Integrity

What is integrity? Is it simply what you do and who you are when you think no one is watching?  - Madame Muse

The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage.  But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage…The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.   -  Chesterton

The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.  -  Lewis

Well, here would be my quick answers.  Integrity is:  Honesty.  Opposite of false.  Even when no one is watching.  Even when it comes at a cost. 

I think there’s more, though, and it relates to gestalt.  Someone once told me that integrity comes from the same root as integer, which is a whole number.  This is why we can speak of machines as having integrity, which in this case, would mean the system was unimpaired, complete, whole.  So in terms of the enjoyment of things, whether art or people or simply a jigsaw puzzle, integrity is the opposite of mercenary.  The reward and enjoyment from the activity needs to fit in the whole precisely because that is the consummation of the activity.  There is a humility and a commitment when one is dedicated to integrity, because you fully immerse yourself to the activity’s agenda and not your own.  In this sense, integrity is the opposite of affectation.  And people are usually pretty good at telling, even if subconsciously, if you’re just pretending to like the latest piece of art, whether music, or painting, or poem, or fashion, or whatever, just to be cool.  Especially good at telling if they themselves honestly like the art.  Most people can tell if you are simply trying to be their friend so you can share the four spiritual laws with them and usher them into the kingdom.  Most people recognize political double speak of their opponents.  For whatever reason, the human race has kept its bullshit detector quite intact—as long as it’s about somebody else.  Hypocrisy, is essentially an affront on our sense of aesthetics.  I find this hopeful, as I’ve written before that our faculty of aesthetics helps us chose between truths. 

Unfortunately, our western culture is on this side of the industrial revolution, and our society is saturated with the compartmentalization of everything.  While this analytical separation of things has enabled us to push technology to some pretty impressive feats, we have paid for it in the aesthetic realm.  It may very well be a dependable axiom that the greater the scientific feats of a civilization, the more they will experience meaninglessness.  We may have amenities a plenty, but we know longer feel connected.  We have ripped the universe into separate parts so that we can rebuild them into whatever the hell we want, but our souls feel the loss of the pattern, the gestalt, the integrity of the system.  A lot of well-meaning people attempt to address our problems, but they have no sense of the pattern, no integrity, and consequently usually cause more damage.  I’m thinking of things like Kony 2012.  This was a classic case of Chesterton’s wandering virtue isolated from the pattern.  The whole white man’s burden is offensive because it lacks integrity.  I confess a part of me was smugly pleased when I heard that some Uganda villagers rioted after watching that ridiculous YouTube.  It was just wrong on so many levels it’s easy to pick on.  But enough people have pointed out that the whole ‘save-Africa-through-awareness’ strategy is fundamentally hypocritical.  We simply can’t continue with the American life as is, and act at the same time as if we are going to help alleviate poverty and fight corruption in Africa.  The two are part of the same whole.  Feeding invisible children and rallying people and governments to kill Kony is at best a relief valve for the guilt a Westerner (probably subconsciously) feels for participating in a global system that sanctions the rape of the world and the systematic poverty that happens as a by-product.  At worst, it’s a monkey wrench in any real movement for change based on reality.  And it is not just our luxuries that perpetuate the system.  Simply functioning and communicating and making enough money to feed our own families requires us to participate in the system, whether it’s simply consuming oil by driving our car to work or buying a cell phone to communicate.  And we certainly don’t have to look overseas to see the effects of our dehumanizing system.  Here as well, the richer are getting richer and the poor poorer.  My wife showed me a statistic that said if you took all the wealth of the poorest half of our world, however many billion that is, it would be less than the wealth of the top 85 richest people on earth.  It’s no wonder the Africans are telling us “Get the effing log out of your own eye before you work on our speck!”

A side note:

I thought of a good way to explain why the jumbled words belong in the gestalt collage.  Remember this?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a  toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

It’s a perfect example of the periphery focus thingy.  Pay attention to what your eyes do when you read.  Read it aloud, and if the sentence is flowing, your eyes are peripherally taking in each word as a whole.  It reads slower for me, because even though the gestalts are happening, I feel off kilter.  Focus in on the details of the letters, and it’s gibberish.  A good metaphor for life, I think.  So many of the patterns around us are broken, but with the right type of focus, we can see things how they ought to be.