INTEGRITY

It is difficult to run the gauntlet of years and remain unscathed by the pressures of the crowd and the seductions of wealth, power, sex and other glittering traps. It is a monstrous challenge to remain faithful to an ideal of the self which hears other words but does not forget one's own, which can understand the glitter without being blinded. Nor is caution dispensable with close friends and relatives, for they might have been caught in those traps and blinded to judgment, logic, or loyalty.

Indeed, the self alone is often the only refuge for qualities diminished in others, which dimming tends to compromise reason, loyalty, and truth; and so powerful is the seduction which claimed them that few others remain ultimately unseduced. Small is the class of those with stern resolve against dictates contrary to self, and whose personal philosophy can survive assault on the nobility of character.

Some may be

fortunate to win

the riches of wisdom;

others will only

Winnebago ....

Despite that lightness, Plato once put it with eloquence:

2


"Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such (a) one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts -- he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore seeing that he (under their ethic) would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and reflecting that (by following) he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way."

(Plato, The Republic; The Works of Plato, The Modern Library, Random House, 1928, p.458)