Let’s make honesty an election issue

WE have, since Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis as one of the most powerful tools in self-realisation just over a century ago, myriad ways of trying to make ourselves comfortable in our skins, of trying to make ourselves fit into the world we find ourselves flickering through like a fairy light blinking on a Christmas tree. 

We have a pretty full tool box of conceits designed to assauge the itch that trying to be a good, decent person inevitably causes in such an unfair world.

Some people take the talking cure, others the walking cure — the Camino de Santiago or any one of those ancient pilgrimage routes enjoying an unlikely, counterintuitive revival. Some embrace religion, many with love but, sadly, others with a dangerous, threatening fanaticism. Others still, equally good and passionate people, reject religion and the idea of a god.