Resolving the Integrity Paradox

Here’s a paradox: A total hypocrite is consistent in their double standards. They consistently rationalize any option that benefits them. Though that means that they are completely inconsistent in rationalizing their behavior, in a way, they have absolute integrity.

Integrity means holding a consistent standard, and these hypocrites do. They’re internally consistent and externally inconsistent. A gaslighting, narcissistic, dark-triad personality is robotically consistent: If it’s good for me, it’s good and true. If it’s bad for me, it’s bad and false.

This paradox explains why Trump sympathizers admire and share his integrity: If it’s good for them it’s good and true, if it’s bad for them it's bad and fake news.

Some paradoxes are irresolvable. This one isn’t like that. Rather, it exposes a challenge we all face and suggests that integrity is not one thing but three or the integration of the tension between them.

We humans each “contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman said of himself. But at the core, we each contain three dimensions that should feel familiar to you. They’re called body, mind, and heart or spirit. I’ll give them more scientific treatment here to ground them in our origins and evolution.

1. Body is called "vegetative sentience". It’s our struggle for existence, the unfelt, unconscious effort all living beings make just to stay alive. For example, without feeling or thinking, you regenerate 330 billion replacement cells daily. Body integrity is the difference between being alive and dead. A dying body is losing its homeostatic integrity, sometimes in cascading complications, one process failing, causing other processes to fail until one dies of loss of body integrity.

2. Heart or spirit is neuronal integrity, sensations, feelings, and emotions, a dimension common to all animals. Felt integrity is comfort in our skin, seeking pleasure, and avoiding pain. At the extreme, this felt integrity is the driver for the kind of integrity any narcissist, gaslighter, dark triad personality, cult fanatic, or drug addict will do anything to maintain, even if it causes other people and our own bodies huge damage. At that extreme, it's an addiction to what I call myopium: the opium-like painkilling effects of myopia or shortsightedness.

All animals have this felt kind of integrity on top of their bodily integrity, though on top isn’t quite the right word for it. Sometimes it does top bodily integrity. For example, in experiments, a rat will push a lever to stimulate its brain's pleasure centers until it kills itself. But sometimes body integrity will override its felt integrity, for example, an animal that will gnaw off its own leg to escape a trap.

Between doing what’s good for our bodies and doing what’s good for our feelings, there’s a tug-of-war tension resulting in alternating dominance: Feelings over health vs. health over feelings. You know this tension well. You’ll eat foods that feel good but are bad for you, and vice versa.

In humans, this tension is complicated by a third kind of integrity, the one we associate with the mind. It’s:

3. Mind is languaged integrity: On top of, or rather, in tension with, body and heart, and as a result of our capacity to use language, humans have concepts, thoughts, ideas, stories, explanations, and rationalizations. Languages are socially maintained systems of words and references that enable us to imagine anything.

Can you imagine a rhino in a tutu balancing the universe on its candy cane horn? Can you imagine your death? Can you imagine eternal heaven or hell? Yes, you can, and as no other creature can. A language-generated thought can comfort or scare us. It can motivate us to do what will save or kill us.

Language integrity is complicated. In logic, math, and science, we strive for an integrated worldview, concepts of reality with no inconsistencies. But language integrity also enables us to have the kind of integrity Trump employs to maintain perfect comfort in his skin, words to rationalize one consistent God-playing truth: “I am eternally right, righteous, and mighty, and like God, I am one. I never contradict myself,” and by this internally consistent standard, be a total hypocrite.

These three dimensions evolved from body to heart to mind. But that's not the sequence in which they play out. Rather, they influence each other in tangled ways. A thought can stir a feeling; a feeling can stir a thought. Either can change your physical health. Your physical health can change your feelings and thoughts.

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I think of these three as the tension between what I'll call the "likely", "likable" and "liked."

The likely is reality itself, the standards our bodies must meet to stay alive. The likable is whatever gives us comfort in our skin. The liked is the popular assumptions our social lives represent to us. The liked can represent reality checks, for example, local laws that are good for our health. But the liked can also represent unreality checks. For example, a cult's feel-good integrity whereby whatever feels good is good and true and whatever feels bad is bad and fake news.

If we’re all living with the tension between body, heart, and mind—health, feelings, and concepts—what does integrity really mean? It could mean perfect consistency on any of these three dimensions. But since we're all juggling all three, it could mean doing the work to integrate them.

One of humanity's biggest challenges is this: For long-run survival, what’s likely is what matters most. But in the short run, what’s likable feels most pressing. Our priority is comfort in our own skin, even if, in the long run, it's deadly.

Humanity has always been vulnerable to mass movements with perfect feel-good integrity, the socially liked prioritizing the likable over the likely. The risk worsens with new media that enables us to share concepts farther and faster, but this risk has always been part of the human condition.