Like it or not, Reader's Digest has documented certain aspects of our dishonesty. Thai people ranked first in an Asian-wide survey of nine countries in the category about the tendency to "exaggerate our personal qualities and abilities that appear in our resumes".
While we ranked high in three (out of 10) categories (returning excess change to cashiers, returning a lost wallet, and informing security guards if witnessing shoplifting), we fell below average in seven others. According to the survey, Thais habitually lie to tax-collectors, keep quiet if they know the lover of their best friend is being unfaithful, and steal towels from hotels.
Over-claiming your ability on a resume may be normal practice in today's society, but any which way you look at it, a lie is still a lie.
But the alarming issue here is not that we rank higher or lower than our Asian counterparts when it comes to honesty: perhaps a better question to ask ourselves is whether we as a society do enough to recognise and honour honest people.
We often praise people we deem successful but tend to ignore the means they used to achieve their prosperity. Too often we turn a blind eye to dishonest acts rather than show our disapproval.
We don't need to look far to see obvious examples.
The news that dominates the front pages of our daily newspapers is largely about dishonesty. (Remember Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's famous "honest mistakes" and the countless corruption cases of various government agencies that are never resolved?)
Perhaps we are too familiar with such lies. Speaking about the news, how about the recent alleged leaks of the national university-entrance examination? And let's hope we have not already forgotten yesterday's outcome of the high-profile murder case of Duang(chalerm) Yoobamrung. The ruling should come as no surprise given the fact that the prosecutors and investigating police gave the court so little to work with.
Perhaps we are living in a world of lies? Morning to night we face situations that encourage us to tell lies. Parents lie to their children, managers lie to their staff, friends lie to each other, and politicians lie compulsively to the public. Perhaps there are occasions when we need to tell a little white lie, but the question is how far we stretch it and at what point we lose our sense of humanity and sell our souls?
To some people, exaggerating on a resume is not really lying, while others bluntly adopt a "so-what" attitude.
They may think that lying on a resume doesn't harm anyone and is therefore okay. This way of thinking becomes the norm in a society in which people are taught to achieve success at any cost. The end is to succeed, and the means don't really matter. We have too many "good" examples of businessmen who have cheated to build huge conglomerates, and there are so many liars in politics that it's beyond a joke: they outnumber the tiny community of the genuinely honest.
Children are taught to be good, but they hardly learn the meaning of goodness. All too often parents put tremendous pressure on their children to succeed using unhealthy benchmarks of success. And when children are told to succeed by any means, it should be no surprise that they adopt any means to do so.
It is a vicious circle: dishonesty breeds a dishonest society. No one will ever know how many lies were told in Duang's legal battle, though in that case it's not the lies that matter: it's the people in the justice system we trust to decide what is a lie and what is the truth.
Our besetting problem is not how many lies we tell others but rather how little time we spend being true to ourselves.
Published on Mar 27, 2004
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