How Much Does Dishonesty Cost Society?

JulesKorngold

Argument Topic: Lots

Dishonesty can lead to:

• Fraud, corruption, increased spending for security measures
• Erosion of trust, increased crime, scams and exploitation
• Resources wasted on verifying information, resolving disputes, and mitigating damages
• Disinformation on social media often leading to violence
• Discouraging innovation and entrepreneurship
  

MayCaesar

In the book "Rise of the West", one of the author's core theses was that trust is what has allowed for societies to develop advanced trading systems that ultimately gave rise to the Western civilization. When you trust people around you to fulfil their promises, abide by the contracts and partake in trades fairly, then the circle of your opportunities significantly expands, you more easily find collaborators for your projects, and the whole society works together towards mutual welfare and thrives. Furthermore, this trust leads to people treating each other with respect in regular social interactions, and that respect leads them to developing ideas such as human rights and equality before the law.

It is very different in societies where such trust is absent and people systematically lie to each other. I would argue that this is the central feature of Russia that makes it an Eastern civilization fundamentally: people are used to being screwed over by the government, the sellers, the employers, even the spouses - so, rather than openly trading, people are stuck playing a zero-sum game with each other, where everyone is trying to "win" and make everyone else "lose". The society becomes hierarchical, where the way to get on top is to bring others beneath you. Hence the history of corrupt totalitarian states, bloody civil wars, serfdom, domestic abuse and uncontrolled crime.

Dishonesty is most apparent when people directly lie to each other for immediate gain - but it can also be a more creeping phenomenon. When people stop speaking their mind out of fear of being misunderstood or chastised. "Political correctness" on the West is one example of that: people increasingly are afraid to say what they really think if it goes against the rapidly changing and tightening norms. The issue is that you can never trust that what you hear from someone is what they really think. Your romantic partner tells you she loves you, but because she is used to saying things in order to please people, she might not really mean it, and this realization drives you crazy. It takes a special degree of stubbornness to still maintain that childhood trust we had for our parents and apply it to other people under such conditions. You have to be willing to get burned every now and then in exchange for cultivating great mutually beneficial relationships with the few with whom it pays off royally.

Then, we have some people who just do not know what a proper conversation is... They think that someone saying something they do not like is an indication of dishonesty. Well, that is a different phenomenon, and they only have themselves to blame for being deprived of good conversation partners. Being unable to trust others because they are known to be systematically dishonest, and being unable to trust others because of your inner paranoid demons, are two different things.

jack

Barnardot said:

There seems to be a lot of talk going on this site about people who compulsively lie and use dishonest tricks to try and make up for not being able to debate properly.

Hello B:

In the world, winners WIN, and losers snivel about the rules.

excon

Dreamer

@Barnardot

Big tobacco's Merchants of doubt killed 500,000 in 2020 alone.

https://theconversation.com/tobacco-killed-500-000-americans-in-2020-is-it-time-to-control-cigarette-makers-153611

Climate change denial harms the economy.

https://skepticalscience.com/co2-limits-economy.htm

Quack Tycoons causes 300,000 extra covid deaths let alone hospitalizations and long covid disability.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/300000-us-covid-deaths-averted-vaccination-analysis-finds/story?id=84753284

The number is easily in the trillions. A statistical life is ten million dollars. $800,000 x 10 million = $8 trillion in deaths in the United States alone.

John_C_87

@Dreamer

Big tobacco's Merchants of doubt killed 500,000 in 2020 alone.

Are you sure many smokers aren’t just committing suicide? We have no real idea of all the effects of the carcinogenic chemicals placed in tobacco and what they can do to a person’s mental health.

The same might go for many of the covid cases as well ?