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.¹

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.²