When I was in my twenties, I realized it was easier to get laid by being an asshole, so I did just that.<p>After a while, it hit me: this strategy made me deeply unhappy.<p>With time I observed a lot my mental process, mood and behavior, and I noticed that things like being rude, cheating, being selfish, etc. while paying off on the short run, were affecting my long time happiness.<p>Apparently I was not made for that.<p>Lying, is one of those things. I can lie. I'm actually a very good lier, and a decent actor.<p>But I keep it in check, doing it mostly because humans tolerate badly total honesty, or sometime because I'm weak. Otherwise I avoid it, not for moral reason, be because somehow, I find it strongly unsatisfying. It's not even a judgemental voice in my head stating that it's wrong. It just feels like writting with the left hand with a boxing glove: I can do it with training but it's just not the experience I wish for.<p>I met many people sharing the same experience, but I can't say everybody feels like this.<p>However, it seems a damn good reason to be honest, even when it doesn't pay.
I'm curious if the value of dishonesty has increased as police forces and their efficiencies have increased. In times past if somebody felt sufficiently screwed, there was a chance for quite severe consequences. People were armed, detective work was primitive, and local legal systems had a defacto defense of 'he deserved it.'<p>But today you can screw millions of people over and feel pretty safe about it. People are generally not armed, police work is of a much higher quality and a perceived quality even higher than that (CSI effect [1]), and criminal courts don't tend to consider justifiability except in an extremely narrow set of situations such as self defense.<p>It means that, in practice, the worst consequence you can ever expect to face for a bad action is the legal consequence for such. And even if everybody 'knows' you did it, so long as you can pose any sort of a defense to offer reasonable doubt you stand a pretty decent chance of getting off. And highly paid lawyers, alongside a convoluted and ever more esoteric legal system, tend to be pretty good at doing just that.<p>I'm not making a value judgement on systems of past or present. I simply find unintended consequences remarkably interesting. A reasonable argument that better police forces and improved legal systems could somehow drive dishonest and unlawful behavior would rank pretty high up there on something nobody would ever intend.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect</a>
If you're not honest, sooner or later people who are close to you will know that. Why should they treat you better than you treat other people?<p>Be honest so you can live with yourself. So that you have nothing to feel guilty about. So that you can reasonably expect and demand other people to treat you as well as you treat others.
Dishonesty only pays off in the short term. It basically requires you to constantly be on the move and into new social circles to avoid your reputation. Wherever you are, whether you're honest ot dishonest, your reputation eventually catches up with you. Which one do you want catching up with you?<p>Where I see people saying, "honesty doesn't pay off," what they are usually talking about is being a doormat. You can be an honest, nice person without letting people exploit you. In fact, it is more honest, to tell people "no, I can't do that" than to constantly bend over backwards to get people's approval.
The short version: The real reason, perhaps unpopular to state it, is that we will be happier, now and in the next life, with a clear conscience.<p>The longer version: there is a God, this life is not our beginning nor our end, we will be rewarded or punished according to our choices, someday everything about us will be known, but God can help us change now, to have peace, and happiness that lasts, families that are happy, tools to address the problems of life, and a reason for confidence to go on when things are really hard, etc, etc. That sounds like a sermon but I have thought about it for a very long time and considered my reasons for belief, which I have tried to explain:<p><a href="http://lukecall.net" rel="nofollow">http://lukecall.net</a> (a lightweight site, just text; it attempts to be a skimmable outline of info where you click what you find interesting, for more info.)<p>EDIT: And no matter one's worldview: after many years of observing, reading and learning from experiences, it seems so very clear that we all get farther if we work together and can help & trust each other.
This is such a depressing read on so many levels, but chiefly for me because I have a brain defect which compels me to be brutally honest at all times, think of it a Tourettes light. And when at times, it's seemed like bending the truth would equate to a 2500 km shortcut, I've comforted myself that pure honesty always wins in the end. Sad to see it doesnt.
I've found that people fall along a spectrum of conscience that determines how bad you feel when you lie (independent of the consequences).<p>Where you fall on this spectrum is determined by a combination of genetics, family values, and societal values.<p>There are people who don't feel bad about lying in any situation e.g. sociopaths and pscyopaths. There are people who only feel bad lying in certain situations (the situations that society doesn't give a pass to). Then, there are people who feel bad lying in all situations (typically, bc of the values they inherited from their parents and upbringing).<p>I say all this because I think the optimal behavior when it comes to lying frequency is entirely dependent on where you fall on this spectrum. If you are a psycopath, you can be happy with a code of conduct that allows frequent lying and covering up your lies. If you feel terrible about lying in all situations, then you shouldn't lie at all.<p>Unless you do really hard work on changing your value structure, you're sort of tied to a solution, and if you want to be happy, it behooves you to follow it.