Flight From Integrity

Some years ago the public rela­tions officer of a large corporation summarized for me his guiding principle: "Find out what the people want and do more of it; find out what they don’t want and do less of it."

While seldom so succinctly stated, such an external, "other directed" guide to behavior is find­ing ever wider acceptance in American life. Implicit in its ac­ceptance is a flight from personal integrity; and here may be found an important explanation for some of the mischief presently beset­ting our society.

Doubtless, this is good enough as a formula for getting rich. However, if an individual looks upon wealth as a means to such higher ends as his own intellectual and spiritual emergence or realiz­ing those creative potentialities inherent in his nature, then the formula has its shortcomings. And, in certain areas, it is downright destructive.

This is a serious charge. Let’s explore it. In order to get this matter into perspective, contem­plate the countless specialized subjects known to mankind. Take any one of them—landscape paint­ing, for instance—and arrange the population of the U.S.A. in a pyra­mid according to proficiency or quality. There would be some one person at the very peak. Under him would be a few competent landscape painters; there would follow perhaps one million having a discriminating appreciation of such art; after which there would be the great mass—millions upon millions, unconscious, unaware, ut­terly ignorant of the art or the standards by which its perfection could be attained or judged.

Rearrange the population in pro­ficiency pyramids for all of the countless subjects which engage human interest and each of us would find himself near the base of most of the pyramids. Few are leaders or among the highly competent—except rarely and momen­tarily, if at all. Each of us has a potential for growth and develop­ment—especially if advantage is taken of the help available from those on higher levels.

With the above in mind, let us explore the implications of integ­rity to the situation we are con­templating. It involves the accu­rate reflection in word and deed of that which one’s highest insight and conscience dictate as true and right. Now, a person’s concept of what is true may not in fact be truth, but it is as close to truth as he can get. It is the individual’s nearest approximation to truth, his most faithful projection of that approximation, the most accurate reflection of his best lights.

Adverse Selectivity

With the pyramid picture and this conception of integrity in mind, let us now observe what hap­pens when the skilled in any sub­ject—the competent who are near the peak—adopt the practice of finding out what the people want in order to "do more of it" and find­ing out what they do not want in order to "do less of it." In such cir­cumstances, from whence comes the instruction for what each of the skilled is to do? From the best that is in each skilled person or available to him? From the highest conscience of each? Indeed not! The instruction and leadership in such circumstances is tailored to the level of the "know-nothings" of the given subject, to the values at the base of our imagined pyramid where over 90 per cent of the peo­ple are. Integrity is forsaken. Po­tential leadership is diverted from higher aspiration and, instead, panders to the tastes and foibles of the ignorant.

The fields of art and music, where new "lows" are now so much in evidence, illustrate the flight from integrity. Consider the fol­lowing confession, ascribed to the famous painter, Picasso:

"In art, the mass of the people no longer seek consolation and ex­altation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since cubism and even before, have satisfied these masters and critics, with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they ad­mired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these ab­surdities, with all these puzzles, rebuses, and arabesques, I became famous, and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya were great painters; I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the im­becility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bit­ter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere."¹

I have a TV program in mind. The star is an accomplished actress with an attractive voice. Does she sing the lovely songs of which she is capable?

Only now and then. For the most part, she and those in charge of her TV appearances insist on the stuff which nickels in juke boxes indi­cate as mass-popular. Instead of the millions at the lower part of the pyramid being lifted in their musical tastes by this singer at her creative best, we observe her descending and catering to the lowest or base tastes—an imita­tion of ignorance, so to speak. Thus is the music of our day degraded.

However unhappily we may view the wreckage which these re­sponses to ignorance have brought to the fields of music, art, litera­ture, entertainment, journalism, and the like, we must concede that the individual who cares anything about himself has the choice, in these fields, of turning off the TV and not reading or viewing the rubbish that is so overwhelmingly served up to him. He can, if he chooses, go his isolated, unmolested way.

The Realm of Politics

But no such freedom of choice is allowed the individual when flight from integrity occurs in the realm of politics. The individual, irre­spective of his scruples, his morals, his ideals, his tastes, is helplessly swept with millions of others into the miserable mess which the dull weight of ignorance gradually but inevitably inflicts on everyone.

A candidate for the Presidency, supposedly brighter and better ed­ucated than average, nevertheless polled the mass of voters to find what they wanted from govern­ment. As could have been foretold, they wanted the very things that crumbled the Roman Empire—"bread and circuses." The farmers wanted subsidies, not for outstand­ing performance, but for not farm­ing. The labor unions wanted grants of coercive power that they might extort more pay for less work. Many businessmen wanted various protections against com­petition. Vast hordes wanted the guaranteed life: pensions, ease, re­tirement; in short, to be relieved of responsibility for self. These are the things our candidate professed to stand for and promised to de­liver, if elected. Instead of stand­ing consistently for the highest principles of political economy known to him, he imitated the low­est common denominator opinion of the population. His campaign manager confided that he had to do this to get elected; that once in office he would then do what he regarded as right. This oppor­tunity never came; the candidate was defeated. And, defeat was his just due. One who runs a campaign without integrity proves openly that he would, at any time, for­sake integrity if it appeared ex­pedient for him to do so.

This explains why the two ma­jor political parties in the United States today stand for the same things. Both have chosen to re­ceive their instructions from pre­cisely the same source, the lowest common denominator of popular opinion. The result is a one-party system under two meaningless labels. This deplorable situation can never be remedied until there is a return to integrity, with can­didates whose outer selves and actions will reflect their own best thoughts, regardless of the effect this may have on their political fortunes.

Edmund Burke, addressing those who had just elected him to Parliament, put the case for integ­rity in unequivocal and unmistak­able terms:

"But his [the successful candi­date's] unbiased opinion, his ma­ture judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacri­fice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure—no, nor from the law and the Con­stitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your rep­resentative owes you, not his in­dustry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

George Washington had the same practical and lofty senti­ments in mind when he reportedly said to the Constitutional Conven­tion:

"If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can re­pair. The event is in the hand of God."

Socialism Leaves Little Choice

No individual, whoever he may be, can escape the immediate con­sequences of ignorance in politics, as he can in art, music, journalism. There is no way to avoid the pains which bad political action inflicts. For ignorant political action encompasses all—one’s life and the sustenance of life which is the fruit of one’s own labor; one’s free­dom to choose how one shall live his own life. Political collectivism—the pattern consonant with polit­ical ignorance—means what it says: Everyone swept indiscrimi­nately into a human mass, the col­lective.²

When an individual, in his think­ing and actions, unhitches himself from integrity, he "lets himself go," so to speak. He is anchored to nothing more stable than whimsy, momentary impulses, mere whiffs of fickle opinion. He is adrift and without compass. This shows through in much current art, music, poetry, and unquestionably accounts, in a very large measure, for the rapidly growing socialism, collectivism, decadence—call it what you will. There remains, how­ever, the task of discovering why integrity is so easily, casually, even eagerly abandoned. Why this wholesale divorce from personal conscience, this shameless acceptance of mass ignorance as our Di­rector of Doing?

Doubtless, there are numerous reasons, some of which may be too obscure for ready discovery and examination. One possible explana­tion has to do with a false economic assumption. We, having paid so much heed to material progress and well-being, to ever higher standards of living, let our eco­nomic concepts pattern other as­pects of our lives. Erring in our economic assumptions, we com­pound the error in our social, polit­ical, moral, and spiritual judg­ments.

Here is the error in economic diagnosis: We assume that "Find out what the people want and do more of it" has been the formula for our success, for our prolific production of goods and services. Thus, in the economic area, so we think, our guidance has come from the mass market rather than from conscience or higher realms of mind. The current cliché, "The con­sumer is king," tends to support this view.

The Spiritual Nature of Progress

Actually, instruction from the mass market has to do only with duplication. The market deter­mines whether or not an economic good is to be duplicated and, if so, to what extent.

Duplication, sometimes called "mass production," admittedly controlled by the market, is not, however, the secret of productiv­ity. The secret lies back of that. It has its genesis in the creation, the invention. Ralph Waldo Trine helps with this explanation:

            "Everything is first worked out in the unseen before it is mani­fested in the seen, in the ideal be­fore it is realized in the real, in             the spiritual before it shows forth in the material. The realm of the unseen is the realm of cause. The realm of the seen is                 the realm of effect. The nature of effect is al­ways determined and conditioned by the nature of its cause."³

The noted economist, Professor Ludwig von Mises, reputedly the greatest free market theorist of our time, adds his judgment to this view:

"Production is a spiritual, intel­lectual, and ideological phenom­enon. It is the method that man, di­rected by reason, employs for the best possible removal of uneasi­ness. What distinguishes our con­ditions from those of our ancestors who lived one thousand or twenty thousand years ago is not some­thing material, but something spir­itual. The material changes are the outcome of the spiritual changes."4

Where, for example, did Thomas Alva Edison get his ideas for the electric lamp? Not from the mass market! How could a people give specifications for something about which they were totally unaware?

In reality, the productive proc­ess works outward from that which is first presented uniquely to an individual mind as awareness or consciousness or insight (the re­ception of ideas—ideation) and is then accurately (with integrity) worked out or reflected in the ma­terial good or service. There is a distinctively spiritual accomplish­ment before the good or service is held up to view before the mass market.

Let Each Do His Best

American economic progress has been truly phenomenal. But this progress has been founded on in­spiration from the highest insights of individuals, not on advice from the lower levels of ignorance. In this manner the masses progres­sively are freed from poverty and slavery, free men’s material needs gratified as never before, and op­portunities opened to everyone to pursue and develop those creative potentialities inherent in his own personality.⁵ If we would succeed with our political institutions, we have in the productive process a model to emulate. However, we must understand how this process really works: that it finds its power in highest conscience and the accurate reflection thereof, in short, in integrity.

One’s highest conscience, re­gardless of the step it occupies on the Infinite Stairway of Right­eousness and Wisdom, is sensitive to the way one treats it. Lie about it, distort it, reflect it inaccurately, take contrary instruction from in­ferior sources or yield to the temp­tation of fame or fortune or popu­larity or other weaknesses of the flesh at its expense and it will be­come flabby and flaccid and will be incapable of rising to higher levels. Now and then we observe indi­viduals who can be depended upon to state accurately that which they believe to be right, persons un­moved by fickle opinions, by the lure of applause, or by the sting of censure. We may disagree with such persons, but be it noted that we trust them. For their creed ap­pears to be:

This above all, to thine own self be true;

And it must follow, as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Such persons are possessed of in­tegrity!  

***

The Major Problem

There is only one major problem in the whole world, and that is the salvation of the individual soul.

Our own personal problem is quite the same as that of every other sane, red-blooded, earnest man or woman in the whole wide world. It is to make ourselves as big and fine and useful and human as we possibly can and, were we so fortunate as to have wellborn sons and daughters, to help them to be bigger and finer and more useful and more human than we are. It is a much less spectacular job than the artificial problems of gov­ernment, dynasty, empire, ecclesiasticism, trade unionism, so­cialism, communism, commercial supremacy, dictatorship, and all the other aggressive mass movements; but it is the one real and important problem whose solution will bring peace and tranquility and worth to a world now very much distraught.

Foot Notes

^¹Broderick, Alan Houghton. Mirage of Africa. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1953. p. 203.

²This dim view of political collectivism is not to be mistaken as a backhanded endorsement of the "philosopher king" idea of Plato and its modern counter­part: that society should be wholly gov­erned by committees of the creative elite. There is no political process of knowing or selecting in advance the persons who will be most creative. The only process that will bring the creative minority to the top, that will encourage their effec­tiveness, is complete freedom.

³From In Tune with the Infinite. Indian­apolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1897.

⁴From Human Action. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949. p. 141.

⁵Touched upon here is the moral function of wealth. Whether or not people use wealth to free themselves for higher effort is beyond the scope of this essay. Many do not.

HANFORD HENDERSON, "Hands Off"

From The North American Review, December 1924.