You Can Always Trust a Dishonest Person to be Dishonest

One of my favorite lines about honesty is from one of my favorite movies said by the character Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean where Jack said at the end: “You can always trust a dishonest person to be dishonest, honestly, it’s the dishonest ones you have to worry about.” There is a lot of truth to that statement, if someone is willing to be dishonest about anything, you can trust the fact that he or she will be dishonest about something else at some point with you. They cannot be trusted.

But what is it to be honest? I think that it is much more than either speaking the truth or not speaking the truth. It’s more about living what the truth is. It’s more about knowing what the truth is, about who we are, about who others are, and being faithful to always communicate in actions, inactions, words spoken and words held back, the truth. Being honest is not just keeping a promise, or telling the truth. It’s living that truth at all times.

Being honest is being willing to be you one-hundred percent. It’s not hiding behind assumed realities or designed fiction. It’s accepting things as they are and being unwilling to hide anything that we don’t like about it. We need to be honest with others, but equally so, we need to be honest with ourselves. I would go so far as to say that we must be honest with ourselves before we can be honest with others.

It’s not always easy to be honest. It’s not easy to admit that we are not good at something. It’s not easy to admit that we have done something wrong to another person. The truth does not claim to be easy, it claims to be right. If doing the right thing was easy, everyone would probably be right more often. But no matter how difficult it is, as Neil Warren said, "truth is always friendlier than anything less than the truth."