My Dear Son,

So you are back in Campus and back to studies! I hope your five days with Punchi and her family would have been a stimulating experience. Though living in thousands of miles away from Sri Lanka, they have never lost touch with the Sri Lankan spirit. Like you, I am also proud of them.

In your email yesterday you said that you have come across a beautiful quote: “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.” You wanted me to elaborate on this quote so that you could grasp it better.

Well son, it is a great saying! I think there are two main reasons why it is important to be truthful: It affects how others perceive us; and it affects how we perceive ourselves. The funny thing is, I’m not certain which is more important. If others don’t think we’re telling the truth, we have no credibility; we have no believability and we won’t be able to get anything done.

If we lie to ourselves; if we are dishonest to ourselves that might even be worse. Think about it, if we can’t trust ourselves; if we don’t believe ourselves; if we have no credibility of our own, how can we even function in this world.

Being truthful, as one might have expected, means a strict adherence to a policy of honesty and openness. Our interactions with others demand conscientious honesty: not just refraining from deception, but making an effort to inform others of any fact that they might have a reasonable interest in knowing. Deception by deliberate omission, though perhaps less immoral than outright lying, is still deception and should be retracted.

Being truthful also means being dependable and trustworthy. To be virtuous, it is important not just that our words be truthful, but that our actions are truthful and consistent with what we have promised.

When we commit ourselves to do something, we should follow through, and failing in our obligations - whether through malice or even through simple forgetfulness - is an ethical lapse that calls for amends. Living up to one’s words is important not only on an individual level but also on the level of the community.

It is no great challenge not to lie to others; honesty, after all, is always easier and less effortful than the mental exertion it takes to weave a consistent and believably detailed falsehood. Self-deception, on the other hand, is significantly easier, and it is rampant.

A person who says things such as “I just know it’s true,” while being unable to present convincing evidence for that statement, is in a very real way lying to himself. Even if a person strongly and sincerely believes in what he is saying, yet cannot back it up with fact, this principle holds true.

I believe I gave you something to think about seriously in the next few days.

Until next week,

Always yours, Thaththi