No love of honesty

Title

No love of honesty

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XVII (No. 5) May 1966

Year

1966

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Society today is here pictured as honeycombed with dishonesty and mendacity

Fulltext

■ Society today is here pictured as honeycombed with dishonesty and mendacity. NO LOVE OF HONESTY Many authorities today speak of a "new morality." A professor at Northwestern University spoke of it as "the wholly new standards of honesty" that the world of mankind have adopted. He meant, of course, the new standards of dishonesty. “It has become the fashion", columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, "to expect cheating and to excuse a certain amount of it. ... The popular standards of mo rality today allow for much more dishonesty than they did some time back.” Oh, yes, truthfulness and honesty are still honored by many as the best policies, but in ac tual practice one finds lying, stealing and all kinds of cheating. Cheating at school, for ins tance is widespread. In one survey, 90 percent of the students in a Toronto, Ca nada, grade nine classroom condoned cheating. A recent survey at the University of Pennsylvania showed that 40 percent of the undergraduates admit to frequent cheating. But, then, young persons are taught from an early age to be dishonest. How so? The father who thinks no thing of cheating on his in come tax should not be sur prised if his son cheats at school. What of the driver who purposely breaks the speed law and who urges his children to keep an eye out for a possible police car in the rear? When someone knocks at the door and the mother tells her daughter to say she is not at home, she teaches her daughter to lie. So also does the mother who pretends she has a headache, to escape some obligation. Not surprisingly, at a meet ing of police authorities from three Scandinavian countries, the chief of police in Norway said: “During hearings of children I have met with situations where parents were lying just as May 1966 17 fast as the children." Where parents do not show a love for integrity, the children are often accomplished liars before they enter their teens. Lying by adults has per meated the way of life of mankind so that it becomes acceptable and expected in some cultures; hence parents need to watch that they do not "pick up” any popular custom of lying, thereby in fecting their children. In France it is accepted that people “arrange” problems, cooking up a story that they do not really expect the other person to believe, but one that justifies persons in au thority for letting others do what they want. “Tell him that your-grandmother died," says the book Souvenirs de la France. “He will know it’s a lie, but he’ll let you leave anyhow.” The “new morality” has no love for integrity. Small wonder, then, that truth hunting has become a big business! One company of fering lie detector service charges $50 a test and reports a yearly gross income of $135,000. Such firms thrive because so many have no love for the truth. Especially when it comes to money and material things do we find that the world has no love for honesty. Writer C. P. Snow has said: "We are more dishonest about money than our grand fathers were.” At least 75 percent of auto insurance complaints in the United States are reported to involve fraud! In the same country a man who found a huge sum of money returned it to the owners and was severely criticized by many for not having kept it. In England a report says that “one per son in every five indulges in shoplifting.” So serious is employee dis honesty in Canada that the president of the Retail Sales Audit Systems, Ltd., asserted: “There is no such thing as an honest person. There are only some more honest than others.” The Toronto ma nager of Pinkerton’s national detective agency claims em ployee stealing has increased steadily in Canada until losses total “at least $100 mil lion a year.” He adds: “In our investigations we’ve found, as an average, that one out of every three employees is basically dis honest — which means he 18 Panorama will seek ways of stealing; that one out of every three employees will be disho nest if given the opportu nity and the third em ployee is the only one who deserves the full trust of his employer.” In the United States em ployees are reported to steal from employers an average of $150 per person per year. A manager of a firm that sells insurance to protect against employee dishonesty reports that he bonds em ployees who are not criminal types but who are respected citizens — yet every working day of his life his company must pay out, because of em ployee dishonesty, an average of $8,000! He found out in a survey of 65 bank embez zlers that virtually every one was ,a respected pillar in his community and that most of them thought they were honest, regarding their dis honest activities as “borrow ing.” “We live in a corrupt so ciety,” declares another au thority on the "new moral ity,” one Saul Astor, president of a firm called Management Safeguards.. Inc., which in vestigates dishonesty in busi ness. In one case he found a New York City auto dealer losing $75,000 a year. An employee was believed res ponsible. “An employee?” asked Astor. “This dealer employed eighty men. Sixty were stealing from him. I’d like to say that this was a particularly corrupt organiza tion. But it isn’t .” According to his investi gation, moreover, there is no difference in the rate of dis honesty of men and women. “They steal with equal aban don.” he claims. “But women are more devious. They lie better. It’s harder to get a confession from them.” Though we do not expect to find love for rectitude among thugs, hoodlums and teen-age delinquents, where is the love of honesty among the well-to-do hotel guests who, during the first ten months of operation of New York’s new Americana Hotel, made off with 38,000 demitasse spoons, 18,000 towels, 355 silver coffee pots and 1,500 silver finger bowls, and 100 Bibles? And customs inspectors have found that prominent people, wealthy people, world-famous people, insist upon playing the game may 1966 19 of cheating, lying to customs inspectors. Yes, the whole fabric of the world is thread ed through and through with hypocritical speech, half truths, outright falsehoods, stained by all manner of dis honesty, on all social levels. Perhaps there is hope that the rising generation will stem the tide of dishonesty, you may say. But what about the youth of today who will be the men, women and lea ders of tomorrow? As we ob serve the young people of our time what promise do we find of a better, a more stable tomorrow? — From Awake, Oct. 1964. PRESIDENT MARCOS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION While it is true that we need more scientists and other experts in the practical fields, to transform a university into a school primarily for specialists is to violate the traditional idea of a university. . . Our universities should encourage freedom of mind, idiosyncracy, and originality of perception. — From a speech in F.E.U., May 12, 1966. 20 Panorama

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