Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I talk about honesty so often that I may have sounded like a seriously broken record over the years. Honesty is the last virtue of the Humanity Way (Đạo làm người) – Love, Propriety, Loyalty, Wisdom, Honesty (Nhân, Lễ, Nghĩa, Trí, Tín). Falling below honesty, you fall below the Humanity Way.

But today, every person, every organization, every social medium… lies, from the beginning till the end of the day, every day. People lie so much that they don’t even know they lie – lying has become a reflex like their heartbeat that they don’t even know it exists.

Everyone knows that lying makes everyone distrust everyone else. Honesty is the glue that binds society together. Dishonesty means the bond is no longer there, and the society becomes incoherent, broken and shattered. Development becomes impossible or extremely weak.

Dishonesty is bad for you, because people don’t trust you and don’t want to work with you. Hard for you to develop a successful career in any industry.

Dishonesty is also bad for your country, because no one trusts anyone – extremely difficult to develop politics, economics, businesses, trade…

Honesty means that what you can’t say, don’t say; what you say, every word of it has to be the truth.

The truth means “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – no half-truth (misleading information), no wrong fact, no exaggeration, no smoke, no irrelevant additional info…

If you really want to help yourself and your country, be honest.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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