Episode 12 -- Integrity

Welcome to 5-Minute Answers.

This is the last podcast that I'll give.

I really just wanted to try out podcasting, and I appreciate all your questions that I've

been responding to and the time that I have there, but this is the last one, so I kind

of want to hit something that I think is important anyway.

Google this year, for example, reports that the word that was most searched is integrity.

I suppose people are trying to figure out what integrity is, so let's talk about that

in this podcast.

What does integrity mean?

Anyway, I looked it up in the dictionary, and it said, most likely, integrity is the

variation of this, some kind of personal honesty or a soundness, those are the two

main definitions.

A soundness means like a building has integrity when it's sound or sturdy, but personal honesty

is more like personal integrity.

That's more what we want to talk about, and you're left with asking, well, what do you

mean personal honesty?

Honesty to what?

There's a technique that I've used before to get to the bottom of something, to get

to the real cause of something.

What you do is you keep asking yourself why until you finally get to a point that there

really aren't anymore.

You're wise to ask, or you can't figure them out anyway, and then you know you've got right

to the base or fundamental thing.

What you end up with then is the meaning of something, or at the very least, you're left

with that important question that you need to answer.

Let's do that with integrity.

First question I would ask is, if integrity means personal honesty, then like I said,

honesty to what?

It's a tough question to answer, but I suppose if I was going to try to answer that, I suppose

that honesty...

Honesty to the ideals or principles that you really believe.

You must be true to those principles.

If you believe in them, you've got to be true to them, or you don't have integrity at all.

If you believe in marriage and the promises you make at a couple and the need to be true

to each other, then you have to be true to those promises, even in the face of temptation

to break those promises, for example, or you will not be demonstrating integrity.

If you folded and gave in to the pressure or reward of integrity, then you're not going

to be able to do that.

If you folded in to the pressure or reward of some sort, and you sold out on your promises

and ideals and those principles that you believe in, then when you did that, you did not demonstrate

integrity.

This is true with any principle, I mean I'm using marriage, but it could be any principle

that you believe in.

You've got to hold true.

If you believe it, you've got to hold true to it.

You've got to follow it.

You've got to be honest to it.

No matter what, other voices or temptations or rewards or alternatives come up.

You've got to be honest to it if you want integrity.

All right.

This brings up another question.

Second question, following the questioning technique, do you need to follow good principles

then to have integrity?

Can you have integrity and be selfish?

If you believe in being selfish, for example, if you really believe in it, or worse than

being selfish, and you follow those, can you have integrity?

If you follow bad examples, if you rob banks, if you rape, is that integrity?

Just following the principle.

This question leads to a lot of other questions following the questioning technique.

Are some values better than others, for example?

Is there good and bad then?

How do we know what's good and bad, if there is good and bad, and where does good come

from?

These are all questions that philosophers have been asking for thousands of years, and

they tend to boil down to one main question.

Where does our conscience come from?

You know, that feeling that you have that certain things are right and wrong, that conscience

that we all seem to have.

Every philosopher, every philosophy I've ever studied, really gets, at some point, it kind

of depends on that conscience.

From Aristotle and his lectures on virtue, to Immanuel Kant and his a priori, I'm not

sure I'm pronouncing that right, he calls it a priori, or the knowledge that we have

of what's good and bad, or moral and immoral.

It's known without experience, it's just there, and most philosophies and most philosophers

depend on that.

Most societies depend on that.

Where does that come from?

And they're all remarkably similar, really.

From Confucius to Booth, to Plato, to Plato, to Plato, to Plato, to Plato, to Plato, to

Buddha, to Jesus, to all the other philosophers and everything.

They really tell us, ethically, our actions, they agree to a large extent on this conscience

and the basic feeling of what's right and wrong.

So that leads to all those kinds of questions.

Now another question, question three, where does conscience come from then?

That's a very important one, right?

Where does this feeling come from?

Is it just chance, part of evolution, or does it come from God?

That might be the most important question of all.

Is it worth everything we have, all of our attention and all of our focus in this life?

It's essentially saying, does God exist, or are we left to ourselves?

That question, I think I'm on question four now, it's getting closer to one of those fundamental,

no more questions type of questions.

You need to answer those before you can go any deeper.

That kind of a question, does God really exist, the follow up questions there kind of depend

on what direction you want to go.

You're getting really close to a fundamental question.

Like for example, do you want to check out if God exists?

There's one way you might go.

And if you do want to check that out, you will sincerely ask, through prayer I suppose,

to be told.

A friend who's deeply religious once told me that the concept, that concept, that ask

and you shall receive, knock and it will be opened, is the most repeated concept in all

of scripture, Old and New Testament.

If conscience really does come from a creator then, I suppose the creator of the universe,

the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe,

the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe,

the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe,

owes us some kind of explanation.

If there's a plan, if there's a design somewhere, I would start by prayer and possibly reading

scripture and try to figure that out.

But if you don't want to figure that out, if you say, ah, there's no God, I'm going

to, then you're still left with a question.

You're left with, I guess, something like, well what principles are best for me to believe

in?

Which principles should I?

And then you're weighing consequences you're trying to come up.

But you're at those fundamental questions and there aren't any others.

Then that's a lifelong pursuit to figure out.

Is there a God?

Or if not, what principles should I believe in?

Which ones are the best to make me and others happy?

Those take a lifetime to develop.

So they're good questions to end on in my podcast.

And I hope that they've caused you to think, and I thank you for listening.

I'll see you in the next one.

Bye.