Why We Tolerate Unintegrity & What To Do About It
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!)
