And above all, we need to be cognizant of what our integrity is worth: if we decide to sell it, it shouldn’t be for cheap. It is hard to read those words and not think about political scandals and corruption, but perhaps the cleanup should start closer to home, with our own behavior, our own too-often-unacknowledged propensity to compromise principles for the sake of convenience, our lack of courage when it is called for, our mostly theoretical sense of justice, our often flaunted temperance, and our own manifestly very limited wisdom in managing whatever life happens to throw at us.
