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Whatever happened to integrity? Do you really think it just recently vanished? To quote from Machiavelli's Il Principe, from the 1500's: "The promise given was
by groby_b 13y ago
Whatever happened to integrity? Do you really think it just recently vanished?
To quote from Machiavelli's Il Principe, from the 1500's: "The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present."
Want to go earlier? Let's get Julius Caesar: “If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”
And I'm sure he wasn't the first one to say or think so, either. Integrity is not a quality we can ever assume in existence - the only thing that will guarantee a semblance of it is accountability.
- chernevik 13y agoToo cynical, and perhaps dangerously so, yet plausible. Everyone is subject to temptation and self-justification. Anyone given too large a pass for "integrity" will start to veer to self-aggrandizement of some sort. That doesn't make people inherently bad, it does mean we all benefit from perspective and inspection. To me the take-away is that an assertion of incorruptibility is a leading indicator of trouble. Anything you aren't allowed to question or discuss is a breeding ground for trouble.
- groby_b 13y agoI'd be cynical if I assumed integrity didn't exist. Some people seem to have it, and many more strive for it. But I'd be hopelessly naive if I ever assumed it to exist, or if I assumed public displays of "integrity" were connected to an internal state. These latter assumptions might be true, but the cost of them being not true is too high, and the occurrence of "not true" is too frequent. Or, shorter, "Trust, but verify" :)