Integrity is a Distinct Kind of Necessary
... and it's not a moral kind
Cleaning up my life has meant doing a lot of work on “Integrity”, a word I’m putting in quotes here because I really want the word to stand out. I want it to stand out because something gets lost in its ordinary usage - we say “this person has integrity” as a kind of moral compliment, seeing integrity as an commendable but optional virtue. By “optional” I mean “it’s a nice thing to have but you can literally live without it”, the way we say that it’s commendable to have some regular workout routine but you can also skip the gym here and there and nothing terrible will happen.
What I’ve come to understand is that “Integrity” doesn’t quite work like that - it is something that is necessary for being human, necessary as in without it my identity and existence will dis-integrate. Chaos descends and friction and pain fly around and I spend all of my time reacting to the last breakdown and bracing for the next one.
To illustrate what I mean I’m going to define “Integrity” and then stop throwing quotes around the word.
“Integrity” here means
When I say I’m going to do something then I do it
When I say I’m going to do something and I don’t do it then I acknowledge that it didn’t happen and do work to clean it up
It’s fairly simple, and it’s something that seems strange to have to distinguish at all since it looks so obvious. It’s also something that’s really hard to actually do.
Our identities as human beings are (in large part or totally, it doesn’t matter here) constituted by our relationships and the conversations we have in those relationships. Those relationships and those conversations are where Integrity makes us and where a lack of Integrity breaks us, literally.
Deep down I think all of us really want to look good and really don’t want to look bad, which is just a drive and isn’t good or bad. Where it can complicate things is when we drop Integrity in the name of looking good and avoiding looking bad. We can semi-consciously tell people what we think they want to hear about us and avoid telling people what we think they don’t want to hear about us - about what we’ve done or haven’t done, what we like or don’t like, what we’re committing to or not committing to, etc.
When we do that - when we work to present ourselves differently to everyone we meet - then we have all kinds of stories about ourselves to keep track of now, rather than just one. Either we exhaust ourselves keeping up charades or we don’t think about it at all and we generate expectations and commitments that leave people frustrated when we never follow through since the words we said to them might as well have been random noise.
That all might sound dramatic, because it is. It might be big, like knowingly violating your commitments to loved ones over and over again behind their backs; it might be medium, like never really letting people close to you know who you are and what you need; it might be small, like a life full of petty frustrations and jealousies where nothing ever quite seems to work out and people disappoint you all the time and you feel relieved when you’re alone but also sad and you never quite know why.
Looking back on the past paragraph I see this starting to feel like a sermon, at least to me, but it isn’t meant to be - Integrity isn’t a moral issue, though it is connected to everything we consider important and worthy in human life, but is instead an existential issue, one that’s fundamental to how we exist as human beings. A lack of Integrity generates this weird slippery half-existence that isn’t a shame-on-you-how-dare-you thing, but is instead something even deeper than that.
Before we figure out what we need to do, we first have to figure out how to be.
I feel myself finding resolution with whatever cognitive itch led me to write all of this down, but before I wrap this up I want to point out all the good stuff that can happen when Integrity is present.
You get to have all of your existence and all of the energy of your life pointed in the same direction, and things line up for you. You get to experience the peace and ease of coherence, existentially speaking. You have very fulfilling conversations and relationships, because you know and communicate what you want and need and are willing to commit to.
You get to speak the future into existence every time you commit to creating something.
All of that is amazing, at least to me, but just writing it all down makes me feel terribly aware of the poverty of language here. I don’t want any of this to be taken as some sort of argument, something to be evaluated as true or false in how it corresponds to reality, but just as an invitation to look at your own life to see what you see for yourself. In this sentence I am wide-eyed and mute, waving wildly past the words here back in your direction, hoping through whatever force I can conjure to turn myself into your shimmering mirror.