Belhor on Integrity

"Why won't you just say it, Arthur? You are always thinking far too much about whether or not you will mean what you say tomorrow. What does tomorrow matter if you mean it now? Why must you stand by it after an hour or two or twenty-four or a year? Truth is contextual. The context of this space and this time is all you need to consider when you speak. Speak! This obsession with integrity . . . Integrity! I will tell you what Integrity is. It is propaganda by cowards--a fancy name given to a guarantee which life implicitly tell them is impossible. It is consoling to think that the world they know today will be waiting for them in the morning. How safe. How sound. How blind. How can a human being that learns and changes and has a free will be expected to remain the same for ever? No one in their honest mind can. Anyone without the courage to know life as it is, does. Integrity is for those who cannot bear to understand that life is not going to obey their deepest desires for an immutable world, for people as static creatures with beliefs fortressed against reality, for minds that never change! What if you are persuaded to change your mind? Will you remain as you are in the face of reality giving you an alternative, an opposite, an idea that perhaps provokes emotions of fear, disgust, longing, or joy in order that you may retain your precious Integrity? Will you deny the mysteries and the complexities of what it means to be a human being, deny the broadening and deepening horizons, as mutable as you are mortal, to tell yourself at the end of the day that you always mean what you say, forever? Is it not enough, and indeed the only guarantee, that you meant what you said then? A chill comes over you, you say, to realize what I say now I may deny tomorrow. You will ask me about my harangue at some later date and I may say to you, “So what? That was yesterday.” Or I may not. It doesn’t matter, so long as I tell the truth as I know it now. This is how we are—perhaps the most wonderful and most horrible aspect of human nature. But if you want to have lived, and lived fully, embracing all that is wonderful and horrible about humanity, then you must accept, if not embrace, this aspect of your fellow Man, and, most importantly, about yourself. You are not an absolute. You are fluid. Embrace it. Revel in it! Speak! For God’s sake speak and mean it. For now. Believe me. I won’t hold it against you. You do believe me . . . don’t you?"