To Speak the Truth

There's a panhandler's trick in tourist traps that goes something like this: A person approaches a tourist and displays a large number of banknotes from around the world. Conspicuously absent are any notes from places like the European Union, the United States, Great Britain, et cetera (a.k.a., the big drivers of tourism). The person tells the tourist that they're attempting to collect notes from around the world, but are missing some.

Because of course they could find someone from Botswana to pitch in, but the tourist is literally the first person from the First World the panhandler has ever met.

To me, this is clever, if bordering on dishonest, panhandling. But for other people, it's a scam, working under the definition that "Any time someone lies to get money out of you, it's a scam." To me, it overstates the issue, as it means that most people's kids are risking fraud charges on a regular basis, but I get it. And I understand that it's a fairly common viewpoint; many people don't like being lied to and especially dislike parting with money on the basis of a lie.

But now to the point... If dishonesty for money = scam, is withholding the truth out of fear of losing a bonus a form of fraud? I get what this graphic is saying, and what the person whose LinkedIn post I snagged it from was getting at, but I think that this points to one of the problems that runs through life, the Universe and everything... The tendency to seek ways of making broken systems less damaging, rather than less broken.

A sense of powerlessness and being financially straited that makes dishonesty seem like the best choice is corrosive. The original post that I saw was making the case that businesses lose valuable ideas when people fear consequences for stating the facts as they see them. But it also teaches and reinforces the idea that there's no value to being honest about things.

Back in the day, I had a little poster in my office that read: "Tact is the fine art of dealing with people who are too good to hear the truth from you." My boss at the time didn't care for it, but I stood by it, having come to the (somewhat self-serving) realization that once people had power, the truth was what they decided it was. But what I was really calling out, looking back on it, was my own inability to present to things to people in a way that worked for them, rather than just for me. And to be sure, I think I'm still bad at that. And so I indulge in fraud now and again, telling people what I think they want to hear from me, rather than what I actually think the truth of the matter is, because I understand my financial well-being to be tied to their satisfaction, rather than to them having an accurate view of the world around them. Because they, not unlike myself, really, don't need to have a particularly accurate view of most of the world in order to get by. The price of unfailingly accurate information is not one that I have to pay, and so, for the most part, I don't. And so I don't expect anyone else to, either. In that sense, I go through the world, asking people to lie to me, and promising money in return. Am I worse than other people in that regard? I would certainly hope so, but I know that it's not a hope worth holding on to.