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I Must Always Try to Be a More Honest Person than I was Yesterday

Submitted by Ken Watts on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 10:40

HAVING DISCOVERED THE HIDDEN liberal messages in the mission statement of Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, and in the first and second of his nine principles, we come to principle number three:

I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

His approach to this principle is more direct than it was in the case of religion, but it's still carefully—and admirably crafted.

Another writer with the same audience—without Beck's leftist inclinations—would have confused the issue by talking about "truth" rather than "honesty".

"Truth" is a much more slippery term. It's very easy for Beck's audience to confuse small-t truth—the kind of normal, everyday truth that science deals with—with capital-T Truth—the kind of authoritarian "Truth" you get in church, or in the pronouncements of dictators.

So it would have been easy for another writer to use that term instead, knowing that their pronouncements would sound innocent, even virtuous, but that the base would hear an endorsement of their particular religious or political views, rather than a call to honesty.

Beck does not make that mistake: another sign of his underlying, very liberal and very honest, motivation.

Instead, he uses the word "honesty" which is much harder to misunderstand.

And he includes, in the principle, an admission of guilt.

Every one of his conservative readers who reads, agrees with, and adopts this principle has to admit that he or she has been less than honest in the past. Otherwise, how can they try to be more honest today?

This is a profound thing for a conservative to admit. It's much more usual, when coming from a right-wing point of view, to cling to repression and denial. (I certainly did when I was a conservative.)

This is the first, and most important, of two ways that Beck is calling for conservatives to be more honest.

The second way is more straight-forward, and more obvious from a liberal perspective—it's just to stop telling lies:

Stop saying that our president is a terrorist.

Stop saying that a provision put into the health care reform bill by a Republican is a Democratic plot to kill grandma, when it's nothing like that.

Stop telling people, for that matter, that a health care reform package that would create the most capitalistic health care system in any large industrialized nation is socialist.

Stop telling people that right-wing web sites designed and run by professional lobbyist groups for corporate interests are grassroots organizations.

Stop implying that Iraq was behind 9/11.

Stop saying that children aren't allowed to pray in school, when that isn't true and when your real complaint is that children can't be forced to pray in school.

Stop saying that Obama wasn't born in the United States.

But Beck has deeper fish to fry than a simple "stop lying" message. He chose the word "honesty" because of the first, and more important aspect of honesty: honesty with ones self.

He's calling for conservatives to embrace a deeply liberal value: the ability to question ones deepest motives and beliefs, to honestly ask whether I am being fair, whether I am being just, whether I am being charitable, whether I am considering all possibilities, whether I am giving the other side a fair shake.

Conservatives have traditionally seen this trait as a weakness in liberals.

It's deeply tied to the current state of affairs in Congress. The liberals are even now still holding out hope for bipartisan understanding and cooperation, asking themselves whether they have listened well enough, understood the other side well enough, extended enough olive branches.

The conservatives, secure in their complete lack of honest self-examination, continue to villify, lie about, and refuse to listen to the liberals. They never bother to take an honest look at themselves to ask if they might be wrong.

Beck is suggesting that this has gone too far, that it's time for a little liberal self-examination on the part of conservatives, a little skepticism about their own motives, a little honesty with themselves.

It's the ability to ask, "Do I honestly hold this opinion for the reasons I'm giving myself and others, or are there other, more selfish, reasons? Have I taken an honest look at the facts before choosing my position? Is that other guy really satanic, or just someone who sees things from another point of view? Could I, possibly, be wrong—just a little bit?"

And, of course, he's also calling for an end to the gratuitous lying on the political stage.

Next time, principle #4—The family is sacred.
My spouse and I are the ultimate
authority, not the government.