Integrity

Every day we’re drowning in a flood of verbal and auditory input. I hesitate to term this influx “information” because most of this input is anything but factual. It’s opinion (admittedly this Substack is too); it’s public relations; it’s advertising; it’s lazy journalists repeating this public relations, advertising, or corporate propaganda instead of doing their own critical thinking or research.

These floods of news tend to come in waves, leaving me to wonder who’s initiating them. Some are political, highlighting the crisis of the day but forgetting the crises that came before. Trump’s war of choice in Iran has totally blown the genocide in Gaza out of the public consciousness. The fact that Trump’s actions caused Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz seem lost in the controversy of how to re-open it. Has anyone heard anything about ICE lately?

Other news waves are cultural. All of a sudden we hear incessantly about everyone taking Ozempic, or everyone quitting alcohol, or the “attention economy”, or how anyone who’s anyone uses GPT to summarize their emails.

The current culture feeds the outward gaze. Every day, I can peruse my Substack dashboard: Have I gained any followers?; How many people read my last post? I can check my Amazon author page and view a chart showing how many people have bought my books compared to the millions of other titles they sell.

I admit, I sometimes do these things. I’m not immune to a nagging sensation of inadequacy. If “everyone” is doing this or that, or thinking this or that, is there something wrong with me if I feel it’s ridiculous? Am I supposed to feel guilty about my normal nonmedicated meal, or my glass of wine, my love of long, print books, my dislike of multitasking, my desire to write “long form”, or the fact I can’t get last week’s horrific headlines out of my head and replace them with this week’s?

Rather than following this outward gaze, adapting my writing and actions to it, I choose to honor my inward gaze and build from there.

Many people I know are handling this daily assault by withdrawing: not reading/listening/watching what passes for the news, not participating in public life. Or they simply become inured, deflecting their pain with irony and sarcasm.

I understand. It’s tempting. But it’s tempting in the way that lying down to sleep in the snow is tempting when you’re hypothermic. Dangerous!!! Ultimately fatal!!! To withdraw is to leave the public arena in the hands of those who wish to control us and those who are easily controlled. And like it or not, we all live in the public arena.

I suggest another path, which is standing strong in yourself , speaking the truth as you see it, swimming steadily through the flood and against the tide if need be. We all differ in our perspectives, our circumstances, our family configurations, our skill sets. What matters universally is taking the time to apply focused, critical attention to the information flood rather than mindlessly drinking the koolaid. And then turning that attention into action. That action can be quiet, but it needs to be firm and consistent.

Christopher Armitage in his Substack The Existentialist Republic expressed this sentiment very articulately: Influence is the degree to which you move the world around you, intentionally or not…You do not build influence and then deploy it. You build real relationships and influence emergences from them as a byproduct. and the deepest form of it starts with yourself, living genuinely according to your ideas, leading yourself first, setting the example through how you actually move through the world.

No one can take your personal integrity from you. You can only give it away.

I’m going to quote from Yeat’s The Second Coming , which is a widely quoted poem but couldn’t be more applicable to these times:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

In a time when the center cannot hold, we all have to be the center.

For more about my writing, please see wendygordonauthor.com