The Science of Living With Honesty and Integrity

Book excerpt: The Science of Living With Honesty and Integrity Table of Contents Introduction Earning Good Karma. Quite an honest man! Let My Conscience Speak for Me Black, Gray and White – Inflexibility And Compromise. Walk Quietly by, by the Other Side Conclusion Author Bio Introduction “Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”- Spencer Johnson. I was reading a story by a French writer, in the 17th century, and I found this line very amusing. “The more he talked about his honesty, the faster we counted our spoons.” Well, cynicism is definitely not something new in the 21st century. It has passed down the ages, and especially, when Shakespeare said “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” when he wrote Hamlet in 1602. Here was a clear-sighted person who knew that somebody was trying to persuade herself and trying to pretend to the world that what she was saying was her own belief and the truth as she saw it. How many of us are self-deceivers? Some of us will not and cannot face reality. Some of us are ready to blame others for our shortcomings. Some of us are quite prepared to fight for what we consider to be the truth, because we have expounded it, and we want other people to share our beliefs and thoughts. Be honest with yourself. Once you have faced reality, you can be honest with others. Honesty, especially when you are able to face reality, and you can understand that you are in the wrong or you are in the right is something very few people can do. They would rather stick their heads in the sand, hoping against hope that the problem is going to go away. Of course, they were not responsible for that particular problem. It just happened. I was reading a Novel by Amanda Quick in which the whole family decided that they belonged to Bad blood, which was frivolous, spendthrift, and definitely not responsible. That is why they could fob off all their extravagances, and stupid behavior, to this excuse, “we cannot help it, our ancestors were like that and they passed on their habits to us.” This was Regency England. Even today, we have plenty of people using the same excuse, because they are definitely not honest enough to admit it that they do not have the strength or the willpower or the inclination to make something of themselves. They would rather go with the wind, and pretend helplessly, that they really cannot do something, because, well, they are not capable of doing that. They belong to a genetically imperfect family, they do not have any money, they have always been pulled down by circumstances and situations, and other such puerile and feeble excuses. These are just ways and means in which they can shirk their responsibilities. These people are slackers and freeloaders. They are not honest, to themselves, or to others, however much they may pretend to be honest in the given sense of the word. They also do not have personal integrity.