74. Integrity is all
Integrity is all SPs have. If you do not stand for anything then you are nothing. For that reason there are SPs who take abrupt and far-reaching decisions because they do not want to lose their integrity at any price, and some consider maintaining their integrity most important when looking back on their work.
US senator Alan Simpson stated, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”410 In other words, integrity is the only thing that counts.411 But why is this?
According to US general Melham Waken, integrity is an important element of self-respect.412
Philosopher Gabriele Taylor even claims that it is an essential, integral element of self- respect.413 In fact, integrity is a necessary condition for self-respect: without integrity there is no self to respect. Integrity is what you stand for. If you do not stand for anything, then there is nothing to respect. If you are not faithful to yourself, then you have lost yourself.
So integrity is the core of who we are. Without that core the rest is useless and worthless. That is why an SP (cited in chapter 40) once said, “I would rather die standing than have to crawl the rest of my life.” Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “A little integrity is better than any career.”414 Abraham Lincoln worded it aptly as follows: “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.”415 That friend is self-respect, personal integrity.
“Don’t compromise yourself, it is all you have,”416 said singer Janis Joplin. If integrity is the only thing, it should also be the last thing we give up. This is the reason why SPs sometimes make abrupt and far-reaching decisions; they want to maintain their integrity at any price. For example, people take serious personal risks by voting against something on the grounds that voting for it would conflict with their personal integrity, or resign because it is the only way of maintaining their integrity. This is also the reason why there are SPs who see having remained themselves and having retained their integrity as important or even the most important thing when looking back on their time in office. As an ex-minister recalled in her memoires of her days in politics: “I am in any case convinced that I remained myself and I derive great satisfaction from that.”417
In short, if integrity is all you have, you should give everything for it.