Lying,Self-deception and the Reconstruction of Honesty Education

As a complex social phenomenon, lying has two kinds of purposes behind it, good or evil. Lying can be used not only as a means of deceit aimed at "deceiving", but also as a means of achieving moral ends such as "self-protection" and "helping others". In addition, it may also be used as an immoral means of "flattering others". Therefore, we can divide lying into three categories:lying based on custom in the field of culture, lying based on profit in the field of economy, and lying based on power in the field of politics. Among them, lying based on custom is an amoral behavior generally accepted by people, while lying based on profit is an immoral behavior that people generally resist, while lying based on power is an immoral behavior that may force people to deceive themselves. Since modern times, under the impact of nationalism and economism, the Confucian tradition of "sincerity" self-cultivation based on no self-deception "has gradually evolved into a concept of "credit" that abandons "sincerity". It not only leads to the era of habitual lying, universal lying and even institutional lying, but also gives birth to an imperfect concept of "credit" based on "self-deception". To reconstruct a kind of honesty education which can effectively avoid personality "self-deception", this paper holds that we urgently need to do a good job in the following three aspects:first of all, we should be tolerant of those who speak the truth, thus create a moral atmosphere of telling the truth; secondly, in the case that there is no full institutional guarantee for telling the truth, we should also tolerate the lying acts forced by the bottommost survival needs, with the premise that we must be on guard against the self-deception personality trap; finally and the most fundamentally, we should cultivate people's spirit of pursuing facts and enhance their capacity of recognizing different types of lying with different characters.