Dwindling scope of integrity

A society’s integrity is its greatest strength and asset. It not only affords it a righteous image but also guarantees upright moral standing. It guarantees greater compliance and conformity to the established social norms, ethos and values. Nonetheless, the social interplay in our part of the world today is indicating otherwise. Integrity appears to be losing its scope and appeal. For far too many people, intents, actions and words are essentially getting divorced from each other. This in turn is paving space to lies, deception, distrust, and fractured promises and relations. We in many instances aren’t living moralistic principles, promises and pursuits. We are living ironies and paradoxes.

We barely do what we say and vice versa. We are hardly apt to standing to our words. We talk and boast a lot, but never indulge in ‘dirty’ practice of putting them at practice. We expect others to behave with us fairly but we hardly reciprocate. We barely wish others the very things we do for ourselves. We like truth but hardly bother speaking one. We call others bad names but lose temper when repaid in kind. We laud originality, integrity and simplicity but love hypocrites and befriend with Machiavellians. We love decency but prefer boastfulness and discourteous traits.

We preach goodness to others but perplex evil with our own actions. We are apt to think with stomach. We are afraid of wisdom as it may blindly disapprove of our long-cherished, effortless assets of our superstition and dogmas; the shields against the frightening facets of so-called reality, rationality and logic. For us, fantasy is the best refuge to horrendous realities.

We firmly hold that the temporal life be better lived in easy and effortless manner and free from complexities and intricacies of deliberation, objectivity, philosophy and metaphysics. Life needs to be enjoyed as it moves on. Resisting its flow and direction is but a folly. We prefer to stay calm in the face of the tide and flow in peace wherever it moves to. Since the majority is always right, we stuck to majoritarianism. Even if they doom, we won’t perish alone.

We learn not to waste our precious and one-time project of life in confining ourselves to the suffocating rooms of useless research laboratories or with lifeless books decorated in shelves in haunting rooms. We often feel sorry for those hapless who use their brains more than their digestive systems and genitalia.

We are convinced that hypocrisy and sycophancy pay the best dividend. To optimise gains, we change our faces and colour more frequently than a Chameleon does. While a chameleon does so to avert an imminent danger, we often do it to put others in danger. Each of us interact with over a dozen or so persons wearing a different face and extract benefits, besides earning applause from them for being a smart and a great person. Covid-19, with its only sunny side, has added yet another mask.

Mudslinging is one of our exalted pastimes. We boost our image, personality and digestion by degrading others. The day our friends or relatives succeed is the very day we die inside out, perhaps due to dyspepsia as their success is too hard to digest. When each of us succeeds, we personally owe the credit. We, however, scapegoat the circumstances for our failures.

Perhaps the greatest irony is our dwindling scope for integrity and growing obsession with the paradoxes. Reversing these retrogressive trends needs serious introspection and soul searching. We need to acknowledge, individually and collectively, the fact that integrity is the very key that opens the door to the societal prestige, position and power.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 19^th, 2021.

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