Can We Get More Dishonest?

We have been on a downhill slide for years.  Once parents washed out a child’s mouth with soap for telling a lie. Now when you turn on the news, you can’t go for thirty seconds without hearing another falsehood.  What has happened to our nation?  When did we become so dishonest?

In The Great False Hope, I documented how deceitful Barack Obama was.  Telling voters they could keep their doctors was the tip of a mendacious iceberg.  He, of course, had been preceded by slick Willy; the man who never had sex with that woman. The reward for both was to be admired as skilled politicians.

Today, we are repeatedly told that Donald Trump is a liar by journalists who lie far more often than he does.  Their goal is not to deliver the news, but to destroy the reputation of a hated adversary.  Truth is irrelevant because the objective is to assert power.

We saw this when a high school boy was falsely accused to harassing an innocent American Indian.  We again saw it when a television actor claimed to have been attacked by MAGA supporters.  We saw it as well when Beto O’Rourke asserted there is unanimity about global warming. For goodness sake, TV commercials now depict untruthfulness as cute.

Dishonesty has become so common that it has spread into nearly every corner of American life.  This was confirmed in the recent college scandal.  Parents, who felt no guilt, happily paid thousands of dollars to deceitfully gain their offspring unearned admittance to elite schools.

Meanwhile, I have witnessed fraudulence within these institutions.  College awards, for example, are often distributed on the basis of “creative writing.”  Professors, without a twinge of shame, brag about fictional achievements, then are honored for these imaginary accomplishments.

And why not?  College administrators routinely trumpet programs that produce no benefits.  Their objective is not to help students, but to make it seem that they are.  Should their subordinates have the temerity to call them out, it is they who get in trouble.

When I bring this trend up with my brother, who is an ardent liberal, his response is predictable.  He invariably tells me that both sides do it.  We thus need to be even-handed.  I, in particular, must stop pointing a finger at his allies. 

But I will not stop.  To do so would be to tolerate deceitfulness.  Furthermore, if those on my side of the aisle lie, I plan to be just as intolerant of their mendacity.  Dishonesty is dishonesty from whichever quarter it comes.  

I have argued that no large society can survive if dishonesty becomes the norm.  If people do not tell the truth most of the time, it eventually becomes impossible for them to trust one another.  But if they don’t, how can they work together? 

We are almost at a breaking point.  Journalists and politicians are leading the way to chaos and disintegration. Americans already recognize that the media are irredeemable corrupt.  They consequently no longer have much faith in them.  So slanted are the stories they tell that they are obviously fictional.

As for the politicians, they promote whatever will garner votes. There is no fact checking.  There is no limit to how much they will defame their rivals.  Opposition research, such as the Trump dossier, merely has to seem as if it might be true.

Adam Schiff is one of the worst practitioners of cheap duplicity. Just like Joe McCarthy before him, he recurrently rushed to the cameras to proclaim that he personally saw the evidence of Russian collusion.  Somehow this never came to light—probably because it never existed.

This, however, did not matter to the Trump haters.  They believed because they wanted to believe. And here is the nub of the matter. Too many Americans, from both parties, do not care what is true.  They only want to be told that which appears to confirm what they believe.

Dishonesty has become so prevalent because honesty has lost its currency.  Truthfulness is neither admired nor rewarded.  No wonder it does not flourish.  People may complain about divisiveness, but they seem unaware that their tolerance of dishonesty is one of its primary causes.  

Those disingenuous journalists and hypocritical politicians merely reflect us.  They prosper because we who allow them to prosper.  If we want better, we must demand better.  We cannot continue to abide duplicity.  Doing so will inevitably swamp us in turmoil and anarchy.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University