Chapter 1: Escaping the increasingly strong chains of dishonesty

You can be honest all the time

Some claim that no one is perfect. If by perfect they mean knowing everything, they are supported in their statement. However, if they mean that no one can consistently act according to their beliefs and desires, they are wrong.

Honesty does not mean unbounded perfection, but perfection with respect to the limits of your present perception. Honesty does not provide an assessment of the objective value of your beliefs or desires or actions, but rather serve as a measurement of self-consistency, up to the limits of your sincere perception of the world and yourself.

Honesty, like so many other internal qualities, is not something determined at birth. Your degree of honesty is completely up to you. No matter what experiences or resources you have or lack, how honest you are is your choice alone, though the consequences that follow are not.

Not only is it possible to be honest—it is obviously the most logical way to be. Honesty ought to be much more common than it is given how vital it is to obtain what each person says they desire. All outcomes are obtained through obedience to the laws of cause and effect. As you increase in understanding of these laws, the degree to which you apply them is determined by your honesty, as honesty controls how effectively you apply your understanding about yourself, others, and the world to get what you want.

The state of honesty

Few people understand how common and harmful dishonesty is— in part because their definition is so narrow as to hide most examples and mask most effects. A better understanding of dishonesty begins with a better definition of honesty.

Many would define honesty in simple terms, such as “trying to tell the truth” or “telling the truth most of the time.” The requirements of honesty range far beyond a mere attempt to tell the truth or an average of the truthfulness of what you say. Honesty requires consummate, full-time practice. It is not a measure of what you try, nor a question of how you are most of the time, but how you are all of the time.

Honesty requires more than just abstaining from speaking something that is false. Honesty is the state of reconciliation between what you think, feel, and do to the truth as far as you understand it. Honesty requires absolute reconciliation to your sincere understanding of reality.

Honesty is a measure of alignment between your self-perceived and outwardly-projected senses of self. Honesty requires total freedom from inward and outward deceit. There is no difference in how an honest person views themselves and how they project themselves to others.

Honesty requires full reconciliation of what you do on the outside and who you are on the inside. It requires accurate awareness of your internal processes and external actions.

Dishonesty is deviation from the truth

Dishonesty is not limited to saying things that we know to be untrue. The pernicious effects of dishonesty appear to some degree in all its forms, making it vital to understand its breadth.

The true definition of dishonesty is much broader than what most people consider it to be, and it is only by this expansion that the sheer quantity of lies is manifest, whether they be the ones we create ourselves or those we endure from others.

In order to elucidate the diversity of ways in which people lie, we must first define what it means to be dishonest. Dishonesty is intentional deviation from the truth. The truth is things as they really were, are, and will be, and any intentional deviation from this is a lie:

24 And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come;
25 And whatsoever is more or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning. (D&C 93)

Willful deviation from reality requires knowledge. It is your sincere but subjective perception of reality that creates the basis against which lies are created, not objective reality itself.¹ The distinction between dishonesty and ignorance is an important one to make, as many dishonest people seek to excuse themselves in the same way as those who truly didn’t know any better. But this kind of self-justification and self-rationalizing is wrong. Dishonesty is always willful: you really are responsible for what you understand to be true.

The laws of cause and effect describe the requirements to obtain each and every possible outcome in and after life.² While no one knows all truth, everyone has some estimate of the truth, which is their belief of how things were, are, and will be. Your beliefs are the collection of your estimates of what these laws may be, as far as you are aware. Dishonesty includes the degree to which you are at odds with your beliefs and the degree to which your beliefs are at odds with your observation of reality. It is dishonest to deviate from your understanding of reality in anything you think, feel, or do.

Dishonesty is caused by preferring something other than the truth over the truth. Devaluation of the truth precedes every act of dishonesty —otherwise known as lies. The love of truth is the cure to dishonesty. To be honest is to set the truth as the highest priority. If you value truth above all other things, you can’t lie. For the honest, no cost is too high a price to pay to find, live, and speak the truth.

It doesn’t take much dishonesty to be dishonest

A person who is dishonest is called a liar, and almost all liars take great offense to the designation. Normal people assume that you must lie often and intensely to be accurately called a liar. The fact is that most people lie, and because most people lie, most would like to think that there is some allowance for lying before one is considered to be a liar.

Just how often can you lie and avoid the designation? For most crimes, a person is designated a criminal after a single infraction. It isn’t the case that someone is a murderer only after killing many people, a rapist after claiming many victims, or a robber after burgling many places. How many times can you lie without being a liar?³

Just how intense does a lie need to be before the person who utters it is a liar? Liars would have you believe there is some threshold of grace under which acts of dishonesty are waived. Is this true? To be dishonest is a question of dishonesty’s presence or absence, not its quantity or quality.

Liars would have you believe that they aren’t liars as long as they aren’t lying right now. Is this true? Would you be an honest person if you had continuously lied until now, even if you were telling the truth right now? Or could you be called honest if you were lying right now, even if it was the first time you ever had?

Liars would have you believe that the only way to lie is to state something that you know is false. Is this true? Defining the condition so narrowly does nothing to narrow the results. To lie is to act, feel, or think contrary to the truth, as far as you understand it, and this spans behavior much broader than simply saying what you know is untrue.

Liars are offended when you call attention to their dishonesty, even if they have no problem admitting other faults. In general, the more a person has rationalized their sin, the more offended they are at being called out on it, and most people have extensively excused themselves for lying. Most people hate being called liars a lot more than they hate lying itself, and this can only be because they incorrectly judge being called the title worse than performing the act.

The common allowances for lying—as with most other sins—are less about reasonable consideration of their effects and more about writing norms around the preexistent popularity of the vice.⁴ There is no such thing as a lie that doesn’t harm the one perpetuating it and everyone exposed to it. Liars may scoff at the label being applied to what is (to them) normal behavior, but this doesn’t make their behavior any less harmful.⁵ Any degree of dishonesty comes with the full range of penalties that dishonesty brings. The effects of dishonesty come by degrees, each of which remove you further from the benefits of honesty —benefits which make all the difference in and after this life.

Honesty and dishonesty are not acts, but states entered into and maintained by honesty or dishonest acts. When you willfully ignore, distort, or deny any aspect of yourself or the world around you, you fall into a lower state of existence, where you remain until you admit and contend with the consequences of doing so. One who enters a state of dishonesty instantly begins to experience the full range of consequences of dishonesty, and instantly distances themselves from the full range of the benefits provided by honesty.

Honesty isn’t a question of how honest you are in the moment. When you ask yourself if you are dishonest, you are not asking if you are dishonest most of the time , but rather whether you are ever dishonest. Even a little dishonesty is enough to poison your life in ways far beyond what you are capable of noticing. Lies are never little. A little bit of dishonesty is enough to adulterate the entirety of your character, like sewage added to drinking water. Just one dishonest thought, feeling, or action is enough to place you into a state of dishonesty.

Maintaining a state of honesty is nothing like maintaining a healthy body weight, where the gradual nature of changes to one’s body composition allows great tolerances in the occasional indulgence. To live in the truth and not be a liar, your life must be free from any dishonesty; you must be honest in all things, all the time. The honesty of a person is not measured by how honest they are during the spans of time when it is easy, but how honest they are in the rare moments when it is difficult.⁶ Almost everyone is dishonest at least sometimes, and a surprising number of people are dishonest most of the time.

As you come to understand just how little it takes to be dishonest, you will come closer to realizing that, in all likelihood, you are a liar. As you come to understand the true cost of being a liar, you will find the necessary motivation to escape from this state.

Honesty is an exceedingly difficult state to achieve and an exceedingly easy state to fall out of. Honesty takes a long time to obtain, and only one moment to lose. Being honest requires you to be constantly ready and willing to do anything and everything needed to meet the demands of consistency and truthfulness in every moment. You never know when a challenge to your honesty will come or what it will cost you. The best defense is to decide ahead of time that honesty is worth any price.⁷

Why dishonesty is the natural state

Honesty isn’t natural. Honesty requires a person to intentionally engage in behaviors that are contrary to human nature, and to do so continuously.

By nature, you will think and act so as to maximize how you feel in the moment. To overcome the natural emotive approach requires intentional and consistent effort. Honesty requires you to use reason to align how you think and act to reality, as far as you understand it, no matter how bad it feels nor for how long it feels that way.

By nature, your thoughts, feelings, and actions will be arbitrary, discordant, and only partially known to and acknowledged by you. Honesty is achieved to the extent that your thoughts and feelings— including your beliefs, desires, and motives—are known, acknowledged, and aligned with one another.

Honesty requires wisdom, but humans are not naturally wise. The more complicated the situation, the more wisdom is required to correctly estimate the long-term cost and benefit of each choice. Few people are willing to exercise the humility required to admit that a situation is beyond their ability to handle well, and that this is the case more often than most would like to admit.

Honesty requires accountability, but humans rarely accept responsibility for past mistakes and do not tend to apply lessons learned from reflection on past experiences to future decisions. Dishonesty makes you feel better right now independent of the need to have chosen well in the past or to choose better in the present. Dishonesty provides you with the ability to claim that a better path wasn’t available, or that you had no way of discovering or executing it, which is much easier than admitting that most things in your life are, above all else, a result of your choices.

Honesty requires accurate valuation of choices, but humans tend to boost the value of the present over the value of the future, irrespective of the actual differences in the outcomes of the options provided.⁸ They will naturally boost the value of a present reward and the inconvenience of a present cost over both at a future date. While we all have the ability to prefer greater future outcomes to lesser present ones, this requires self-denial, and that is a hard thing to find in the modern world.

Honesty requires difficult choices, but humans tend to prefer the path of least resistance. The best path is almost never the easiest. What generates the greatest long-term outcomes also tends to cost the most in the short-term. Almost no one feels good while paying a great price,⁹ and almost no one will do anything that is uncomfortable or hard if they can avoid it, no matter what future benefits it might provide.

In short, dishonesty is designed for one thing: the miscarriage of justice; to feel better than one deserves, to feel good while doing bad, to enjoy the fruits of accomplishment without the requisite work, to avoid the penalties of poor choices, and to enjoy short-term feelings through pretending contrary to reality.

Most people are dishonest

Dishonesty is not a trait only found in the worst people. It is normal to be dishonest. Almost everyone today is almost completely disjointed in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Consider the wide differences between the following:

• What they say they want versus what they actually do.
• What they say they want versus what they actually want.
• What they should want, given what they believe, versus what they actually want.
• What they say they believe, versus the beliefs they demonstrate by what they do, why they do it, and how they feel.
• How they see themselves versus how they really are.
• Who they appear to be to others versus how they see themselves.
• What they say to and do around others versus what they really think and feel.

How few people consistently feel, think, and act in accordance with each other and with reality as they understand it to be? One who feels differently than they think or act, thinks differently than they feel or act, or acts differently than they think or feel is dishonest.

Dishonesty is a successively worsening process

Lies have a compounding effect. The intensity and enduring power of the consequences of dishonesty increase as long as you remain in that state. Dishonesty causes problems to grow bigger and spread wider. There are internal and external effects of dishonesty, and both grow in intensity and reach the longer and harder you deny reality. The more dishonest you are and the longer you wait to become honest, the more the penalties compound. The consequences of dishonesty increase with each repeated lie in every moment until and unless you reconcile to the truth.

While you remain out of reconciliation with the truth, you expose yourself to an ever-present weakening that is working against you, even in moments when you are not thinking about it, eroding your confidence and degrading your outcomes, all the while making you more numb to the process. It is fitting to think of dishonesty like radiation: as long as you expose yourself to it, you will suffer from it, and the more you expose yourself to it the more and faster it will hurt you. Unchecked dishonesty spreads through your life like a cancer that strangles out a shocking array of good things in your life. Dishonesty is a condition that increases automatically, like a boulder rolling down a hill increases in speed as it descends.

The longer states of dishonesty are maintained, the more difficult they are to escape from. Every impedance you place between you and the truth has outsized effects and increases faster than expected, making the path to correct your lie longer, and the costs of doing so higher. The increasing difficulty of escaping a state of dishonesty is why such states are scripturally described as the “chains of hell”:¹⁰

10 And therefore, he that will harden his heart, the same receiveth the lesser portion of the word; and he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word, until it is given unto him to know the mysteries of God until he know them in full.
11 And they that will harden their hearts, to them is given the lesser portion of the word until they know nothing concerning his mysteries; and then they are taken captive by the devil, and led by his will down to destruction. Now this is what is meant by the chains of hell. (Alma 12)

The chains of hell have bound up individuals as well as groups of people throughout time. In a vision given to Enoch describing his time, he:

...beheld Satan; and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced. (Moses 7:26)

Many people are similarly wrapped in the chains of hell today.

But now, behold, they are led about by Satan, even as chaff is driven before the wind, or as a vessel is tossed about upon the waves, without sail or anchor, or without anything wherewith to steer her; and even as she is, so are they. (Mormon 5:18)

The escalating entrapment of the chains of hell is further described in scripture with the analogy of thin entrapping cords that thicken with time and repetition:

...[Satan] leadeth them by the neck with a flaxen cord, until he bindeth them with his strong cords forever. (2 Nephi 26:22)

In the state of dishonesty, you will do increasingly more harm while it becomes increasingly more difficult for you to realize the harm you are doing. With every lie that entraps you, Satan gains greater power over you to use you for his purposes, since your declining awareness makes it easier for him to conduct more overt attacks on what is good beyond the limits of your awareness,¹¹ including empowering you to say and do things that inflict harm far beyond what you could do by yourself.

The evolving nature of dishonesty: Three sequential levels of lies

As you remain in a state of dishonesty, you will find that individual unaddressed lies and your general dishonesty will both grow according to the same predictable pattern: Lies of neglect turn into willful lies, and willful lies turn into involuntary lies.

Level 1 dishonesty: Lies of neglect

A negligent lie is any unconscious failure you commit in measuring up to the ideal of which you would be capable. We are accountable to raise our thoughts, feelings, and actions to their highest potential; to align them as fully to reality as we know it, and to aim them at the most valuable outcomes for ourselves and others. The specific and general effects of doing less than your best will always become apparent over time, and always lead to regret for what could have been. Freedom from guilt here and eternal satisfaction hereafter requires you to do all you can to become the best person you can. In every way that you fall short of your potential, you commit lies of neglect.

Feelings. Failing to raise our feelings to their highest potential is one way to enter into a state of dishonesty. Our feelings will be their best as we intentionally recognize and prefer what maximizes longterm joy, even if it causes short-term suffering.

It’s impossible to maximize your long-term feelings while you spend your resources maximizing your present feelings. It is astonishing to consider how much energy the average person spends in artificially stimulating their short-term feelings. While reality ebbs and flows in the pleasure it provides, synthetic alternatives provide a cheap, unbroken stream of shallow and fake contentment. From sensenumbing drugs to scrolling social media, modern society offers an endless array of highly effective ways to ignore our internal and external realities. While all of these interventions can be used to support what produces optimal long-term feelings, they are overwhelmingly used as an end in and of themselves, to the detriment of long-term feelings.

Making choices that prioritize present emotions over long-term outcomes is dishonest, and the danger of promoting emotion over reason cannot be overstated. The scriptures describe this as “open rebellion against God” and “obey[ing] the evil spirit.”¹²

Emotions can distort every step of the decision-making process. Emotions can block perfectly plausible options and distort the cost or benefit of those that are considered. Emotions can cause preference for an option other than what logic suggests is best. Bad choices are often obvious to outsiders, but invisible to those who make them because they are in emotional rather than rational states. Every time you cede your rational capabilities to your emotional condition, you are diminishing your ability to reason about future situations and your strength to prefer the long-term best outcome to the one that feels good right now.

In order to maximize your long-term feelings, you have to acknowledge that your long-term feelings are based on the utility of your short-term choices. If you feel terrible, investigate the quality of your past decisions and improve the quality of your present decisions.¹³

Actions. Failing to raise our actions to their highest potential will put us into a state of dishonesty. It is a rare person who shapes their actions based on the greatest good they could do.¹⁴ Instead, most people simply do the least good they can get away with.

Too often, modern people make decisions based on how visible their thoughts, feelings, and actions will be to others instead of whether or not what they are doing is for the greatest good, so far as they understand it.

Woe to those who contrive to hide their schemes from Jehovah! They work in the dark, thinking, Who will see us? Who will know? (Isaiah 29:15, Gileadi Translation)

Deciding what is good based on the reactions of others alone is a form of willful negligence. No matter how valuable the opinion of another, you are never free from the personal responsibility to evaluate the utility of any choice you make.

A popular form of negligence is committed by those who consider morality to consist of short lists of things that are bad and good while holding all other things as inconsequential. The problem with this perspective is that it guarantees the dishonest state of willful neglect. Those who live this way view themselves as good people, but their lives are actually incubators for deceit. They are developing and sustaining lies for the greater part of every day. They lie by ignoring most of their day, because everything matters—not just the short lists they pay attention to. They lie by refusing to think critically and situationally about what they consider to be good and evil. If their idea of what is actually best differs from the moral rules they’ve received from others, then what they consider to be good is actually evil, and what they consider to be evil is actually good.¹⁵

Those who refuse to exercise their ability to better understand what they do, why they do it, and what alternative options exist are living in a state of active dishonesty, even though they do not know this.

Thoughts. To fail to raise our thoughts to their highest potential is to enter into a state of dishonesty. Our thoughts not only include what we actively think about, but how well we are able to think and what we believe. What we think, why we think it, and how well we take advantage of potential improvements to each determines a great deal of how much happiness we experience in life. For example, our ability to obtain the best outcomes stems from the quality of our beliefs about reality: the options that exist and the cost and benefit of each. These are purely matters of thought.

It is common for people to lumber through life without thinking about what they are doing, why they are doing it, or whether a better option exists. By intentionally allowing yourself to act without making your intention conscientiously explicit, you enter into a state of dishonesty, choosing to decrease your awareness until and unless you begin to think about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and whether a better option exists.

Level 2 dishonesty: Willful lies

A willful lie is a conscientious contradiction between your thoughts, feelings, or actions and your honest perception of and interaction with the world around you, to include your actions with other people. Contradictions can occur between categories, such as acting in a way that does not align with your beliefs, or within categories, such as holding beliefs that you know are contradictory to other beliefs that you hold. While this characterization of willful lies may be new to you, the applications of it are not. Who hasn’t simultaneously held contradicting feelings, such as desire for two mutually exclusive things? Honesty requires extensive recognition and effective resolution of such contradictions.

A willful lie is distinguishable from a lie of neglect by whether it is rebellion against information you already possess or not. Willful lies are responses to what you are already aware of.

Those who engage in willful dishonesty think of it as a way of getting something good that they couldn’t have if they played by the rules of their conscience, but nothing good can be obtained through dishonesty. No good thing comes from evil. Lying to yourself may indeed bring to you what you immediately seek, but it comes with a price that will eventually have to be paid. Acting against your own sense of what is best will always do more damage than obedience would. Everything you do in secret has an effect on everything else you do.

Willful sin causes inevitable harm in the form of future blindness. Any conscientious rebellion against what you believe is best attenuates your ability to perceive and obtain what is valuable. Every time you act contrary to your understanding of what is best, you impede your ability to perceive what is best, you attenuate your desire to do what is best, and you weaken your ability to do what is best in the future.

Those who sin willfully incrementally lose their ability to see how obvious and involuntary their lies become, or the damage they do to themselves and others by continuing them. To the extent that you turn away from the best you know, it is not just that your thoughts, feelings, and actions will decay, but that your awareness of this decay will be so dimmed that you probably won’t even realize it is happening. In some ways, the choice to engage in willful sin and the effects that follow are a lot like leprosy. The disease not only decomposes the outer flesh, it also dulls the body’s senses, leading victims to accidentally cut themselves or break bones, and leaving them unaware of the putrid smell of their rotting flesh. Leprosy is a disease caused by a bacterium that is fairly easy to prevent through a reasonable degree of personal and societal hygiene. Those who work actively to discover and minimize lies of neglect will significantly mitigate the temptation to lie willfully.

Level 3 dishonesty: Involuntary lies

There is a popular but false belief that, in order to be dishonest, you must be aware of the fact that you are being dishonest. In fact, involuntary and willful lies differ only in one’s awareness of them. Involuntary and willful lies are the same in that they are contradictions between your thoughts, feelings, or actions and your honest perception of and interaction with the world around you, to include your actions with other people, but differ in that you are not aware of your choice to lie.

While you remain in a state of dishonesty, your ability to detect whether you are lying or not diminishes.¹⁶ In this way, involuntary lies are as much of a choice as willful lies; the former are caused by the latter.¹⁷

The more you lie, the less of a reason you need to lie. Once you are willing to lie about one thing to a certain degree, you are willing to lie about all things up to that degree. With more frequent or intense lies, you will feel less guilty about lying.¹⁸ With each lie, you feel less guilty about lying. As you slip further and further away from the truth, you will be able to lie with less and less intentional effort. Eventually, a person becomes capable of telling the most insidious lies without the slightest inner resistance or realization. They lie as easily as they breathe—with no need to think before acting, and without any activation of their sense of guilt.

When you get to the point where you stop noticing at least some of the lies you tell, you have become a pathological liar. Pathological liars don’t have to think about lying to do it any more than you have to think about your heart in order for it to continue to beat. Through repeated choices to lie, pathological liars reach the point where they can’t help but lie. They subconsciously generate lies sufficient to avoid any thoughts that would make them feel bad, including hiding memories of things they did or said and replacing the real reasons they did things. They will only notice their lies when someone more honest points them out, causing a temporary boost to their damaged conscience, and causing a sense of guilt for the first time in a long time. This almost always triggers an outpouring of wrath rather than gratitude and contrite repentance.

Never underestimate the terrible state of a person who can honestly excuse themselves when called on their lies by saying “I didn’t lie intentionally.” Pathological liars are morally much worse than intentional liars. A pathological liar doesn’t notice when they lie because their conscience is so seared¹⁹ that that can lie without any internal disturbance whatsoever. If one’s conscience is so inhibited that they don’t even notice lying, they have not only lied about many things many times, but they are capable of terrible moral transgressions without any necessary additional decay in character. You should exercise great caution around such people. The fact that so many people openly deny objective truths today may leave you seeing those around you very differently than you have until now.

Dishonesty causes cascading poor choices and eroding character

It is hard to correctly understand how extensively dishonesty affects you. Willingly ignoring what you have the ability to perceive impedes the full breadth and depth of everything you perceive and think. Most problems in your life and in the world exist because of a lack of honesty.

As humans, we have tremendous potential for good in the lives we live, from our personal happiness to making the world a better place for others. Unfortunately, in almost every aspect of life, our inaccurate ideas about and approaches to life inhibit the good we could otherwise do. Our internal experience and the world in which we live provide a steady stream of signals that indicate ways in which we could think, feel, and act to obtain better outcomes, but we are limited by the choices we make in how we perceive and respond to them.

Making good choices is a process that depends on the breadth and accuracy of information you are aware of, your ability to reason through it, and how much you desire what is best. As you intentionally resist or ignore what you have reason to believe is best, your existing awareness of information, capabilities of reason, and capacity to act will wane. As you ignore what you see, disbelieve what you have sufficient reason to believe, or refuse to do what you believe is best, your ability to see, evaluate, and do what is best diminishes.

_A brain to think, And a heart to desire— But neither will help, If you’re still a liar._[^20]

The effects of continued or successive dishonest choices will cascade in your life, spiraling into worse and worse decisions with larger and larger consequences, until much of what you value in life is destroyed.²⁰

The destruction of escalating deceit are not limited to the loss of previously obtained positive outcomes, but also your very character. The cumulative effects of several successive lies can cause a shocking degree of degradation in a previously upstanding individual. As their awareness of their dishonesty diminishes, they will think, act, and feel in ways that they would have never allowed themselves to before.

Whenever you find someone who has done something terrible, you will find preceding choices of successively worse judgment. Unfortunately, the perpetrator is typically the last to notice; the power that corrupts their judgment also corrupts their self-awareness. Their descent into becoming a much worse person occurs in a way that is invisible to them.²¹

Lies never make anything better

Lies cannot make anything better. Dishonesty is the choice to turn toward greater misery by turning away from acknowledging reality. You cannot turn away from reality to any degree without reducing good and causing outsized harm.

No matter how glamorous they seem, the expected benefits of dishonesty evaporate in context of the long-term consequences that inevitably follow. A lie can be enticing for those who ignore or do not know the long-term negative consequences it will bring. Lying in any way will always bring with it more sorrow, pain, and other negative consequences than whatever you avoided by lying. In the end, it is always apparent that lying was a poor choice, but most never learn or accept this lesson, no matter how many times they experience it.

The benefits of any lie are always far exceeded by their eventual cost. When you knowingly lie about reality, whether through denying obvious signs of a needed course correction, making false excuses for your failures, or acting contrary to what you say matters to you, you will always make things worse. Everything that comes from dishonesty is worse than everything that doesn’t.

Dishonesty causes mental misery

Dishonesty blocks opportunities both for increased joy and reduced suffering. It is hard to overstate the ability of a little dishonesty to spiral into what seem to be permanent and debilitating mental and emotional problems.

Liars use lies to bypass their conscience, but there is nothing you can do to avoid the guilt, depression, and anxiety you experience by doing so. Any attempt to use dishonesty to silence the discomfort you feel in your present state will magnify—not erase—the negative emotional or mental states it temporarily avoids. You will always feel depressed, anxious, and fearful while you feel, think, and act contrary to reality.²² The more intense and enduring your dishonesty, the more guilt, overwhelm, depression, and anxiety you will suffer.²³

By choosing dishonesty, you forfeit the joy and peace of mind that comes to those who do the best they know how at all times and in all places.

Dishonesty reduces your perception of reality

All humans have the ability to choose to increase or decrease their awareness of themselves and their surroundings. Frequently, unintentional ignorance in the present is caused by willful ignorance in the past. Awareness cannot be partial. You cannot see much of anything while there are yet things you are unwilling to see. As you voluntarily turn away from your perception of yourself or the world, you decrease in your ability to see yourself, others, and the world accurately. When you do anything less than live up to reality as you sincerely perceive it, you damage your ability to remain as aware of reality as you presently are.

It is dishonest to ignore or reject the measure of reality you have the capacity to perceive and respond to. To the extent that you do not notice or respond to reality, you are not just being dishonest, you are also diminishing your awareness—something that carries the most serious and wide-ranging penalties. Essentially, the largest and leastoften identified consequences of dishonesty are actually consequences of reducing your awareness.

You can’t lie without reducing your awareness of the truth. Lying in one thing dims your vision in all things. When you ignore or reject reality in anything , you diminish your awareness of it in everything . Lies in specific situations will always rot your ability to see the truth in all situations. Even if the present effects seem negligible, the future effects will not be. Lying can even cause you to forget that you have lied, making it extremely difficult to correctly recognize the consequences of having done so.

Most people are so well-trained in subconsciously detecting feelings, thoughts, and actions that would cause them shame that they can ignore them before even consciously noticing them. Their normallyfunctioning awareness instantaneously darkens to the degree it needs to in order to avoid their glaring deviation from how they see themselves or would like to be seen, just as quickly as a welder’s mask darkens in the moment the arc begins. Unlike a welder’s mask, their awareness will not fully and instantly return after what they don’t want to see stops. People tend to willfully ignore what is unflattering often enough to render them progressively less capable of seeing everything about everything, not just what they do not want to see.

Dishonesty weakens your active guidance system: your ability to discover and anticipate long-term consequences

By nature, humans strongly weigh present consequences as more important than future consequences, regardless of their duration or intensity. This is dishonest. Those who weigh the present more heavily than the future will make choices that have negative long-term outcomes, and as a result, will experience greater and greater misery as life advances. You need to face the truth of what long-term consequences imply, no matter how difficult it is or what extremity of actions they suggest.

Too many willingly tread in paths that they know have such tremendous future costs that they are not worth whatever benefit they presently offer. Simply consider how many waste the prime of their lives in the pursuit of things that rarely last, to the neglect of those things which almost always do. How many women spend their youth rotating between promiscuous partners, only to struggle to find a quality person willing to marry them thereafter? How many men delay professional preparation only to find themselves without sufficient time left to earn what is required to have a high quality life and family? How many people live in cities known to seismologists to regularly experience apocalyptic earthquakes? The examples abound.

One form of dishonest appraisal of long-term consequences is acting contrary to them, but another is to fail to identify them in the first place by evaluating the worth of something only in present terms. For example, how many parents have investigated the effect of public school on promiscuity, gender dysphoria, obesity, addiction, self-harm, mental illness, or adult earning potential?

Once confronted with the consequences of their choices, so many claim that no one warned them, when in reality, they simply ignored the plentiful warnings.²⁴ God is limited in what he can warn us about by factors that include our honest recognition that he knows better than we do. Those who despise correction will receive far less of it:

To whom shall I speak, and give warning, that they may hear? behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold, the word of the Lord is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it. (Jeremiah 6:10)

The penalties for willfully ignoring or rejecting reality include a total inability to recognize the most consequential and obvious consequences in life, ranging up to matters of life of death.²⁵

Dishonesty degrades your ability to determine what is best

Your awareness helps you discover what you want and how to obtain it. Lies successively weaken your capacity to determine what is best by reducing your awareness of what options exist and your ability to accurately estimate the cost and benefit of each. Every choice is a selection among options, and to the extent you are unaware of the choices available, inaccurate in your calculation of net benefit, or inconsistent in your preference for what is best, you will fall short of the ideal in what you think, feel, and do.

In order to see what is best, you must know the available options and the long-term cost and benefit of each. To make better decisions, you need greater awareness. The more of reality of which you are aware, and the more accurate your perception, the closer you will grow to knowing what is best in every situation.

As our world continues to grow in complexity, your ability to recognize, extract, evaluate, and act on information becomes more important.²⁶ A little honesty is sufficient to determine what is best in simple situations, but as the complexity of a situation increases, the degree of honesty must increase geometrically in order to obtain the greatest outcomes.²⁷ While complexity makes it more difficult to know what is right, it also makes it more difficult to know what is wrong. The more complex the world becomes, the easier it becomes to lie and the harder it becomes to detect a lie. Complexity provides more opportunities to obfuscate the truth and increases the amount of wisdom necessary to detect a lie, all while increasing the short-term benefit (and, importantly, the long-term cost)²⁸ of lying.

Every lie you live will reduce your awareness of information, reduce your ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood and erode your ability to correctly compare value between alternative options. The more you lie, the more trapped you become by your dwindling ability to detect what is true, valuable, useful, and good:

8 The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.
9 Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness.
10 We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men. (Isaiah 59)

As your awareness declines, you will be less likely to choose the options that lead to the greatest long-term benefit because you will have a less accurate idea of the options that exist²⁹ and what they are worth than you would if you had greater awareness.

Lies successively weaken your capacity to do what you determine is best

Lying weakens your faith. Faith is a principle that means much more than just belief in religious ideas. Faith is a measure of how much you are willing to believe and do when given sufficient reason to.³⁰ Like awareness, a person’s faith will grow or diminish all at once. A person’s faith grows or diminishes in general depending on how they use or deny faith in specific instances. Specific acts of faithfulness will increase faith in all things for the one who does them. Similarly, specific instances of faithlessness will diminish faith in all things for the offender.

Faith manifests in the goodness and longevity of the outcomes we obtain and the intensity of the obstacles we overcome to do so. The more dishonest you are, the more you will shrink from opportunities to live life fully, no matter how much evidence you have that living life fully is worth the cost. Dishonesty reduces tenacity, achievement, and meaning in life.

The more you live in the truth, the more reasons you will have to live with intention and tenacity, both of which are required to find and maintain deep meaning in life. You can’t have self-respect, confidence, or improvement without seeing and admitting how you really are, perceiving and striving towards what is better, and achieving things that increase your objective and subjective merit. Those who live life most sincerely and zealously will find themselves growing in confidence that what is best is worth the price, and they will continuously desire and do what they perceive as best, even as their capacity to do more and the cost of doing so increases.³¹

Dishonesty makes you weaker and less prepared for the future

Acting below your potential reduces your potential. When you act, feel, or think contrary to the best you know, you also choose to be less than you were before. Doing less than your best makes you worse.³² You can’t do a little less without being a little less, and you can’t do a lot worse without being a lot worse. You can’t pass on obtaining more without becoming less than you were. If you aren’t honest about the good you already know and have, or the evil you know you need to improve, you can never receive more or better.³³

Lying reduces your power to contend with the challenges of life. For example, the Book of Mormon provides an account of a persuasive but evil man named Korihor who was trampled to death by horses that he couldn’t hear coming as a result of his chronic lies (see Alma 30). In speaking what he knew to be false, he lost the ability to speak anything. By turning away from religious truths he did not want to hear, he lost the ability to hear anything else. His lies had resulted in losing his ability to contend with the world. Eventually, he was overcome by what was previously within his ability to overcome. Though the details vary, this pattern repeats itself in the life of all chronic liars.

As life continues, it gets harder. As it does, it will challenge your beliefs and test your character. A key purpose in life is to discover the information and character traits that are necessary to overcome what presently overcomes you. Truth is successive, and contending against it removes you from the path of improvement—improvement required in order to withstand the demands of life.³⁴ Reality can’t teach you more while you live in delusion.

God does not work in the realm of lies,³⁵ and his desires for you cannot be realized in the paths of dishonesty. God’s path for each individual includes protection from what would otherwise overwhelm and destroy you,³⁶ but remaining in this path requires you to consistently do the best of which you know.

While faithful living will cause you to grow to face greater challenges, dishonesty guarantees missed opportunities for improvement, subjecting you to being overcome by what you otherwise would have avoided or weathered well. While God promises you the capacity to overcome or avoid the challenges that face you, the promise only applies inasmuch as you seek and obey him in all things.

Lies remove you from rationality

While you are dishonest, you can’t also be rational. Lies rationalize what would otherwise be obviously irrational behavior. You can’t turn away from your ability to reason without losing some of your ability to reason.³⁷

Lying makes you irrational and stupid, and can do so permanently. Any lie will curtail your access to God’s spirit, which is what powers your understanding.³⁸ Even “little” lies corrupt you.

8 And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God.
9 Yea, and there shall be many which shall teach after this manner, false and vain and foolish doctrines, and shall be puffed up in their hearts, and shall seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark.
10 And the blood of the saints shall cry from the ground against them.
11 Yea, they have all gone out of the way; they have become corrupted. (2 Nephi 28)

The more you lie, the dumber you will become.

Korihor provided a good example of how lying dulls one’s rational ability. He received a mission to preach from a supernatural visitor who first said people had gone astray from God but also said that there was no God (see Alma 30:53). The message he was given to share was that it was foolish to believe in Christ because “no man can know of anything which is to come,” (Alma 30:13) but he also taught that “[God] never was nor ever will be.” (Alma 30:28) This message consisted of elements that were obviously mutually exclusive. If there was no God, how could anyone go astray from him, and why would it matter if they did? If no one could know the future, how could anyone proclaim that Christ would never come? Neither Korihor nor his followers caught the contradictions, because none of them were seeking what was true . Instead, they were searching for beliefs that made them feel justified in doing what made them feel good in the moment.

Those whose highest priority is how they feel right now are particularly susceptible to proliferating lies about what they are doing, why they are doing it, what alternative choices exist, and the cost and benefit of each. For example, Korihor liked the idea of being important, and his followers liked the idea of doing whatever they pleased without feeling any guilt. When the devil told him that he had a special mission to “reclaim [the] people, for they have gone astray,” he happily taught the words he had been given: that “whatsoever a man did was no crime” (Alma 30:17) and “when a man was dead, that was the end thereof.” (Alma 30:18) He continued to teach the words given to him because they made people follow him and made him feel good, not because he had sufficient reasons to believe they were true:

...I taught them because they were pleasing unto the carnal mind; and I taught them, even until I had much success, insomuch that I verily believed that they were true; and for this cause I withstood the truth, even until I have brought this great curse upon me. (Alma 30:53)

It’s only possible to exchange rational arguments with honest people. Our rational and emotional facilities are typically contrary to one another. A liar will not easily admit the real reasons they do things. Those who try to help them either waste their time arguing against false reasons made up on the spot or repeated denials of their actual motive. When you are in an emotional state, you can’t be helped rationally. When you prefer emotions to reason, you remove yourself from the influence of others who might use persuasion to assist you in more correctly seeing the available options and cost and benefit of each.

Sustained lies will damage your rational capability to such a degree that they can and do cause severe mental degradation. In many cases, mental degradation that is often regarded as the effect of old age is actually just the long-term effects of willful dishonesty, as shown by the magnification of delusions established long before old age. As modern people age, they increasingly cling to increasingly irrational surrogates for the enduring meaning they fail to encounter in their lives until their personalities are dominated by delusions that are so obvious and intense that they are difficult for others to deal with. They lose access to the ability to learn and grow beyond the asymptote of their willful lies, lose the ability to see and feel anything else, and everything about them decays to fit into that prison cell of their own make. These symptoms can be averted in the lives of people who break the chains of dishonesty while they still can.

Dishonesty diminishes confidence

Dishonesty robs you of confidence. Confidence in public comes from discipline in private. You lose something every time you deviate from who you really are. You can’t do less than your best without gaining guilt and losing your self-confidence. Those who walk in dishonesty are hollow shells. They don’t realize how substantial the effects of their constant self-betrayal are on their daily lives.³⁹

The inviolable honesty of God provides an anchor⁴⁰ that justifies extreme effort on our part and provides strong consolation against disappointment. We access both benefits through our own inviolable honesty. As you are brutally honest with yourself and all others, you will find the confidence only available to those who stand on the surest of foundations: the truth, as far as you presently understand it.⁴¹

24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:
25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7)

Without the kind of confidence that only comes from deep honesty, the uncertainty and challenges of the modern world will overcome you. In absence of honesty, we will experience despair⁴² in place of hope.

Dishonesty is a weak attempt to sidestep God’s justice, but God’s justice is inescapable.⁴³ You can’t ignore God’s justice when your choices suggest future punishment without weakening the resolve it would provide you in cases that would result in your blessing. Courage comes in large part from the confidence those who do their best have in their eventual attainment of worthwhile outcomes in spite of apparent and significant challenges. A person who lives so as to avoid God’s punishment will not have God’s courage.⁴⁴

You can’t intentionally deny God’s justice in one thing without disbelieving it in others. The less you trust in God’s justice, the smaller the sacrifices you will be willing to make for fear that the results will not be worthwhile. The more you lie, the less power you will have to engage in opportunities that require greater sacrifice. Without firm belief in God’s justice—including a life lived in accordance with it— you will never pay the high price required to achieve great things in life. The most powerful source of confidence in life is belief in God’s justice coupled with the sacrifice of obedience to God. One way of measuring the strength of your faith is by the degree of sacrifice you are willing to make for a worthwhile outcome.

Dishonesty weakens your passive guidance system: the conscience

Your conscience is a vital guidance system gifted to you by God that protects you from threats beyond your ability to anticipate. While most people at least try to avoid directly violating their conscience, most are also skilled enough to know how to disable it through deceit. While an active conscience limits evil from accomplishing much, dishonesty impedes its function so thoroughly that great damage can be done to the individual directly and, through them, to others around them. When you lie to yourself, you create a window in which you can do what you know is wrong without immediately feeling as bad for doing it as you would if you were honest about it. However, the guilt will return in amplified force at a later date, and lying can do nothing to avert the increased consequences of the choices you make while doing so.

Your conscience is not a static resource. Through the expansion or contraction of your awareness, your conscience will successively improve or diminish: You can strengthen your conscience through exercising it, just like a muscle, and it can atrophy through misuse in the same way. The more you subdue your conscience, the weaker it will be. You can’t keep your conscience gagged and bound, expecting to untie it occasionally in times of perceived need. The more you work against your conscience, the weaker it becomes. When you turn away from your conscience in any way, you weaken both your ability to see what is right and your strength to do what you believe is right,⁴⁵ making it that much easier and more likely that you will do worse things later. Every time you lie, you will damage your conscience further, making it easier to lie again or tell a bigger lie.

If you have thoroughly damaged your conscience, realize that it will take time to restrengthen. Don’t expect your ideas of right and wrong to be accurate while you regularly lie, and don’t expect them to suddenly become accurate the moment you stop lying all of the time.

Recovering a state of honesty

Once you lose awareness of lying, you have entered a state that will be very difficult for you to escape. As you dissociate from reality, you separate yourself from the information and feedback that God has designed to keep you in the path of greatest joy and away from unnecessary suffering.

It is highly likely that you are more deeply immersed into a state of dishonesty than you previously thought. No matter how seriously you are embroiled in dishonesty, there is a way back. While you can instantaneously decide to be completely honest, it will take time before you will be “perfectly honest and upright in all things.”⁴⁶ The more dishonest you have been, and the longer you have been dishonest, the harder and longer a process it will be.

Some will be discouraged as they begin to see just how little they see. Recovery from involuntary lying is a process. You can’t directly act on what you can’t see. It takes time to develop or recover the ability to re-sensitize your conscience, perceive more information, and gain the wisdom necessary to process it into better decisions.⁴⁷ The journey into honesty begins with whatever improvement is visible in your life. No matter how dishonest you have been, you will always be aware of some way in which you can improve. This glimmer of light, no matter how dim, is your lifeline to attaining the full benefits of honesty. As you consistently do everything you know is best, your ability to see what is best will expand, and you will grow more and more towards the benefits of full honesty:

9 And he said: Go, and tell this people to hear and actually understand, and to see and actually perceive.
10 For they have blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts to what I have shown and told them, that they cannot see with their eyes nor understand with their hearts, but if they turn to me, and see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, I will heal them. (Isaiah 6, Author’s Interpretation)

Returning from a state of involuntary dishonesty requires great diligence. While dishonesty is a state that is passively maintained, honesty is a state that must be actively and intentionally maintained. To escape a dishonest state, you must address all dishonesty in your life, as far as you can see it, and continue to do so continuously through time as you gain the ability to perceive more and reason better.

Honesty is a full-time affair. As you learn how to tell the truth, ensure you do it all the time. Exercising honesty unevenly works about as well as trying to be healthier only when you get sick. You grow more honest through being honest all the time, just as you grow healthier by being healthy all the time.⁴⁸

The remaining chapters in the book will detail how to live with deep honesty.