“Lying in politics gives a green light to lying, period. And the more we tacitly buy into this Faustian bargain, the more it helps to destroy the character of our country and the culture of our society.” ~~ William Fisher, http://billfisher.blogspot.com/

I believe that the Unintegrity Pandemic must be dealt with both one person at a time and systemically in organizations, businesses, cultures, and governments.

Here is the three-step plan I propose for putting an end to the Unintegrity Pandemic:

1. Develop Unintegrity Symptom Recognition Skills: Learn how to recognize symptoms of an Unintegrity outbreak – I hope this blog helps with this!

2. Develop a Clear Vision of Integrity: Develop a clear and complete vision of what Integrity is – we will explore this in my future posts!

3. Develop & Embody the Seven Skill Sets of Extreme Integrity: There are specific skills necessary for embodying Integrity, personally, in your relationships, and in the systems in which you are a part – you will learn what these are and how to develop them when the book I am currently writing on this topic is released in 2007!

That said, I propose that the single most important positive difference you can make in the world is to harness the power of what I call the “Integrity Effect.” Embodying true Integrity has a profound impact not only on your own wellbeing but on all those with which you come in contact.

You already know this if you have been blessed with the experience of being in the presence of someone who embodies the Integrity Effect. If you have not, you will shortly discover how embodying the Integrity Effect is not only the most effective way to serve highest good; it is also the single most powerful way to experience personal and relationship fulfillment!

At the same time, the Integrity Effect can only do its magic at the macro level when business, political, educational, religious, cultural and social advocacy leaders embody Three Dimensional Integrity like never before.

We now turn our attention from the problem to the solution. You will discover a new vision of Integrity (Three Dimensional Integrity) in a future blog I will post on the Integrity Effect.

At this point in reading prior blog postings, you have no doubt realized how truly mind-numbing the range of flavors and examples of Unintegrity is. Isn’t it amazing how much most of us don’t even identify Unintegrity when it is occurring? We even have culturally accepted terms that whitewash unintegrity behaviors. A great example is the word “cleanse,” as in cleansing files. This has become an acceptable word for describing the destruction of incriminating information to reduce the chances of being held responsible for something that occurred. Think Enron, or incidents of soldier abuse in Iraq. That we even have “politically correct” terms for Unintegrity only serves to downplay how devastating a phenomenon Unintegrity is, on ourselves, on others and on our world. What other examples of Unintegrity Whitewash words can you think of?

So, with such a huge, why do we tolerate it? The answer, in a nutshell, is that we are so accustomed to it, so adapted to its existence, that we hardly see all the forms it takes. This is a great example of the dark side of the human gift of adaptation. Let us now look a bit more closely at why we tolerate Unintegrity, followed by beginning to look at the amazing and magnificent things each of us can do about the Unintegrity Pandemic.

We Are Used to Being Surrounded By Unintegrity

Because of how pervasive Unintegrity is at all levels of every culture, we grow up with a wide selection of Unintegrity role models. Parents break their promises to us and then tell us we should feel the way we feel. Peers who seemed to be our friends turn out to only be out for themselves. Teachers tell us how we should learn, rather than showing us how to effectively learn with our own learning style. Clergy sermonize about how it is a sin to feel certain feelings or to question whether God exists, rather than showing us constructive ways to work with our feelings and how to do our spiritual questioning in effective ways. Television is full of cartoon and sitcom characters who are constantly out of integrity.

The older we get, the more we see that the people in our immediate life as children are not the only ones who are out of integrity. Hardly a day goes by without a news story about a person, organization, business or governmental entity being out of integrity. Hardly a day goes by when we encounter someone whose words and deeds do not match, or who is only out for themselves.

We Are Used to Embodying Unintegrity

What we saw (and continue to see) modeled to us is only part of why we tolerate Unintegrity. The other part is that each of us learned how to be out of integrity with ourselves beginning as children. The main difference among us is merely how out of integrity each of us became in order to survive. To the extent that we are used to embodying Unintegrity, we tolerate Unintegrity in others. (Unless, of course, we are so unaware of the range of our own Unintegrity, and so hate it, that we almost cannot avoid seeing it in others all the time, nor can we avoid judging them harshly for it!)

Those in the system know it is broken but do not make it a top priority to join together to do what is necessary to repair it. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. We’re doing the best we can just putting out today’s fires, and we will cover one another’s backs despite how broken the system is. Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Example of the Unintegrity of Dysfunctional Systems: The Prescription Medications Approval Process

The pharmaceutical industry provides us with our final example of the many forms the Unintegrity Pandemic takes. This rather detailed example is not only illuminates how massive the Unintegrity Pandemic is, but why there is no one person or group to blame for it. It is also a particularly juicy example because it contains elements of a number of the eight forms of Unintegrity described in this chapter.

Until only a few decades ago, research about the effectiveness and safety of new drugs was primarily conducted by independent universities. This meant that those constructing the research design, selecting how the data would be analyzed, and deciding how to most accurately report the data, were generally in search of whatever the scientific facts turned out to be. As a result, drug research studies published in the medical journals tended to be reliable, even if flawed for other reasons having to do with unconscious scientific bias.

What I mean by this is that most drug studies did not, and still do not, compare the effectiveness level of a drug against the effectiveness of taking nutritional supplements or exercise or other non-pharmaceutical treatments for an illness. As a result, neither physicians nor the public know whether a drug is more effective, as effective or less effective than other non-drug methods of treating the illness for which that drug was developed. I will return to this matter in the “obsession” Unintegrity category further below.

Anyway, for the past few decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been taking greater and greater control over how pharmaceutical research is funded, conducted and reported. Today, the pharmaceutical industry is the primary source of funding for drug effectiveness and “side-effects” research. Today, the pharmaceutical industry has the power to approve how the research is designed and how the data will be analyzed. Today, the pharmaceutical industry owns, and frequently refuses to disclose, the raw research data from which the statistics are compiled.

Mounting evidence indicates that drug companies have been both suppressing and distorting this data, much like the tobacco companies have done. Not surprisingly, the data the drug companies tend to suppress is that which would cast suspicion on either a drug’s effectiveness or its safety. Not only do they manipulate the data, but they mount massive and expensive advertising campaigns to both physicians and the public that too often downplay the risks and over-represent the benefits of a drug.

Why do they do this? Maximizing their own profits is more important to them than being in integrity with serving highest good through protecting the public’s safety. In other words, greed.

But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You see, the drug companies are not out the only ones who are of integrity with public safety when it comes to medications. So are the leading medical journals, the governmental organizations responsible for approving drugs for treating specific illnesses (such as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration – FDA), and the insurance companies who issue malpractice insurance policies for physicians.

Here’s how it works: Drug research deemed to be the best constructed and most reliable is published by the world’s leading and most credible medical journals, such as Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine. Government organizations responsible for approving drugs for specific uses make their decisions in large part on research deemed worthy of being published in these medical journals. Medical malpractice insurance companies use this same information to determine the ‘standards of care’ to which physicians must adhere in order to be covered if they are sued for malpractice. Makes sense, no?

Think about this. If a pharmaceutical company wants to make sure that a drug, Vioxx for example, comes to market regardless of whether or not this would be out of integrity to do, this can occur because of how the system is set up. All they need to do is this:

1. Human Safety and Effectiveness Trials: Set them up so the majority of the volunteers are not the primary group who would actually be prescribed Vioxx. And, by all means, don’t compare the drug’s effectiveness or incidence of side effects to the non-prescription pain relievers already available to the public at much lower cost.

2. Papers Submitted to Medical Journals & Data Disclosed to the FDA: Keep hidden from any data that points to either inferior effectiveness (say, compared with over-the-counter pain relievers) or risks (that is, chances the drug could cause Iatrogenic Illness in patients the doctors would be required to prescribe the drug to in order to avoid being sued for malpractice).

This example is not fictional. It is real. After being touted as the greatest pain reliever ever for certain conditions, Vioxx was pulled from the shelves because of the severe Iatrogenic Illness it appeared to be causing. (Iatrogenic Illness is the technical term for becoming ill from medical treatment for an illness, in contrast to being ill from the illness itself.) Subsequent lawsuits introduced evidence of unethical research study design and covering up research data that could have prevented the drug from being approved for use. This resulted in juries requiring the manufacturer to pay out huge sums of money as punishment. As this book is being written, there are many more Vioxx lawsuits waiting to be tried.

Not only is this example real, but it is not isolated incident. Other drugs, nutritional supplements and certain artificially produced food substitutes have faced the same fate over the years. Unintegrity-by-greed and collusion is more widespread than most people realize.

Making unilateral decisions about highest good occurs when I talk myself into believing know what is best for you and I will do whatever I must in order to bring it about. A variation on this is where I know that what I want isn’t best for you but I am going to talk you into believing it is so I can get what I want. But that is more about lying, Unintegrity Pandemic #1.

Forms that unilateral decisions about highest good can take include: imposing our will on others (excluding containing violence, of course), unethical manipulation, confusing dogma with fact (dogma is a point of view put forth as authoritative without adequate verification), and Fanaticism Disorder (covered in Unintegrity Pandemic Variety #5 above).

Example of Unintegrity Through Unilateral Decisions: U.S. Stonewalling Collapses the Doha Round of World Trade Organization Negotiations

In 2006, I was invited to Geneva, Switzerland, to give a workshop on collaborative negotiation and leadership skills to a number of World Trade Organization (WTO) ambassadors from developing countries. It was a wonderful experience and I hope it proves to be a beginning rather than a flash in the pan. Shortly after I gave my workshop, the round of WTO talks collapsed. I can safely say I had nothing to do with that outcome, but because of the workshop I gave, I had an extraordinary opportunity to learn a deal about how negotiations occur in the WTO.

From my perspective there are essentially three types of negotiation strategies: manipulation, compromise and collaboration. Manipulation means I convince you that the solution I want is in your best interests when it in reality serves my interests more than yours. Compromise is successful if you and I come up with an agreement in which we both feel equally ripped off. Collaboration means you and I share the core intentions beneath our positions, and then co-create a solution that honors both our intentions, even if that takes a different form than either of us would have thought of on our own. All three styles produce agreements but the collaborative style is by far the best at building truly healthy long term relationships.

Four important things I learned through working with the developing country WTO ambassadors were:

1. What they knew about negotiation they learned through the WTO

2. They knew a fair amount about feeling on the receiving end of manipulation and some about compromise, but very little about collaboration

3. They very much preferred a collaborative negotiating style

4. They wondered what it would take for the largest developed countries such as the United States to become willing to use a collaborative negotiation style.

I was therefore not surprised by the reason the press was given by the WTO about why the Doha Round of talks later collapsed (in the WTO, rounds of talks are named after the city in which the agreements for a round of talks are created). The reason given was that the United States was perceived as “stonewalling” the negotiations. Essentially, “stonewalling” is saying “my way or the highway.”

In this case, not only was the United States taking that position, but that the position it was taking was the best one for all concerned. Funny how very few other countries seemed to agree with that. This is a classic example of Unintegrity through making unilateral decisions about highest good. There is a simple word for this: arrogance. This kind of arrogance is yet another form of Unintegrity that is not being called what it truly is.

Disregarding highest good means achieving short-term wants or success at the expense of long-term price or what is more truly in my highest interests, or getting what is truly in my highest interests in ways that make it harder for you to get what is truly in your highest interests. We can disregard personal highest good, the highest good of a relationship or the highest good of the smaller and larger systems of which we are a part (such as our family, community, business, culture, religion, country, the planet, etc.).

Narcissism, greed, addictions, greed and pathological opportunism (taking advantage of opportunities even when they will harm others) are all examples of disregarding highest good.

Examples of Disregarding Highest Good: Everyday Narcissism

First Example: People who park on or over the line in parking spots, making it impossible to safely use the next spot over. Lack of common courtesy is one of the most rampant forms of the Disregarding Highest Good variety of the Unintegrity Pandemic.

Second Example: Sticking with the driving theme, you are sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to turn green. The traffic going from your left to your right is thick and backing up.

Even so, cars keep going into the intersection, clogging it up without regard for the fact that the light will change before they make it through to the other side. Your light turns green but you cannot go anywhere because one of those cars is blocking you and has no where to go. The cars behind you start to honk at you to go, not able to see that you have nowhere to go and are just as exasperated as them.

You glare at the driver clogging the intersection. He gives you the finger. Or maybe he just seems to pretend he doesn’t even see what is happening. No acknowledgment, no apology, and probably no chance he will handle this situation any differently in future similar circumstances.

This is a classic example of everyday narcissism. Essentially, narcissism says that there can only be one most important or privileged person here and it’s me. It’s not my problem if others are inconvenienced. It’s their turn anyway, after all the ways others have inconvenienced me.

Merely calling this self-centered behavior falls short of the mark. This is yet one more example of an arrogant flavor of Unintegrity. Think about how many times during the day you or others engage in this or some other kind of Unintegrity. You may have privately or publicly criticized yourself or them for being selfish. But how often have you really looked at these behaviors as examples of being out integrity?

If you are like most of us, the answer is, not very often. If we as a culture and as a planet knew how to recognize all the flavors the Unintegrity Pandemic takes, there would be no need for a chapter like this one.

Another Example of Unintegrity through Disregarding Highest Good: A Culture of Debting

Before providing this example. I first want to say that I do not believe that all forms of debt are examples of Unintegrity. One common example of what I would consider Integrity-based debt is taking out a conventional mortgage to purchase a home, when the monthly payments include 100% of the principle and interest due. Taking out a loan to reasonable start or expand a business is another example. So is taking out an education loan, assuming you will make enough when you’re done so you can justify taking out the loan. Keep this in mind when I now talk about other forms of debt as an Unintegrity issue.

Debt is one of the most widespread forms of Unintegrity that exists.

Governments regularly create debt to pay for more than they can afford today, by leaving it to future generations to clean up the mess, if it even gets that far. During the 20^th century, a couple of countries had accumulated such massive national debt that they would have collapsed had the World Bank not forgiven and/or restructured billions of dollars of loans. Italy’s birth rate has decreased so substantially that there are now nowhere near enough young people to cover the cost of the baby boomer generation’s social security bills as they retire. One of the first big government debt scandals of the 21^st century in the United States was the city of San Diego, California. The seventh largest city in the country drove itself into such severe debt, and a subsequent cover-up, that Wall Street stopped allowing San Diego to issue municipal bonds, and the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) initiated an investigation, as did multiple federal agencies.

On San Diego’s behalf, I do want to add that I believe its leaders as of 2006 are committed to correcting the debting, corruption and secrecy that led to this awful example of Unintegrity, and to restore San Diego to a model of Integrity in government.

Businesses too often create huge debt to pay for an almost obsessive need to grow as large as possible as quickly as possible. The kind of debt I am talking about jeopardizes a company’s long-term viability or causes the company to have to inflate its short-term prices in ways that make them less competitive in the marketplace.

Individuals figure that if irresponsible debt is okay for government and business, then it must be okay for them too. Credit card companies do their best to legitimatize this. The consequence is that consumer credit card debt has grown to utterly astronomical proportions. And this is despite it being virtually universally recognized that this does not serve either the highest good of individual stress levels or long-term economic stability.

A Final Example of Unintegrity through Disregarding Highest Good: Internet Spam & Junk Faxes

Those who engage in internet spamming and junk faxes have no regard for how they are imposing on the unwitting recipients of the garbage they send. I spend an average total of about a half hour each day just weeding out and eliminating spam from my e-mails before I start looking at the e-mails that were actually intended for me. Invasion of privacy, which is what this amounts to, is an excellent everyday example of blatant disregard of highest good. Spammers and junk fax senders offer yet another example of how widespread is the Unintegrity Pandemic.

Obsession, in the context of Unintegrity, means my goal is so important that I will reach it no matter what damage I do to myself or others along the way. It is this kind of obsessiveness that gives rise to the cliché, “the ends justify the means.” Unintegrity-based obsession comes in three main flavors: Obsessive Overdrive, Obsessive Secrecy and Obsessive Crusading.

Obsessive Overdrive

Obsessive Overdrive is a state in which all life balance is compromised as a single-focused goal is pursued. A very common example is the leader or entrepreneur who focuses on business at the ongoing expense of personal balance and cherished relationships. Of course, in real life, most business people have busy periods. I am referring to this imbalance being more the rule than the exception.

Even people doing profoundly noble work in service of higher good, such as Mohandas Gandhi, can fall into this trap. It has been commonly reported that his wife and children chronically felt neglected by his single-mindedness on being of service in the world. In serving this way, he may not have served those he loved in ways that nourished them. This is an important illustration for two reasons. First, Unintegrity is possible even in those whose good intentions are unquestionable. Second, Unintegrity is possible even when doing profoundly valuable things to improve the state of the world.

Obsessive Secrecy

Obsessive Secrecy is a state in which secrecy is demanded in order to maintain abusive forms of power. Of course, in real life there are times when secrecy is required for integrity to be preserved, such as client-psychotherapist confidentiality or client-attorney privilege. In contrast,

A classic example of obsessive secrecy comes from my experience as a psychotherapist. To preserve confidentiality, this example is a composite of a number of situations my clients have shared with me. It is the husband and father who essentially leads a double life. On the one hand, he is highly regarded in the community as a church elder and civic organization volunteer, and who has won many awards for all his community service. On the other hand, he is verbally abusive with his wife and has incested his daughters, and has then threatened to kill them if they ever told a soul about what goes on at home, insisting that what goes on in his family is nobody’s business. The words he hides behind are, “a good and righteous family never airs its dirty laundry in public.”

Obsessive Crusading

Obsessive Crusading is a state in which a person passionately pursues a cause more as an expression of unresolved trauma, mental illness or megalomania (extreme obsession with having ultimate power), than as an outgrowth of a high-minded state. The milder form could be called Traumatized Obsessive Crusading while the apt term for the most extreme form is Ideological Obsessive Crusading. Of course in real life, there are people who passionately pursue causes from high-minded, love-based states of mind, heart and spirit.

Periodically, a story makes the news in which a parent’s child has been killed in a particularly brutal way by an elusive killer, and where the parent has vowed to not rest until the killer is caught and “justice” is served. As understandable as this might sound on the surface, I am talking about the parent who wants revenge more than true justice, and who is willing to sacrifice their health, livelihood and remaining family in order to get it. Seeking an outer fix (revenge) for an inner problem (grief and rage) is not only ineffective, but it requires huge amounts of Unintegrity in order to pursue. This is an example of Traumatized Obsessive Crusading.

At the far extreme of Obsessive Crusading is Ideologically Obsessive Crusaders. There are people who invoke some variety of higher principle (a philosophy, religion, or even science) to justify advocating hatred and violence.

Sometimes this person acts alone and sometimes this person recruits followers. Always this person insists s/he is doing this in service of higher good, and most often s/he vehemently insists that those who do not subscribe to his/her ideology are the devil. Always as well, these people are ultimately revealed to have a history of severe trauma, mental illness or megalomania (extreme obsession with having ultimate power). They are usually willing to die for their cause, but more often are willing for others to die for this cause. Jim Jones is a good example, but any number of examples can be found throughout history.

The most famous of the 20^th century Ideologically Obsessive Crusaders was Adolph Hitler. The most famous of the 21^st century is Osama bin Laden. What all Ideologically Obsessive Crusaders have in common is an extremely severe and dangerous, but unclassified, psychological disorder that I refer to as Fanaticism Disorder.

Whether Traumatized or Ideological in variety, Obsessive Crusaders are fiercely devoted to, and usually in highly disciplined “integrity” with, their beliefs. Yet they are in a state of Unintegrity. What gives this away? Crusading that advocates hatred or violence as a result of projecting one’s own disowned inner darkness onto others, is never in service of highest good.

Non-self-responsibility means denying any part in what happened between us or claiming that what I did is not my fault.

Example of Unintegrity Through Non-Self-Responsibility: From Early Childhood

This version of Unintegrity is so well-understood that I will offer only one example. Before I do, I want to lighten things up for a moment because I know that all this Unintegrity stuff can be pretty disheartening to read about all in one place.

So, I will tell you humorous but instructive little story about non-self-responsibility. It is a story about how young we are when we start learning the low art of Unintegrity. This example is not only about non-self-responsibility but about lying (Unintegrity variety #1).

I was maybe three years old. I was, if anything, an overly well-mannered and overly responsible child. One day, I was playing in the living room and bumped into a sofa side table, knocking off a vase. It fell to the floor and shattered.

By the time my Mom came in to find out what had happened, I had already put as much distance as possible between the vase and me. She calmly asked me, in a non-accusing tone, how the vase broke. I will never forget my response. I innocently replied, “It did it by itself!”

Another Example of Unintegrity Through Non-Self-Responsibility: The Litigation Epidemic

We all know how rampant the litigation epidemic is. Ask any judge how overburdened the court system is with litigation issues: individuals suing individuals or companies or the government, companies being sued by groups of individuals (class action lawsuits) or the government, businesses suing other businesses, and individuals, businesses or countries suing other countries.

With the caveat that sometimes litigation is truly a proper course of action, let us briefly look at the Unintegrity that lives beneath the other litigation suits (the majority of them, it seems to me).

Litigation comes about when one party believes they have been wronged by another but that party will not take responsibility for having done this – or at least not as much responsibility as the party who feels wronged wants them to take.

Here is the essence of the non-self-responsibility that leads to litigation: “It’s not my fault. If it’s not my fault then it’s yours. You therefore owe it to me to take care of me. And I am going to make you do this.”

There are two main non-self-responsibility variations:

1. You won’t own your part in what occurred or you won’t do your part to make it right.

2. I won’t own my part in what occurred and I want you to do both your part and my part to make it right.

Not taking responsibility is largely about perpetrator-victim mentality. The perpetrator disowns responsibility by saying, “Let me see how much I can get away with,” or “It’s someone else’s fault that what I did was wrong, so don’t look at me,” or “You had it coming to you.” The victim disowns responsibility by saying, “You should make me whole because my part in this is small or irrelevant compared to yours” or “Others like you have wronged me in the past but I could not make them pay, so I will try to make you pay not only for what you did but for what they did too.”

If you look closely at the perpetrator’s position and the victim’s position, there is very little difference between the two. They are both about narcissism (self-centeredness) and entitlement (I am innocent and you owe me).

The litigation epidemic illustrates how non-self-responsibility goes hand-in-hand with the lying and obsession forms of Unintegrity.

Frivolous litigation, no matter how socially sanctioned it has become, is unmitigated Unintegrity, plain and simple. Case closed.