Disregarding Highest Good: Unintegrity Pandemic Variety #6
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 20th 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 21st 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.
