Issue167 G-89互助社-8.12.同主题 ~期待你的意见

飞啊~飞UID: 2121330

G-89互助社-8.12.同主题 Issue167:

It is impossible for an effective political leader to tell the truth all the time. Complete honesty is not a useful virtue for a politician.

I fundamentally agree with the author's assertion that as an effective political leader, one cannot tell the truth all the time. Although it is true that honesty is a virtue for almost every one, a politician has to lie sometimes for gaining the power or maintenance of the stableness of a country.

To begin with, to gain the power, politician sometimes cannot tell the truth. Because politics involves many individual competitions，if a politician tell truth all the time, their competitors may utilize the information to fight against him. For example, if a political leader talked about things about his private life when others asked, his or her competitors may spend those information to the media, such as TV and newspaper, and the masses all know them all. Because information about private life makes the leader losing his or her respect and seriousness, thus he or she will probably fail in the election. Therefore, to avoid utilized by the competitors and to gain one's power, a political leader cannot tell the truth sometimes.

In addition, to maintain the stableness of a country, an effective leader should lie on some situation. In some situation, complete honesty will bring side-effect on the country disturbing the harmony of the country, so the leader has to hide their true plan. A good case shedding light to this point is that before the depreciation of RMB, Chinese government pronounced that RMB would not depreciation, while not long later, RMB begun depreciation, not as what the government pronounced. Why the leader talked so? If the Chinese government had said that RMB would depreciate at the first, there would be a lot of people to sell their RMB and buy the USD, and it would ultimately lead to only one result--greatly disturbing of the economic balance in China. If it were the case, the impact would not only be on the economic but also on industry, people's life and so on. To ensure the stableness of China, it is the responsibility of government official to tell this white lie.
So an effective leader cannot tell the truth all the time at the expense of disturbing the balance of society.

Admittedly, honesty is the traditional virtue in China as well as in the word, and a politician should tell the masses the truth at most of situation. Otherwise, the people will never believe what the leader say, and the leader will lose his basic support of his work. Nixtion is the best example. Because of  hiding the watermen scandal, he was require to resign of presidents.

In sum, as an effective leader, although one should be honest, he or she cannot tell the truth all the time at the expense of disturbing of balance of society.

[ Last edited by staralways on 2005-8-13 at 23:47 ]

zehuaUID: 199246

depreciate 是贬值，老大！
应该是appreciate!