Is Honesty Really the best Policy?

Is honesty better than guile and subterfuge?

Many people would argue against honesty in all things. “Sometimes it’s better to lie a little. Everyone deserves some privacy. In business you never want to disclose your trade secrets, and to make a good social impression you may have to exaggerate. Sometimes you have to lie to secure an advantage, or to make people feel better, because you don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

There are a lot of good justifications for lying. Unfortunately, the process of lying has within it a fundamental flaw. Lying is the deliberate hiding of information and it creates a data structure that eventually collapses in on itself and wrecks the area you seek to gain an advantage in.

Losing Information is Different than Hiding Information

Deliberately hiding information is different than losing information.

Consider this information system – a Sumerian tablet:

How useful is this information? Not very, because no one now knows how to decipher the symbols that represent the information being conveyed. That knowledge used to be in someone’s head, but even though the data has been written down symbolically, the information that it represents has been lost. It’s one thing to simply lose information – from a corrupted database, for example – but it’s quite another when you deliberately attempt to hide information. The more you try to conceal something, the more energy you have to expend to keep it out of sight.

Secrecy leads to cover-ups, and any cover-up is just extra data you have to add into the system to keep prying eyes from figuring it out. Security systems (codes, encryption, etc.) are always expensive add-ons that take time and resources to maintain.

Even when you take out data to prevent people from understanding your information – as in a file that has been compressed or zipped, or computer code that has been minified (taking out spaces and comments and substituting single variable names for longer ones) – you need a special program to maintain the code. That is your extra data. Obfuscation, guile, subterfuge and lies always generate extra data into the system, and require more time and energy to maintain the system. The more sophisticated the information system you are trying to hide, the more effort it takes. This eventually leads to a breakdown in the system.

The point is, information systems are only as good as they are open and transparent. This idea applies to business and life in general.

Lies Create Data Structures

Let’s say that this asterisk * represents an open-source program – code that is free to all users. In an open system, that information just sits there and is accessible to anyone. But what if someone wanted to take that code and make a proprietary program that he or she could sell? Well, they would have to cloak their program with security programming, and maintain the security system around the program, so no one would find out the code is really free. The same applies to dishonest persons and criminals. Dishonest people lie to obscure their connection to some kind of activity. The simple truth, represented by this asterisk *, could be anything from “Politician A is cheating on his wife” to “Corporation B is dumping toxic waste into the river,” or anything really.

The purpose of a lie is to hide the truth. The data obscuring the truth is the “front.” But the front is also a set of lies, and when people look at it they say, “it looks good on the surface but there is something fishy here.”

Lies inspire investigation, because people want to know the truth.

That requires more lies to cover the previous lies; but the new lies also inspire investigation, which requires more lies...eventually the liar forgets all the lies he told and the entire data structure collapses. Interestingly, the very fact of hiding something generates extra data. The “front” needs to be maintained, because lies are themselves data. Criminals forget this little fact until their lies contradict each other and their carefully constructed system of lies caves in on them, and they are left with the simple truth exposed: *

If this has ever happened to you – I’m sure it has happened to a lot of people – it’s a crushing, horrifying feeling of being totally exposed. It doesn’t feel good.

Lying is the Process of Exposing Yourself

Lies propagate themselves into the future, whereas

It seems contradictory, but lying is the process of exposing yourself. The more you deliberately hide stuff, the more problems are created for yourself. This can happen to individuals and organizations and governments; on trivial, unimportant matters, or in matters that affect everyone.

Lying to your husband about where you were last night may not cause any problems. But if you keep doing it, maybe he will notice. Lying about something trivial, if it is hiding something important, will eventually blow up in your face.

It’s almost as if the laws of the universe are working against liars.

Let’s look a little deeper into this.

The origin of the saying “too clever by half” encapsulates this idea of obfuscation through additional information, and the eventual result.

Lies themselves are information systems and must be carefully maintained.

I heard a story this morning on the radio. A guy (let’s call him Mike) wanted to switch from cable to satellite. When the cable guy came over, he told him a lie. He said that he didn’t want to watch TV anymore and so he was going to disconnect his TV. The cable tech knew this was b.s., and proceeded to ask Mike questions for 20 minutes. Mike defended himself by telling more and more lies, until he finally blew up and told cable guy to cancel his account and shut-the-bleep-up. Been there, done that. More and more lies build up more and more energy.

Have you ever been able to tell just one lie and hide the truth from someone? Well, maybe if you have a reputation for integrity. But then you got that reputation because you’ve been open and aboveboard with people. Lies, like mosquitoes, breed very rapidly, and come back to bite you in the end. Lies create a sort of black-hole phenomenon, until the buildup of energy then collapses the event horizon – and the entire system — on top of you.

The basis for subterfuge, guile, obfuscation, propaganda, etc. is lies.

It’s hard to lie, it’s hard to obscure, because you have to expend so much extra energy to keep the information system of lies coherent.

Integrity is the Reason behind Success in Anything

Integrity is the reason behind success in anything, even in sneak-thief activities, because illogic and inconsistencies stick out like a sore thumb and are recognized. The term “honor amongst thieves” describes the most successful thieves. They are the ones with the most integrity! The “Ocean’s” movies, although pure fiction, are great examples of this. Integrity is simply the coherent framework of an information system – any information system! Without that coherence, the system falls apart.

An intelligent person who recognizes this can cut through a lot of garbage.

For example, I received an invitation in my emailbox the other day from a guy who claims to make over $600,000, automatically, every nine months. This offer came from a very respectable website. He offers “proofs” – photos of his big house and pool, his cars, and printouts of monthly income statements. When I went to his sales page, I discovered that he’s selling a course that costs $27. If this guy is making that much money without any effort, why does he need to advertise and sell a course for a lousy $27? The answer is that his sales page is a false front, because someone who really pulls in over 600 large every nine months on auto-pilot sure doesn’t need your paltry $27!

Nowhere is the art of obfuscation more prevalent than in politics. Politics is the art of subterfuge. Politicians are stereotyped as liars, because they are skilled at saying one thing while doing another.

There are so many examples I can’t even list them. The “Monetary Control Act” of 1980, for example, gave the Fed the power to monetize virtually any debt instrument, including bank loans to irresponsible foreign governments, which resulted in an expansion of dollar-denominated debt on a world-wide scale. This (along with massive government overspending) has led, in 2023, to the gross devaluation of dollars around the world. If you are a U.S. bondholder in a foreign country, you probably don’t like the fact that your Treasury security buys less and less every year. It’s really a form of stealing. That’s why the BRICS nations are creating a new system of trade that bypasses the U.S. dollar.

Bills that support oil companies and fossil fuels masquerading as environmental legislation, bills that purport to stop terrorism but curtail constitutional liberties, governmental accounting practices that obscure the actual allocation of funds, are all part and parcel of a political system that gives lip service to openness and honesty, and supports obfuscation and guile.

Such a system lacks integrity and must collapse, like the Leninist systems of the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This is happening in the United States as I write this. Polling shows that less than 39 percent of people trust the government.

In the old Soviet Union, for example, the Party and the government had duplicate departments, so that an appeal to a government agency could be overridden by a similar Party agency, and vice-versa. In the United States today we have a similar system: the national security establishment duplicates many of the functions of our government, but these functions are hidden from the public. The very funding that supports these three-letter agencies is supported by lies and obfuscation. If you don’t believe me, try to ascertain where the funding for the CIA comes from! That’s classified information.

The world financial crisis is also based upon lies – the lies that “structured products” are worth their nominal value. Look up “derivatives” in your browser and see what you come up with. It’s not pretty.

Conclusion

The good news is that systems that lack integrity must collapse. The bad news is that systems that lack integrity must collapse. Let’s hope for a soft landing.

Almost every problem we have on earth stems from a lack of openness and integrity.

Secrecy and guile is self-defeating, illogical, and irrational. Information systems based upon these false principles must inevitably fail.

So why not just do it the open and honest way?

Not because of any moral or religious imperative, but because it works the best. Openness and transparency is the strong fabric that supports even the cloth of dishonesty, because people assume you are honest – until you tell too many lies.

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