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“Integrity means everything to me!” declares Sharon, her pride evident in the way she relishes that word’s trip across her tongue like it was some culinary delicacy.
She’s happy to give you evidence to prove she’s got integrity, story after story about the world’s slackers, doofs and hypocrites, a world chaotic over which she presides with confident, consistent, clarity.
To Sharon, integrity is demonstrated by never being wrong about anything. If you’ve got integrity you know what’s right and you promote it unwaveringly always. Your worldview is coherent. It integrates everything there is to know about the world.
Listening to her though, you notice that the only thing coherent about her worldview is her claim that it’s coherent. She changes her standards from story to story and yet doesn’t notice the changes.
To allow for such inconsistency, does she cut herself slack? “Certainly not,” she tells you. She’s insists that she’s very hard on herself. “No one’s more critical of me than I am,” she says.
And in a way you believe her. The people who are hardest on themselves are also the easiest on themselves. They have to be. Since critical self-awareness is so painful to them they have to avoid it.
That’s what seems to feed her relentless stories of personal glory suffering a world of fools. Integrity is her lifeline to self-esteem. So long as she can keep up her impression that she’s got integrity, she doesn’t have to face dreaded evidence that she’s like the rest of us.
Adriana doesn’t talk about her integrity but you can feel it in her occasional calm, unflinching references to her failings and flaws. Her stories are sometimes like Sharon’s, stories about what she knows is true. But as often they’re about her getting it wrong. She sits with her errors and flaws in ways that would send Sharon flying out of her seat into her self-reassuring song and dance.
Adriana has a knack for neutral self-observation borne of her sense that she’s not an exception. She’s not exempt from the human condition. She’s amused by her own human-ness. She doesn’t laugh nervously when she admits she’s got problems. She doesn’t inflect all her stories of daring-don’t upward toward tidy conclusions in which she prevailed in the end. Her stories aren’t epics in which she’s the hero. She’s not at tedious pains to prove anything about her unique qualifications to assess the world. You can talk to her about anything.
It’s not hard to get her to visit the possibility that she’s wrong about something. She doesn’t live in some psychologically gated community of the right-minded living among the wrong-headed. She’s one of us.
The great psychologist Jean Piaget said that learning was a combination of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is integrating evidence into your existing world view, accommodation is changing your world view to accommodate the evidence.
Sharon proves to herself that she has integrity by never having to accommodate, never having to adjust her worldview to the evidence. After all, wouldn’t integrity mean being consistently right always? Still, there’s a big difference between feeling and being consistent that Sharon overlooks.
Sharon is not consistent. Rather she’s always in the here and now telling the story that maintains her positive self-impression regardless whether the standard she champions in her current story is the opposite of the standard she championed in her last story. You’ll never find Sharon noticing that she’s talking out both sides of her mouth. For her, integrity is all about feeling consistent.
Adriana assimilates and accommodates, both with relative grace. Sometimes she’s right and sometimes she’s wrong. She’s disappointed by her errors and flaws but doesn’t over react to them. She’s neither beats herself up or lets herself off the hook, two sides of the same coin. She lives on the edge of a coin that tips gently this way and that, as she tries like the rest of us to navigate her way through a confusing world, while living in a body that tugs her this way and that.
Sharon is a bad sport and a sore loser covering her tracks with claims that it’s all in the service of maintaining her integrity.
Adriana is a good sport, trying to win, but OK with it when it turns out she hasn’t. As a result Adriana is a quick study, a fast learner, better at predicting what is likely to happen. Sharon seems hell-bent on not learning. She puts the ass into assimilation.
