I wanted to talk about something that has been bothering me for a very good while, and that’s the lake of honesty that seems to have increased even among simple & religious folk as of the last decade or so. And while simple or religious folk had their issues and down falls, being honest or lacking decency wasn’t usually one of them.

So what’s going on here? why does it seem that people often feel the need to lie about something every now and again? maybe even like it or justify it?

Well, If we take a look at recent history and by recent I mean like the last 100 years or so in any country regardless of what their customs were or whatever religion they followed. What you’ll see is that lying was almost never praised, unless your were required to lie, say in war or in some other unusual scenario, but that was it! honest men and women were always held in a higher regard relative to their counter-part regardless of their social status or what have you.

What I think is happening is that modern comforts such as social media, the internet in general and even transportation, modern automobiles, like the ability of the common person to travel for leisure, meet new people temporary in person or over the internet have disconnected humanity from the immediate consequences of lying, and maybe even the long term ones or so we might be inclined to assume, after all when we lie nothing bad happens, so why not lie? why not make our new ‘friends’ happy? it’s not like we’ll meet them again? right? why not lie to people on social media or to our friends in a video game to make them feel better about us? it’s not like we’ll harm them in anyway? right?

Well, to answer that question I think we need to take a step back and look to people who’re are much smarter than myself, one of those people is called Richard Dawkins, Richard at his his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ coined the term memetics this was published at 1976, I beleive.

And what he meant is that much like genes ideas(moralities) evolve and get selected for, based on their objective value and/or fitness to the cultures old, current or future as well.

And upon investigation and much criticism, Dawkins ideas seem to hold up pretty well. Cultures from everywhere and, ’everywhen’ seems to have evolved similar moralities and philosophies. In religions for example we find commandments like Matthew 22:39 from New Testament which states: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” or the hadith from Mohamed PBH “There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab nor of a white person over a black person, except by piety”

Now I can go on all the examples of let’s just say “believe systems” across time and cultures and the counter argument for it from a materialist nihilist would be: Well, religions, morals and what-have you were just mere tools that the poor and weak used to protect themselves or were enforced upon them by the rich and powerful who actually lied and did whatever they pleased, and to that I would say, look no further than Immanuel Kant and his theory of the “Categorical Imperative”

Put simply, Kant viewed appropriate morality (which includes of course honesty ) as “Universal” he would ask “If everyone did this, Could people still trust each other?” as to determine logically if one’s actions were moral. He viewed people as the end goal of life not what you can get out of them.

Which in our modern age doesn’t really seem to commonly practised much, and I bleieve, as I alluded earlier that it’s due to the lack of immediate consequence for which we evolved to notice. But make no mistake, there are always consequences, another smart person that I should’ve mentioned earlier is called Carl Jung.

Jung for those of you who don’t know him he called was the father of “Analytical Psychology” and for good reason. Jung had some interesting ideas about the “self” as he called it which is split into two parts:

The first is the conscious Ego, what you call ‘yourself’ or ‘me’, and the second part is the subconscious shadow and as far as Jung was concerned we live our lives not knowing our much of our shadow, even though it contains a good portion of who we truly are. And Like Kant, Jung had a very negative view of lying as he theorised that we often ’treat’ our subconscious like we treat other people, so if you lie a lot you start losing touch of what truth is, you start believing the lies and you lose touch with a core part of yourself. In his own words: “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”

Hopefully now we’ve reached a point where you, dear reader can agree with me, even if my rant isn’t really the most pleasant read that it could’ve been. And so, I have favour to ask of you, how do you get a materialistic nihilist to reach similar conclusions about honesty and morality in general if they lake immediate consequences or proper feedback as to why lying is wrong? if they can’t comprehend that if morality, honesty and even truth are meaning-less then then their metal/materialistic gain is probably just as meaning-less. How do you do that without wasting the good part of an afternoon on an article that most likely will get few readers, if that?