Our knowledge of the world around us comes from two sources -- conceptual knowledge and necessity. Within the circle of daily existence, we develop the necessary knowledge of how things are by encountering things. Beyond this, the notion of how things are comes from conceptual knowledge.
With prosperity, it's easy to make a life within a certain circumscribed area of action, which we come to know very well, both from practical knowledge, and intellectual knowledge; we develop the latter inferentially from actual sensory intuition and our own physical reactions.
So within prosperity, there can be quite a large number of people just doing their thing, and their notions of the world beyond the sphere of actual experience come not from valid inference from the local circumstance, but largely from cultural knowledge -- exogenous suggestion.
And then, as with the invention of the second actor in the Greek tragedy, a messenger appears from afar.
At this point, Hegel might say that we are only that which we are thought to be by the messenger, and vice versa. And that's at least true for the interaction, and the person that each is thought to be, and accorded the right to be, in the conversation.
Perhaps this is the point at which the abstract ideas of honesty, truth and virtue that the person in the circumscribed, or prosperous, existence was able to do without, as they had a direct mastery of the empirical actions necessary for survival -- perhaps at this point they become necessary. They existed before the point of encounter as sort of placeholders for the arguments for the universality of experience that each of the two strangers would attempt to make.
And if one of the two has consciously disregarded truth, virtue, or honesty as false notions, they will have no claim when meeting the messenger, or the local citizen, or perhaps the distant kingdom from which the messenger has come, or the sovereign which the citizen serves.