I am so relieved when I meet people and even more so have the privildge of befriending people who live honestly and with integrity. I breathe a sigh of relief when I encouter these people. I know the relationship will be bumpy, but I also know it will be worth the ride. While I have not read it all, Erich Fromm’s Escape from freedom comes to mind. I glean from it that freedom, the freedom to - positive freedom - is most difficult. It is this freedom that I aspire to and hope for. I waiver, my vision gets clouded, but it is the one I believe in. I have some dear and wonderful friends who are free on those terms, and I love them dearly. I count on them and know that they are honest and have integrity, that together we will figure things out.
Why are these characteristics, traits, ways of doing, so difficult and so rare? Why am I always so sad, when people I care for fail here? Is it because my expectations are too high? Is it because the people who were supposed to have cared for me failed so deeply in these areas? Is it because the systems that did eventually take over, fared worse? Is it because, that living according to these basic principles, is so very hard? And few can live up to the task? Is it because I have experienced such disappointment and much harm stemming from a lack of honesty and integrity? Is that what tempers my views when I meet people who lack these traits, what leads me to I consider and label them as weak and dangerous? Where I just give up on them. Often I rationalize these characteristics systemically, politically, socially, economically and consider the outcomes (e.g., homelessness, sexism, tyranny of the masses. etc.). Within that I see so many compromises and compromised. Perhaps that is why I loath risk aversion, because it leads to freedom from, negative freedom, freedom derived and created from conformity - the norm, the kind of freedom that prevents taking that extra step, that hard one that leads to and is along the virtuous path. Perhaps this is why I think Ottawa as of late exhibits collective risk adverseness, apathy and mediocrity, it is because freedom is so very difficult. It is easier to default to what is known, comfortable, easy, accepted, unquestioned. That is the society I live in. One that fears questioning itself thus yielding to dishonesty, a lack of integrity and the inability to really do the right thing. But, it is easy to think about these traits at a societal scale. What about the interpersonal? Is it a lack of empathy and compassion for myself and others if I and they do not live according to these basics and I judge them and me so harshly? How often do people have to fail on these grounds before you loose trust in them? Once? Twice? How much context has to be taken into consideration before one decides? I know someone who is so rationally bound to these ideas, that he alienates himself from anyone who wavers from his standards. He has alienated family, his own children, etc. because they are inconsistent. A most difficult character as he believes himself to be a peace practitioner. Of course it is so much easier to be an adherent of peace if one is alone! But what of me? I embrace my inconsistencies, which can be considered a lack of integrity, yet, the inconsistencies reflect my core values. They are also a reaction against absolutism. Since absolutism is what yields fanaticism, orthodoxy, exclusion - freedom from. This fuzzy logic leads to a thick line between conceptual, emotional and act spaces. That edge space that is full of diversity, where worlds meet, where biodiversity is at its greatest. It is these edges and spaces I, we depend on, the exceptional lines, hidden, but thick and obvious when the scale changes, when fractalized. But all that thinking, rationalizing, reflection, does not make the hurt stemming from the experience and witnessing of a lack of honesty and integrity. It does not make it hurt any less. Why am I and others, afraid to tell the truth, and so afraid of the freedom to live according to the results of that? It would just be so much easier would it not?
All that to say, that I am feeling a little sad today, a feeling I normally avoid, but today I am going to reflect more about why a lack of integrity and honesty affects my core. Especially when it comes from people I love, count on and expect to have the strength to live according to those basics.
