This again is slightly amorphous territory – difficult to get a handle on.  And yet it definitely has a handle on us and we need not blithely submit to it.

Trust is key

First, take the simple issue of trust.  If there is no real trust, there is no real relationship.  Nearly everyone would agree with that.  Betrayal of trust deeply undermines any significant relationship.  If, then, people are more important than things, and relationships ‘make the world go round’ (after all, who, in a near death situation, thinks of their hi-fi system or their designer clothes back home?  People think at that moment of those they love), then it follows that trust – the currency of real relationships – is overridingly important.

The power of habit

The problem about trust comes when one party thinks they can bend that trust a bit and the other party won’t notice.  This, of course, never works in the long term, because untrustworthy behaviour that starts with a ‘one off’ eventually becomes a habit and habits eventually get exposed; thus, in our families and friendship groups, we all do in fact know quite clearly who can be trusted and who can’t.  ‘The truth will out’.  This being the case, for all our sakes we need an ethic of honesty and integrity, rather than an ethic which pays lip service to these old warhorses, but really worships at the alter of convenience.  If we have a culture that tells us that ‘it doesn’t really matter’, we will tell white lies, we will evade difficult situations, we will let people down – and they will let us down, undermining any basis of trust and any true relationship.  If, on the other hand, we have a culture which values truth and holds that ‘my word is my bond’, and teaches youngsters so, then we will have a foundation for relationships that last and that don’t disappoint.

Dishonesty brings inconvenience

It is not only relationships that are let down, often destroyed, by mistrust.  It is also that the apparent convenience of living according to vague and malleable ‘values’ is attended by the huge inconvenience of living in a society where everyone behaves that way – so that everything has to be locked, contractually sealed, withheld, defended, doubted, distrusted.  The money that has to be spent on security guards, locks, surveillance, insurance, police, prisons – all this is ultimately paid by we the consumers and tax payers.  And at the national level, two of our greatest institutions – the banks and Parliament, two great pillars of British fame and success – have been rocked by scandals that speak of opportunism taking the place of integrity.

Leaders are like us

And yet we have to be careful before blaming leaders who act in much the same way as frankly the rest of us tend to act (do we not sometimes skirt around questions of integrity, preferring the more relaxed and ‘chilled out’ path to getting what we want?).  Leaders will tend to act that way because they grew up in the very same cultural atmosphere we did, in which the lines had become increasingly blurred and we had ceased to be taught that telling the truth was morally important.  That is why corruption is rife in some countries and rare in others.  It is a cultural matter.  Britain inherited from Victorian times a culture of moral discipline, probity, honour and truth.  We still have relatively honest politicians, administrators and business systems.  But the fluid in which our venerable institutions are suspended is the relaxed, evasive culture that we have all grown up in.  Some of it will seep in to those institutions; and in time they will become waterlogged with compromise, evasion, greed and indiscipline.  Economically, the consequences of becoming a corrupt country are almost as severe as the consequences of mistrust to personal relationships.  Nothing works!  Visit some countries in Africa or Latin America and you will know what we mean.  Britain is in severe danger of going that way.  Good character is the foundation of economic and social success and our good character is being vitally undermined.

What is to be done?  Part of the answer lies in the way in which children are brought up (for this see “The challenge of bringing up children”); but even this is parasitic on a society that practices what it preaches, without which children soon see through the hypocrisy.  For children, it is about how they see us living our lives – and how ‘everyone else’ is living their lives, as reflected in the media.  Then they learn by imitation.

How we lost it

What watered down our once rock-solid morals in this sphere?  Partly, it was that discipline and probity were mixed up with what we call ‘being up-tight’ – and no-one wants to be tarred with that brush, or go back to that reality.  So it is a question of the baby going out with the bathwater.  In our bid to be relaxed and ‘chilled’, we forgot to maintain that truth matters!

This was then compounded by a commercial culture in which ‘image’ could be used to manipulate consumers into parting with large sums of money.   Thus, so many of the cultural mores that make up our society are based on the power of image, which tells us how we must look, how we must behave and what we must have.  Yet the power of image is based on a subtle hoodwinking of a whole population into gradually buying a lie, and swallowing it whole!  For example, we regard certain things as ‘cool’ (and therefore must have or do them) on the basis that people that we regard as cool (celebrities, models etc) have them or do them – and we try to imitate.  The lie comes in the suggestion that this or that sportsman really does prefer this brand of shoe (even though we know he or she was paid huge sums in sponsorship to pretend they prefer it); or the suggestion that the aura of the celebrity who is pictured driving a certain kind of car will somehow rub off on us, if we drive the same kind of car.  Or that the aftershave worn by the hunky male will therefore make us look hunky!

It doesn’t deliver

In truth, it has never worked for anyone.  People with the personality to pull it off look ‘cool’ in virtually anything they might wear, and the people who are intrinsically ‘un-cool’ require more than designer clothes or fast cars to make up the deficit.  That is the truth.  Our culture is peddling one long, involved, complex, idiotic lie.   As the poet TS Eliot wrote: “The increasing organization of advertisement and propaganda – or the influencing of masses of men by any means except through their intelligence – is all against them”[1].   He wrote this in 1939 – he had no idea of what was to come!

A couple of simple examples of what has come, to demonstrate the point:  KFC currently has a sign up with a picture of the venerable Colonel Sanders, with the caption “The Colonel is glad that you were able to drop in”.  For this to be true, the Colonel would have to be a) in the branch at the time of your visit, and b) alive – he died in 1980!  But we just accept it…  Meanwhile, a current Coke-cola ad says: “Coke – open happiness”, as if ‘happiness’ could really be expected to emanate from a can of a carbonated drink!  Again, we just accept it… But the cumulative effect of such nonsense is to create a culture in which we cannot believe a word that is said, or trust the motives of the one saying it – what a loss to genuine community!  It also leaves people confused.  A survey of 1,000 16 year-olds found that the question "what would you like to do for a career?" was answered "become a celebrity" by no less than 54%  Meanwhile, a survey of British holiday makers found that the US was the most popular destination, with some British tourists attracted by the prospect of "meeting a celebrity".  [2]

What to do?

The first key here is to expose the culture of manipulation.  It must be talked about, lampooned, brought to people’s attention, become the subject of dismay – all richly deserved, but somehow having remained immune until now.  Exposing what is going on will in fact be a key factor in upholding all values (not just that of truth) because all of them are currently victim to precisely that commercial manipulation which seeks to herd us mindlessly in the seller’s chosen direction, into the clutches of empty materialism, selfishness, violence and lack of commitment – all of which can only be received when we are unthinking as to their consequences.

We must raise a shout so loud that it will shake the foundations of the culture of deception that is all around us.  We are like the proverbial frog that will boil in the pan as long as the water is heated slowly.  But there is surely now enough heat to show us what is happening – and give us enough impetus to jump!

And the second key is to reinstate a culture of truth at every level.  In many ways, this has to start at the bottom level – and we all have our little bit of leverage over that.  But we can also address the representation of our culture, which comes through the media and informs our view of how ‘everyone else’ is living.  That needs to adopt some values, fast, so that the constant diet of value-free living, only-fools-have-rules skepticism, amoral-is-exciting entertainment – that this diet is changed, on account of our growing indigestion.

Next: Who is to say which values?