Terror of honesty

From my not so long experience , I can say for sure that whenever one is faced with choice between being correct/principled and confronting difficulty one should choose to be correct/principled difficulties ease out or/and do not matter. Similarly one should choose to be correct if the other choice is (un)popularity, popularity is very unstable. One should be honest in any case to be happy and one should be cynically honest if one can afford. Authority wields fear, honesty wields terror. And if one rationally calculates just the self interest without  taking into consideration any social concerns and conscientiousness, one would find more pluses on the side of honest/principled life than the corrupt/unprincipled one. The basic pre-condition of a principled life is a dialectical unity between theory and practice.