Integrity

Go back to the thoughtful page

Occasionally, you hear about people who do things that seem rather extreme, but admirable. I will give several examples, all hearsay:

• A former police chief of Portland moved his family into NE Portland, the so-called "bad" side of town. With so many people talking about the problem of white people fleeing into the suburbs and erecting their castles to protect themselves, you find few people, it seems, who actually decide that they personally are going to do something different. I thought it was especially striking because this man was a police chief, and he was investing himself into making the neighborhoods of NE Portland safe not just as a job, but to protect his and his neighbors families as well. He put his family's safety on the line.
• Everyone talks about how extravagant American life styles are, but no one really decides to live differently. I've read about a well-established university professor who decided to live on $200 a month, and has constantly done so. He gives anything he makes above that to whatever causes he believes in.

How do we define the word "integrity"? M. Scott Peck points out, in The Different Drum, that integrity comes from the same root as "integrate". Integrity, then, is about integrating what you believe into your life. What we often try to do as humans is separate ourselves into different compartments. For example, a woman works at a company that is polluting the air in which she lives, but she goes home every day to concentrate completely on her family and friends. The root of the problem is not that she has a contradiction in her life, but that she has divided her life into two separate components in which her morality is different in each: home and work. Integrity is about integrating different parts of our life together. It's looking for inconsistencies in our life, and changing our lives to integrate our beliefs into our actions in our lives.