Perhaps the most obvious fruits of repentance and awakening would be public honesty - in small things as much as large. It would be startlingly obvious, and would have immense consequences.
In no other area have there been such changes in my adult life as the expansion of dishonesty; from a few enclaves such as advertising and government to embrace all major institutions and activities, all of the time - in private as much as in public.
For example, in the worlds I worked in - universities, science, the medical profession - honesty was normal and almost complete at the lower and middling levels. Dishonesty (including deliberate misleading) while considerably more frequent, was not common even at the leadership levels - rare enough that it stood-out, and attracted explicit adverse comment, often sanctions.
But lying and misleading rapidly got more common from the late 1980s until the present situation when almost all public discourse is essentially dishonest - only containing enough factual truth to sustain the basic and motivating lies.
I found this particularly shocking in science which - in Britain at any rate - was almost ridiculously honest about almost everything forty to fifty years ago. Honest to the point of pedantic dullness (but, in retrospect, what an admirable fault!)
Even more widely in academia (I knew English Literature and Philosophy pretty well), there was an aversion to exaggeration, to one-sided selectiveness, to anything smacking of self-promotion.
Yet now, scientists do not write or speak even a paragraph without 'massaging' the spirit of truth into something more expedient. And as for Western politicians...
Because of all this systematic dishonesty everywhere, we inhabit a virtual reality - our world is a tissue of lies; and honesty strikes most people as a brutal act of aggression. Indeed, they regard honest men as obvious liars, because they assume truth is the mass consensus. Plain honesty is insensitive: one of the worst of crimes.
If ever Western Society turns-around and becomes qualitatively better; it must include a restoration of the transcendental Good of Honesty in all public discourse - and this would be so shocking as to seem cataclysmic.
If this unlikely event ever were to happen, you won't miss it: Imagine the sensation of this inverted world being upended, and restored to stand right-way-up, on a solid base of truth...
