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.1 The more intense and enduring your dishonesty, the more guilt, overwhelm, depression, and anxiety you will suffer.2
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.
Footnotes
- 1. To live dishonestly is to live contrary to “the manner of happiness.” (2 Nephi 5:27) ↩
- 2. The scriptural support for this idea requires understanding that the presence of God is the literal and figurative source and fulfillment of all truth. And if they be evil they are consigned to an awful view of their own guilt and abominations, which doth cause them to shrink from the presence of the Lord [or to diminish in the face of greater revelation of reality] into a state of misery and endless torment, from whence they can no more return; therefore they have drunk damnation to their own souls. (Mosiah 3:25, comment in italics) ↩