Why doing the right thing is the right thing to do

11 Aug Why doing the right thing is the right thing to do

“I can resist everything except temptation” said the great poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, a tortured but talented soul if ever there was one.

Wilde fully understood how easily temptation can easily lead to a dereliction of our own moral code – from matters trivial like munching a second slice of cake to more sinister behaviour.

A somewhat lesser-known Victorian author – my great-grandfather Alfred J. Tyrer – wrote a poem entitled Only Do the Right – a sentimental call to arms for socially conscious middle class folks to do the right thing to help those less fortunate.

The temptation is to put yourself first and others second of course. Indeed, some might reasonably argue this itself is the right thing to do. You can’t help others unless you have the means to look after yourself first.

Yet the temptation to cut corners, to skimp and scam and tell lies to the detriment of others that is more manifest. No one is perfect but such morally vacuous options lack pragmatism.

If you wilfully and repeatedly do the wrong things, you’ll soon be found out. If you don’t tell the truth, where’s your fallback position? Everyone now knows you’re an unreliable liar. Your word isn’t your bond. Why should anyone ever trust you again? Oh, and how can you sleep soundly at night?

Doing the right thing is an often tougher option and demands you do things that are for the greater good rather than self-interest. It means having values and principles – holding true to them and putting them into action. Without them, you are rudderless.

So, what has this got to do with media and communications – surely the most contentious, even contemptuous, area of public life? Well, lots actually.

The temptation to boast, distort reality and make claims beyond your means or simply lie can be overwhelming for some folks.

Take the current Tory party leadership – and de facto contest to be the next Prime Minister – between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.

Both are making a stream of unbelievable claims they know they can’t realistically fulfil spanning the economy to cracking down on human rights and even shifting ‘handouts’ from the deprived to the well-off – from inner cities to the supposed more deserved shires where, don’t you know, ‘hard-working people’ live.

It is a desperate race to the bottom – pretentious pandering to what they perceive to be the prejudices rather than the preferences of the Tory party members whose votes they need to seize power.

Whoever wins will spin a wholly different line to woo the rest of us in time yet we all know neither believes a single word they say. Just how sad is that?

Now compare that to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown who recently urged Sunak, Truss, outgoing PM Boris Johnson and chancellor Nadhim Zahawi to urgently call a COBRA meeting in order to devise strategies to help people who face “an unbearable burden of what are going to become unpayable bills”.

There is nothing in it for Brown yet he said what he thought was the right thing – and has been widely praised for doing so.

Now consider how you choose to communicate your own moral code. How often do you do – and say – the right thing because you feel it is the right thing to do?

Good communication is rarely about us but about others – the audience we aim to communicate with, the people we seek to influence and appeal to.

How may they think about us if we communicate effectively by providing considered opinion, offer clarity and purpose and, most of all,  trustworthiness – not to con or confuse but to prove our worth, knowledge, skill, value, experience and expertise?

Doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do is the cornerstone of every good person, business, organisation or enterprise – congruent with our mission, vision and values and how we choose to communicate with them.

So go on, do the right thing. It IS the right thing to do.

© Chris Green