Alternative Editorial: Power of Integrity
Is there such a thing as thinking one thing and doing another? For example, can you 'love someone to bits', but be plotting their downfall at the same time? Can you 'hate capitalism but be obsessed with your own success’? Can you deeply relate to nature - or to animals, maybe - but continue to collude with their brutal slaughter?
Of course, knowing our readers seek complexity, we are not offering any simple answers to this conundrum. After all, we live in a world that is not of our own making: we don't always have a choice to live in full alignment with our ideals. At the same time, do we even care about integrity? More importantly, have we ever considered its power?
This weekend we hit another low. Watching the coverage of the Grand National horse race was excruciating. For those who might not know the context, this is a horse race that takes place each year in Aintree, North England. It's a high point in the gamblers’ calendar - so it's not only those attending in person who make it an event.
Families - even whole streets - get involved in picking horses that might win and make an afternoon of it. The race’s allure comes partly from the especially high fences the horses have to jump - higher than the horse and the rider combined. To get the horses to tackle such an unreasonable height, the jockey whips the horse frantically. The two together have to be in a constant frenzy of excitement (or fear) to have a chance of winning.
Fun? Well maybe, until a horse can't quite make that jump. Or one horse, confused or resisting, swerves even momentarily into the path of another. Then one, maybe two horses may fall, break a leg and - because horses can't be looked after easily with a broken leg - be quickly put down. Even as the horse lies thrashing on the floor, someone approaches with a shotgun to 'put it out of its misery'. Somewhere between 1% and 3% of the horses you may have bet on, the one its owners spent a minimum of seven years grooming, will not come out of this race alive.
This year - and every year since 1991 - people who care about animals protest against this race. They take the risk of assembling peacefully but not quietly - chanting with placards both outside and inside the grounds. They are trying to stop the race happening. Yesterday was no exception but, in the current anti-woke media-sphere, hatred of these (mostly young) people spoiling race-goers fun made the front pages. Amongst the headlines calling those who risk prison for trying to protect horses 'disgraceful', 'hypocritical’, ‘criminal' or 'nuisances', none mentioned that three horses died that week.
In a live interview for BBC radio before the race a number of enthusiasts expressed sympathy with the protesters' cause but followed that up with a light-hearted "but I enjoy the race too much." In that moment is all the abnegation of responsibility that lies at the heart of so much of our collective failure to address social injustice. On the one hand, expressing awareness and even empathy for victims of our way of life; on the other hand, continuing to actively collude in generating the same outcomes.
None of us will have trouble finding ourselves in that dichotomy in some aspect of our daily lives. Whether we call out racism or any form of bigotry yet find ourselves taking part in the structures and cultures that guarantee its continuity. Or profess to love our pet animals, while upholding a meat industry that brutally murders them and destroys the planet. Or bemoan the capitalist growth economy, as we indulge regularly in its addictive consumption.
Core to this incongruent self is a certain ignorance about the connection between cause and effect. Because we can't see the outcomes of our actions, we pass off the responsibility to others. We blame farmers, abattoir designers, advertisers. We don't grasp that cows would not be treated so summarily - as if they didn't have awareness or sensitivity of their predicament, didn't suffer - if we didn't create the market for their massive consumption. Saying no to this industry would destroy the conditions for its success. As it already is doing in some way, though it’s early days.
But what about the people who do understand their connection with the system that links them to the extractive economy - a system which sucks all the life out of people and nature, powering a monetary machine benefiting only a small section of the planet? Yet who still fail to behave any differently? Who feel so entangled that they cannot experience their own agency: "what difference would it make if I stopped flying? I'm just one person and the plane will take off regardless".
Yet as long as we are thus compromising and devaluing our own actions, we continue to mentally and spiritually inhabit the world that is failing. That is who we are and that is our discourse. Not unlike a sick person who refuses to believe a change in diet and exercise will make much difference to their health. The future we are heading for - and investing in with our actions - is decline and eventual demise. Our feet are planted on a doomed planet.
To live without integrity, our thoughts constantly contradicting our actions, is to rob ourselves of vital energy. A disjunct that leads to loss of mental health and a loss of power: we are at odds with ourselves, carrying the baggage of centuries of failure. As if we actively chose it.
On the other hand, to step away, consciously, from both the causes and effects of past generations - with or without any guarantee of change in the broader society - is to free yourself. Only then can you enter into a space of genuine possibility for the future.
While this sounds like a hard task - maybe too much to ask, given the daily pressure of life - it is also surprisingly liberating. Without doing anything more than shifting our stance, we suddenly find ourselves on a different path, with a different view ahead: we are heading for a different future. Of course there is no guarantee that future can be realised, but that is very much the nature of life. How many of us are on the same career path we imagined as children? At the same time, any one of us could die tomorrow for reasons unimagined.
But once on that different path, we will see new possibilities for creativity than before. Some of the activities we took part in before will drop away—but others will open up. The constant cynicism about life – a cynicism that previously felt so real because we ourselves were complicit in making it so - gets taken over by original, often radical ideas. Play becomes our strategy (check out our four new incubators), giving rise to a new socio-economic-political system. Without the usual measurements of success, we make new ones.
This is what Hannah Arendt would describe as natality, the quality of constantly birthing your world. And in the words of singer, songwriter Bob Dylan - who so lived in his own value system that he didn't change his schedule to pick up his Nobel Prize - "He who is not busy being born, is busy dying".