For the month of January 2022, I chose the theme of “truth, honor, and integrity.” To me, this topic relates to light because when people are trustworthy and honorable, it is uplifting to those who depend on them. Honor and integrity give people a sense of confidence about their interactions with those who live out those characteristics. Truth–true facts about a matter–is also essential for the progress of man. Particularly, technological advancements don’t take place with false information being used to develop a process or product. It takes truth–truth about physical principles that operate in the natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But even in the social world, we need truth for people to flourish and contribute to prosperity. Closely related are honor and integrity. Being honorable and having integrity involve being truthful and trustworthy. If these characteristics were typical for most people most of the time, I think we would see a greater unity among people and several types of crime would not even exist, such as fraud and scams. Financial dishonesty and cheating would be rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I just discovered a paper on “public deception schemes to conceal product dangers.” It discusses several cases where industries deceived the public and withheld evidence and information about product dangers so that they could profit financially. One of those was the tobacco industry, which I had heard of before. But less known to me, before “unleaded gasoline” became the norm, a similar profit scheme led to the use of lead in gasoline, though many already knew that lead was a health danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One scheme that I found particularly interesting was about the sugar industry. This one was only recently discovered. Apparently, documents were discovered that showed that in the 1960s, the sugar industry began a campaign to counter “negative attitudes toward sugar.\u201d Part of that campaign included paying a couple of Harvard scientists to “publish a major review paper in 1967 that minimized the link between sugar and heart health and shifted blame to saturated fat.” Can you imagine? Industry leaders were willing to use their resources to deceive the public at large–and a couple of scientists were willing to go along with it. (You can download a copy of the paper here<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where was the integrity? The truth? The honor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Are we okay with this sort of stuff taking place in our nation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It will take all of us striving to be honorable, trustworthy, and people of integrity to really make dishonesty and fraud go away. If the norms of our society lead us to feel okay deceiving others for our benefit, what can we really expect when some of the members of that same society get into positions of power and authority? Will they suddenly become benevolent, honorable, truthful, acting with integrity, when the stakes are much bigger, though they weren’t that way with the smaller risks?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our honesty and honor must start in the smallest things, before those characteristics can be strong enough to endure the high stakes and the big deals. They must become our way of life, our reputation, and what we expect of each other. We need to teach our children to be honorable, as well. Among the many things we might do to teach them integrity and honor, we must be truthful, ourselves, with our children to set the example. Please take this message seriously. We, your fellow citizens, need you to be a man or woman of honor and integrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here’s to honor, integrity, and truth! We can’t have the greatest light without them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the month of January 2022, I chose the theme of “truth, honor, and integrity.” To me, this topic relates to light because when people are trustworthy and honorable, it is uplifting to those who depend on them. Honor and integrity give people a sense of confidence about their interactions with those who live out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,244],"tags":[243,241,239,90,236,99,159,242,240,191,238,237],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-relationshiips","category-truth-honor-integrity","tag-benevolence","tag-benevolent","tag-honesty","tag-honor","tag-honorable","tag-integrity","tag-right","tag-trustworthiness","tag-trustworthy","tag-truth","tag-truthful","tag-truthfulness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":529,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}