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.¹ 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,² 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.