Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about honesty. Actually, I've been thinking about lying. Why has lying become so epidemic? Pandemic? Systemic?
As the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh put it, "The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple."
Of course, this is not just in America. Travel through Third World and less developed countries and you get a lion's share of deceit from all directions. I couldn't walk down a street in Jaipur, India or Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam without having somebody with a big smile and a disengenuous, "My brother!", come up to me with some scam or pack of lies designed to extract as much money as possible from my wallet. But there you kind of go with the flow because 'LIE' is spelled S-U-R-V-I-V-A-L and I honestly don't think these con artists view it as lying so much as just business-as-usual.
But that's what I see in America now. Outright lies, by smooth-talking advertisers, jaded politicians, slick salesmen, Teflon CEOs, PR spokespersons, televangelists, television news anchors, big-bucks bankers, icons, celebrities and public figures of every shape and size. Frankly, lying is not merely acceptable. It's expected! It's business-as-usual.
I guess I should just accept the new reality but I grew up in simpler times. And it's not like this everywhere.
Let's get anecdotal by talking about my own conflicting gut reactions to a couple things that happened recently. Maybe you can weigh in on these, either privately or by leaving a comment below.
My wife Masumi and I were on one of those amazing no-speed-limit autobahns during our recent three weeks in Europe. We stopped at a rest area and went to our respective toilets. She came out of hers holding a women's wallet high in her hand. "Someone left this." She had looked inside and apparently it had a huge wad of cash, credit cards, etc. Repeat ... a huge wad of cash. She had closed and fastened it up. I took it, my mind was churning, but out of respect for Masumi's values walked it in to the cashier at the convenience store. For some reason I was also holding it high like it might be contagious. As the cashier saw me approach, carrying what was obviously a woman's wallet, her eyes widened in surprise __ actually shock. I handed it to her and though nearly paralyzed with disbelief that someone would actually turn it in, she took it and put it behind the counter.
Now you're probably thinking what I was thinking. Is this cashier going to empty out the hundreds of Euros and make believe she never saw it? Was I crazy for turning it in? What were the odds the absentminded lady was going to remember where she left her wallet, actually turn around and backtrack who knows how far on the autobahn to reclaim it? Since it was so full of money, the person was probably pretty well off, so what's a few hundred (or thousand) bucks, eh? If she was so stupid as to . . . etc.
You get the picture.
I'm not destitute but a few hundred Euros would have made our vacation a little sweeter. But I never hesitated about turning it in, purely out of respect for my wife.
You see, in Japan, it is inconceivable to appropriate another person's property.
An English-speaking friend of mine (she's from New Zealand) who lives in Japan left her latest model Macbook Pro in a train station ladies room. For two hours! She had left it on the counter while she washed her hands and forgetfully walked out without it. She got an hour further on her trip home, remembered, jumped off, took a train back to the station. This was in a major city and that restroom had hundreds of people going through it every hour. She found her laptop right where she left it. Two hours later!
This is the way it is here. I still find it amazing.
It's extreme in the absurd. You can drop something on the sidewalk and come back hours later and find it where you dropped it.
Think I'm exaggerating?
One Sunday many months ago, we went to our favorite local hot springs. This is one of the great joys of living here in Japan and we try to go once a month. Anyway, I left my hair brush in the mens locker room. This was not a family heirloom. This was an 89 cent piece of plastic, dirty and full of my hair from use over many months. The only thing it had going for it was that it was a pleasant shade of purple.
Five weeks later, we returned to the hot springs. On some impulse __ my synapses tend to fire randomly at times __ I asked at the counter if they had a purple hair brush in their lost-and-found box. Stupid me. I was thinking they had a cardboard box behind the desk. The clerk asked when I thought I had lost it. That was easy. Maybe four or five weeks ago? He stepped into the facility's main office, consulted with someone, then returned with my 89 cent hair brush, safely contained in a sealed plastic bag with a label. On the label was the date I left it in the locker room.
I could go on and on. In the news several months ago, there was the story of a person who had found a satchel on a park bench with over 5 million yen (that's $50,000 cash) and no identification of any kind in or on the bag. It was promptly turned into the police.
Is your head reeling?
Now let's switch settings to America.
In 2011, my wife and I spent four weeks touring the East Coast, from New York City to Atlanta, Nashville to Philadelphia. We were on a local train coming out of Washington, DC returning to where we were staying in suburban Silver Spring, MD. On the seat opposite us, there was a nice, practically new pair of in-ear headphones someone had left behind. "Should I take those?" Her reply was straightforward enough. "No. They don't belong to you." Of course I replied, "But someone else is going to take them." Sure enough, a young man sat down, spotted the headphones, looked up at me. I shrugged. He fingered them for a while, then finally put them in his bag. In fact, I was surprised he hesitated as long as he did, seeming to be giving his decision some thought. Was he having a moral crisis or was he wondering if the person who owned them had ear herpes?
But that's the way it is.
Do I have to ask what you would do if you found an unmarked satchel with $50,000 in a park? Do I have to tell you what I would do? After all . . .
"Someone else will take it and keep the money."
"The cops at the station will just split it up."
. . . or . . .
"The cop at the counter will take it and just stuff it in his locker. He can afford that nice boat he's been dreaming about for ten years."
That's what happens to an "honor system".
Once you introduce the element of distrust, once suspicion about the honor of our fellow humans enters the equation, respect for the property of others starts to slip further into the background, finally to disappear. Once that solid door represented by the "do unto others" dictum opens a crack, it swings wide open. Then the free-for-all takes over. Then the Golden Rule becomes, "The others will do whatever they can get away with. So I'll just beat them to it."
Now so far I've been talking about property. What's that got to do with lying?
Lying is stealing.
Lying steals hope. Lying steals trust. Lying steals the future.
When we can't believe what others say, when we can't count on them to honor their words with their deeds, we can't expect what they say today to mean anything tomorrow.
On an individual level, this breeds suspicion, distrust, a circumspect attitude towards others.
On the scale of society at large, this spells decay and collapse.
When a politician or other iconic public figure lies, excusing his or her "massaging the truth" by insisting that the ends justify the means, that "if I don't lie, someone else will and then people will listen to them instead of me", it's not just a few words getting misplaced. It's not just a case as former-president Clinton likes to say, "perfection becoming the enemy of progress."
No, the truth is . . . it's the end of progress.
Because when the people we look to for advice, guidance, leadership, and a positive vision for creating the world we want for ourselves and our children, smile into the camera and lie to us, they steal our dreams.
"If I don't tell the voters what they want to hear, they won't vote for me."
I wrote a blog this past New Years Eve, I'm very proud of. It's called "Take me to your leader!" Of course, I got a lot of hate mail, threats, and vilification __ though the morons who attacked me wouldn't even know the word 'vilification' __ for reaming the current bunch of sociopaths and sycophants who hold public office. I concluded that it's been so long that the American public wouldn't recognize true leadership if it actually somehow magically appeared. Such a person would be cynically mocked as weird or naive or an idealistic space cadet.
And here is the sad thing . . .
As I think more and more about this, I wonder if it's a one-way street. I wonder if it's ever possible once we individually and collectively join this race to the moral bottom, to turn it around. I wonder if we can ever stop asking . . .
"Why shouldn't I take it? Someone else will."
"Why should I let someone else beat me to it? Why should I lose out?"
"Why should I be the sucker? I'll tell them what they want to hear. If I don't someone else will. There's no honor in being a chump."
Once we individually and collectively judge our words and actions by the lowest standard, what is to prevent that standard from being lowered even more?
I hope the lady in Germany got her wallet back. I hope the money was still in it and she took out a nice 100 euro note and gave it to the clerk behind the counter as a reward.
My trip was great, even without her money.
And I slept well.
[ This originated at the author's personal web site . . . http://jdrachel.com ]
