A NEED FOR INTEGRITY
THE head of our title has declared his intention to pursue those who sully his integrity as a newspaper man. This promises to be a battle of the long knives. When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. The coming battle will no doubt become one of the major media events of the new year.
All of which serves as suitable introduction to this week’s theme: integrity.
Integrity is defined as a strict adherence to a code of moral values, artistic principles or other standards.
It is cousin to the word integer, which means whole, complete, perfect, virtuous.
Maintaining and nurturing this moral imperative is hard in a world of commodification and instant gratification. The absence or deliberate undermining of this quality fosters the feeding frenzy of fraud and bureaucratic malfeasance.
It allows the festering sores of all the unsavoury truths that are now emerging. I refer to domestic violence, sexual harassment and abuse in every area of society.
The topic came up at a soirée at a campus in Mowbray last Saturday. I engaged with some serious academics. We agreed that integrity was lacking in the professions.
We started with medics. These venerable practitioners appear to have abandoned the Hippocratic Oath in favour of material prosperity.
And churchmen seem to pursue promotion within ecclesiastical ranks rather than nurture our souls.
Teachers celebrate term endings as relief instead of refurbishment of much-needed skills and enthusiasm.
In the private sector, the invasion of the psyche is complete with blaring newspaper adverts exhorting splashing out with spending. And if you can’t get it from the shop in person, the new wave is logistics that include drones.
We are gearing up for silly spending during the silly season, followed by a scramble for enrolment at schools which charge crippling fees, followed shortly by a dash for the exclusive providers of uniforms, which are as gaudy and complex as they are expensive.
Where does integrity fit in? It’s a mindset, a willingness to slow down and realise that many of our urges are triggered by others. The peer pressures, inflexible company policies, confusion of mixed messages, all scrambles our brains.
We are warned about draconian measures against drinking while driving. This in a world that spends millions advertising alcohol in impossible varieties. We are asked to help our economy by accepting loadshedding even while a clip goes viral showing this government loading acres of coal into the maws of ships heading for other countries.
This is shameful. It is duplicity with dollops of arrogance. It has become our daily fare. No wonder a voice has emerged to say with vigour, muscularity and integrity: stop the rot or take the consequences.
A voice is about to be heard. I trust that we will stop to listen.
Where does integrity fit in? It’s a mindset, a willingness to slow down and realise that many of our urges are triggered by others