A few weeks ago, I wrote about honesty and why there are cases where it is best to not tell the truth or to keep some things secret. Now let's take a look at the other side of the coin: cases where dis-honesty has become socially acceptable and normal, but shouldn't be.

The first and most obvious of these, especially in light of one recent case that I won't go into, is lawyers. While the judge, the jury, and the investigators may in fact be trying to get at the truth of the case, that is just not true of lawyers anymore. The lawyers, especially in a major criminal case like rape or murder, don't even think of themselves as trying to get to the facts of the case. That, they believe, is not their job. Their job is to either get a conviction if they are prosecutors, or get an acquittal if they are defense lawyers. In most cases, it really doesn't matter to them whether the client is innocent or guilty The result, as we have seen in several major cases recently, is that the case is won not by finding the truth, but by the lawyer or lawyers who can come up with the most convincing tales to confuse the jury. So the guilty go free because they have a top notch lawyer while the poor go to jail even when they are innocent because they can't afford a good lawyer.

Another big one, even bigger actually but it doesn't seem to get as much notice, is marketing. There is nothing wrong with a company hiring people, or a marketing firm, to advertise their products or services, but there is when they are not the least bit honest about those products or services. There is actually a series of ads running on TV now for a hotel chain that implies that your sales people will get such a great sleep you will be able to sell anything. In one example, selling ice to Eskimos The mentality of the marketing and sales people is that they really would brag that they had sold ice to Eskimos Or sand boxes to desert dwellers. Or a cell phone to someone who just bought a new one a month ago. Or emphasizing the positive effects of a prescription drug while glancing over the side effects that are sometimes worse than the illness being treated. Or selling houses to people who statistically have only a ten percent change they they will be able to keep up the payments (and we all know how that one went).

Another area is in education where teachers are forced to teach what the government says the students must learn rather than what the teachers think is important, or what the students are really interested in.

There are other areas where this problem exists, but those are, I think, the major ones. And these are all areas where more honesty is needed. Even if it means your law firm occasionally looses a case because the client is guilty Even if it means your product doesn't sell as well as you would like it to because it really isn't useful to that many people. Eventually, I think we will see improvement because the age of materialism is ending, but it will take a while.