of our hopes and dreams.