Honesty and Dignity

Quite often a guilty sub­ject will invoke such expres­sions as, “I swear to God I’m telling the truth,” “I hope my mother drops dead if I’m lying,” “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles,” etc. Although expres­sions of this type can­not be con­sid­ered as symp­toms of decep­tion, they fre­quently are used by guilty sub­jects in an effort to lend force­ful­ness or con­vic­tion to their asser­tions of innocence.

Inbau & Reid, Crim­i­nal Inter­ro­ga­tion and Con­fes­sions, 1962.

In the inter­ro­ga­tion room, the truth­ful­ness of the sub­ject is nat­u­rally in ques­tion. The man who pro­claims his hon­esty (when it is not oth­er­wise chal­lenged) is prob­a­bly not being hon­est. When deal­ing with some­one who tells you he’s hon­est, keep a hand on your wallet.

Like­wise integrity. If you have integrity, peo­ple will know it with­out being told. If they don’t or if you aren’t, telling them won’t con­vince them. In fact, if peo­ple don’t know you to have integrity and you claim to, they will (appro­pri­ately) ques­tion why you should think it nec­es­sary to protest. The more offended noises you make in response, the more their ques­tions will seem justified.

In the same way that unpro­vokedly pro­claim­ing one’s own integrity calls into ques­tion that integrity, so does right­eous con­cern over one’s honor and dig­nity reveal a lack of honor and dignity.

Honor and dig­nity are not some­thing that some­one else can take away. If you have honor and dig­nity, it doesn’t mat­ter what peo­ple think of you. Dig­nity and honor are in how you behave, not how peo­ple see you. If you’re upset that some­one might be depriv­ing you of either, you’ve already lost—no, surrendered—it.

Yet peo­ple die over honor and dignity—or over the per­ceived loss of honor or dig­nity. That’s what road rage crimes are often about—loss of con­trol, per­ceived loss of dig­nity, esca­la­tion (“I’ll show him!”), wrin­kled sheet metal, gun­play. In a flash one per­son has gone from