The use of the Internet to fraudulently promote stocks, e-mail schemes to sell suspect drugs, computer ploys to steal identities ? these dishonest practices and others are now mushrooming. A Securities and Exchange Commission official once wryly noted, “Any con artist not on the Internet should be sued for malpractice.”
With the widespread abuse of computer technology, we have the latest evidence that dishonesty is escalating in our society. The liar and the cheat have always been with us, but the prevalence of lying and the problems it causes have never been greater.
About 10 years ago, I wrote a book entitled “The Book of Lies,” which dealt with how schemes and scams have affected many aspects of our past and present. What astonished me in my three years researching and writing that book was how much lying has become an increasing part of our society. Since the book?s publication, the picture of deceit and deception has only darkened.
Consider:
» Cheating on income taxes is now the biggest crime in America, dwarfing drug trafficking. The federal government loses upward of $88 billion a year from tax evasions and fraud.
» Health insurance premiums are being forced up because fraud now costs the health care industry an estimated $10 billion a year.
» The Federal Trade Commission reported consumer fraud complaints climbed to more than 680,000 in 2005, with losses escalating $144 million last year to nearly $700 million.
» Plus, a parade of major white collar cheating such as the Enron scandal has led to devastating losses in jobs, pensions and shareholder values.
Why so much dishonesty on such grand scales?
My own theory is that as modern life becomes more materialistic and less governed by moral codes, the pressure to defraud others increases. Lying is motivated by self-interest and self-gratification, and the liar does not want to make the sacrifice in time and effort to achieve success that honesty often requires.
And compounding the problem is that if others are not acting honorably, an otherwise honest individual feels pressured to act accordingly to keep up. The result: fewer take upon themselves the challenge to act honorably, the tendency to lie increases and lying spreads more easily throughout society.
What we need then is a society that offers social support for honesty, a society that encourages its members to act honorably, that raises the status of the honorable and does not wink at the “success at any price” syndrome we seem to feed into in America today. What we need is the modeling, preaching and teaching of honesty in all facets of our business and economic lives.
This is why, following the publication of my book, I proposed an idea to celebrate honesty and honor the honest. I called it National Honesty Day and selected April 30 for its annual celebration (I chose April 30 because April is the one month that starts with a day devoted to lying ? April Fool?s Day ? so I thought April should go out on a higher moral note).
As suggested activities on or near National Honesty Day, I called on schools to hold assemblies, religious leaders to give sermons and the media to provide coverage on the topic of honesty. The occasion could also be used to educate the public about scams. I also proposed that on National Honesty Day I would recognize outstanding acts of honesty by individuals and companies by issuing Honest Abe Awards (dishonorable mentions would be given to those acting deceitfully).
The concept of National Honesty Day seems to have found a receptive audience. “Chase?s Calendar of Events,” the repository of holidays, events and anniversaries found in most public libraries, now lists National Honesty Day, and each year I receive calls from the media to discuss the day (the BBC in England once called to do a live radio interview). I have found references to the day in a Miami police department newsletter for children, in sermons, as a topic for classroom discussions in various school districts and in newspaper articles.
My hope in all this joint effort is that by celebrating honesty and honoring the honorable, we can begin to restore trust within our nation and encourage a greater sense of integrity within ourselves.
M. Hirsh Goldberg is president of M. Hirsh Goldberg & Associates LLC, a Baltimore-based public relations and marketing agency. He has served as press secretary to a governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore. He is the author of five books and numerous op-ed articles and columns. His e-mail address is [email protected]
