Do you really need to be truthful ?
We often find ourselves feeling “Life is not fair” because of our desire for being just and fair. We want equality, justice and fairness in everything in life, our empathy stems from the very concept of being truthful.
One of the many seemingly simple yet one of the most significant and complex questions we find ourselves asking many often is,
“What does it mean to be Human?”
However, one of the most remarkable attributes that define humanity in the core of its being is the sense of longing for Truth and Justice.
Truth and its significance in ethics :
Even a man who violates Justice longs for it when he is in the victim’s stead.
Justice has as at its foundation, the principle of being Truthful; no wonder why scholars include the word ‘honesty’ as a synonym for Justice,
because,
no one who’s true to himself and his conscience can oppose justness in the state of being truthful.
Truthfulness is the basic raw material for everything that makes human life valuable and worthwhile.
Since the dawn of humanity, we have attributed Truthfulness to the noblest of humans.
We subconsciously associate truthfulness with the concepts such as Conscience, Ethics, and Justice.
As we created the blueprint of the ideal human being, the attribute of honesty was always present; even during the initial prototypes of the ancient moral framework.
For the ancient Egyptians, Maat or Ma’at was the concept of TRUTH , balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Maat was also personified as a goddess.
Ever since then, it has never ceased to influence life as we know it, regardless of the language or religion. It has always been regarded as a divine attribute.
Therefore, Justice in its most abstract form is nothing but truthfulness, and our longing for morality is but the echo of the cries of Truth within our heart.
Without truthfulness, justice would be non-existent. Truthfulness is a mirror, the reflection of which is unbearable for pretense and hypocrisy. It is the standard by which everything measures up to, it is the plumb line of the strong wall of Equity.
Truth vs. Happiness
If we are seeking Truth, we may find both Truth and Happiness in the end, but seeking after happiness without the former gets neither of them.
“No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be True”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne.
To be truthful is to have respect for ourselves, for lying is but deceiving our own self.
A man without truthfulness is a hypocrite, and he acts in contradiction to his or her own stated beliefs.
Although being Truthful and Honest may sometimes hurt others, it is more important to be Truthful than making others happy and comfortable because once they realize that you weren’t truthful to them, they won’t remember the times you kept them happy, they are only going to remember you as a cheat and a liar all their lives.
Hypocrisy:
The best thing we can do, that would be beneficial to everyone around us is to be true to ourselves at all times and circumstances, especially when we feels the least likely to be so.
Having the boldness to be truthful about ourselves is the gateway to freedom and happiness.
Life becomes a lot more blissful when we do what we say and say what we do.
We will not have the need of changing masks often and remember what we say.
Truthfulness gives peace of mind but lies only demand more of lying.
William Hazlitt quotes it well, that “The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy because the repentance of the hypocrite itself, is hypocrisy”.
Lack of truthfulness is the reason why our marriages fail, why we fall out of love and get to hate one another, why we rob and kill each other. It is the lack of truthfulness that is the mother of all evil.
If you’re truthful, you obey the dictates of your own conscience and can never deceive yourself.
If we lose our conscience, we have lost the essence of humanity itself. We are never more hopelessly lost beyond repair, than when we have lost the capacity of being true to ourselves.
Being Truthful is being Human:
None other than Shakespeare puts it well about Truthfulness in Hamlet, in the words of Polonius’ last piece of advice, summing up his long-winded speech to his son Laertes, who is in a hurry to leave, “This above all: to thine own self be true, let it follow thee as the night follows the day and Thou canst not then be false to any man”.
Truthfulness in quintessence is at the core of all Justice, Ethics, Love and Life itself, and to lose it, is indeed to lose the meaning of being human.
