Telling white lies is a common social phenomenon that helps us to fit in with our peers. We frequently tell 'prosocial' lies which demonstrate moral judgement and politeness, both of which are important social skills for new school children as they step into the wider world.
When children begin to tell lies, it's a sign they have hit a new cognitive milestone. It shows their minds are able to manage the complex processes required to formulate a lie, and for those who can lie persuasively, that they also have the acting and verbal skills to carry the lie through.
But if lying becomes a strategic behavioural norm, an inauthentic way of dealing with Reality, we spawn a major social problem of Lack - of trust, account-ability and rely-ability. Past a certain tipping point, lying becomes counter-productive. It is my contention that that tipping point between social convenience and healthy authenticity lies at about 0.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.
But the convenience of white lies, fibs (including those of omission), porkie-pies, obfuscation, half-truths, spin and downright dishonesty seem to have taken deep root in our social psyche. In the short term it's easier to lie than tell the truth. It even reached a point where one respected commentator this week seriously suggested that no politician should ever be held accountable for the words that come out of his mouth during an election campaign. What??? Any sentence beginning with “Trust me...” can be followed by lies and that's OK?? One past Prime Minister of Australia pronounced a difference between a “promise” and a “core promise”; another (who subsequently got elected) actually said in a press conference, “Look, I'm bound to say anything in the heat of a discussion – don't believe me unless I put it in writing.”
When children begin to tell lies, it's a sign they have hit a new cognitive milestone. It shows their minds are able to manage the complex processes required to formulate a lie, and for those who can lie persuasively, that they also have the acting and verbal skills to carry the lie through.
But if lying becomes a strategic behavioural norm, an inauthentic way of dealing with Reality, we spawn a major social problem of Lack - of trust, account-ability and rely-ability. Past a certain tipping point, lying becomes counter-productive. It is my contention that that tipping point between social convenience and healthy authenticity lies at about 0.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.
But the convenience of white lies, fibs (including those of omission), porkie-pies, obfuscation, half-truths, spin and downright dishonesty seem to have taken deep root in our social psyche. In the short term it's easier to lie than tell the truth. It even reached a point where one respected commentator this week seriously suggested that no politician should ever be held accountable for the words that come out of his mouth during an election campaign. What??? Any sentence beginning with “Trust me...” can be followed by lies and that's OK?? One past Prime Minister of Australia pronounced a difference between a “promise” and a “core promise”; another (who subsequently got elected) actually said in a press conference, “Look, I'm bound to say anything in the heat of a discussion – don't believe me unless I put it in writing.”
Do these people not realise who they're hurting? What
the hell has gone wrong!?
What
went wrong was putting a Snowball on a Slippery Slope. And it's our fault –
yours and mine – for allowing them to get away with in the first
place. We close our eyes and ears, sit on our hands and do nothing while they rationalise bullshit in the name of
some form of pragmatism. They play with semantics to cover immorality ("This isn't an evacuation, it's a relocation" - Jay Wetherall 4/7/14) We don't hold them to account for the weasel-words that come out of their orifices, because it's too much trouble? One little lie adds to another, and
suddenly the snowball has impetus and it has got way out of hand.
Because
of this rationalisation process— this Moral Disengagement—people
are more likely to slip into a pattern of declining behaviour.
We even have a name for it – it's called The Slippery-Slope
Effect.”
It
starts out with some creep like Eddie Obeid or Craig Thomson taking a
little bit, maybe a few hundred. You get comfortable with that, a few
hundred becomes a few thousand, and before you know it, it snowballs
into something huge.
Outside
Australia I can cite rogue traders like Jordan Belfort and Kweku
Adoboli; former New
York Times reporter
Jayson Blair, who was caught fabricating facts in his stories; and
the editors and reporters who hacked phones for British tabloid News
of the World; these are just random examples
of individuals like you and me who succumb to an insidious ethical
snowball effect. The sin is the same: the only difference between
them and me is the magnitude of what's been done.
Without
self awareness, just one small ethical lapse, unchecked, can snowball into big
trouble.
The
same kind of slippery slope can make any individual and business
vulnerable to internal rot—unless we correct ethical transgressions that may
seem minor right at the source, before such behaviour takes root and
corrupts the culture of the organism.
Conditions
where incentives for little lies slowly morph into incentives for big
ones more than double the rates of unethical behaviour. Look at the Commonwealth Bank, and its creepy strategy to avoid serious and open investigation. We need to do
a hysterectomy on any womb to that succours evil. And I'm not talking about the CBA in particular, but the environment, culture and systems that allow that kind of behaviour to exist and flourish.
I
call on those of you who are managers to prevent ethics breaches with
measures such as quickly condemning even small lapses before they
compound themselves. More ethical behaviour may result over time when you and I
require, firstly ourselves, our children and then others, to be
vigilant and ethical in dealing with anything that affects a fellow
human being.
Ends
are never justified by dodgy means. You know what happens to
snowballs in hell. History tells us the universe has a way of
ensuring that crooks pay a terrible human price for their
crookedness, in the same way as people who do good deeds reap the
rewards of what they've sown.
[Snowball
– The Dirty Dozen Brass Band – 5:44]
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