Getting ahead

I found the article Lying from today's Christian Science Monitor of timely relevance as my current status is set to: job seeker. My aversion to lying can be debilitating at times. Perhaps limited and selective disclosure is the safest bet.

Anyway, some tidbits from the article:

In the high-pressure, high-stakes environment of 21st- century America, lying has for many apparently become a way of life, even among those whose faith demands truth-telling. People may know it's wrong to lie in theory, researchers say, but in practice they feel the success they want will be out of reach if they admit their flaws and sins along the way.
...
"It's now more lucrative to lie," says Diane Swanson, professor of professional ethics at Kansas State University. "People must know there is a risk, but the payoff is potentially enormous.... Conversely, if you admit you had a flat quarter or a flat year, then the market will penalize you."
...
Meanwhile, the list keeps growing of top achievers who got snared in their own web of lies. Martha Stewart awaits sentencing for lying to investigators; 28 top federal employees hold fake degrees; journalists at USA Today, The New York Times, and The Nation have presented fiction as fact.

Seen most charitably, the ever-rising toll of lies told to get ahead might in part reflect a rising level of scrutiny and standards for leaders, according to Douglas Porpora, author of "Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in America." Although lying has always been around, he says, today's reporters who probe routinely into private lives are now more likely to find and expose it... Yet what's also noteworthy today, Porpora adds, is that the ordinary person is willing to tolerate routine lying under certain circumstances. When the crime seems practically harmless - to cheat the government out of a few tax dollars, or to bill a rich client for a few unworked hours - then the working guy seems to have won, according to Porpora and other analysts.