Why is it important to be honest?

Communication is founded in telling the truth. When someone speaks to us, we naturally accept what they say as true. We listen to each other’s words. We act upon each other’s words. Not many of us consider how just as we might entrust a close friend with our belongings or even our person, we daily entrust complete strangers with a part of us far more basic: Our belief. At the local store when the cashier tells us the price of our bill, or at school when our instructors teach us the concepts in life. We entrust these people with our belief, often without even considering the validity of their words.

Honesty is an intention. We are told so often by so many people, day in and day out, “Tell the truth,” but how often do we tell ourselves this? Why is it important to be honest? Merely speaking words that can be true or false by context is not honesty. You as the speaker choose the context and the message. If what you say is true, but the context is a lie, is honesty the intention? If you intend to cloud your message, even If every word we say is true, are we being honest? So many times we get away with a clear conscious by telling half-truths and borderline lies, after all, it’s not our fault, is it, if someone else comes to wrong conclusions by our words. Honesty is not such a gray line for us to interpret, however. If our intention is to deceive, we are not honest. Whether or not we speak the truth, or half-truths does not matter because we have intended a lie. Honesty is not merely the words we say and the actions we do, but the intention behind our words and actions. What is the message we intend?

We have a responsibility to be honest, because others trust our words. We may think we have no relationship with complete strangers; the fact is, however, that we do. When we lie, we break the trust of another human being. Others act upon what we say. We set complete strangers into action with our words. Sometimes we might think that lying is justified. Perhaps lying to protect someone from something they don’t need to know, or even to keep yourself from hurting another person’s feelings is good and right? Maybe for the sake of being polite? Not so! When we do this we mislead people into believing something that is not true, words that someone trusted to be true. The fact is, when we lie to “be polite” we are in fact disrespecting the other person’s trust of us to tell the truth. We are in fact being impolite. Every action that is a lie, every word that is a lie, every intention that is a lie, is a betrayal of trust.

We cannot judge what course of action our words will set another person into. To make a judgement that someone else should hear not the truth, but a lie is wrong, because not only are we judging the other person’s capacity to hear the truth, we are also judging what they will do with what we say. We cannot know the future. Whatever another person does with what we say, we do not know. What another person does with the truth is their choice; our responsibility is to be honest. We give others the responsibility of being honest with us every day, and just as we might expect them to, they too should be able to expect the same integrity of us.