I have always believed that a person’s integrity was one of the most important attributes of a person’s character. I learned my value system at a young age and by the time that I had become an Eagle Scout, my value system was fully formed. I was constantly dismayed at seeing the corrosion of our societal norms.
It should come as no surprise to you that I felt that social media corrupted good people. Everyone wanted to be “center stage” and self-embellishment led to flat out lying. Lying became so commonplace that I believe people began believing their own lies. Lying just became a way of life.
News organizations no longer reported the news, but created the news and no one cared if the facts were right, as long as they fought for higher ratings. Fake news became a commonly used term and news sources became a forum for reporters to push their own belief system.
One of my biggest failures, as pointed out by one of my employees, was that I placed too much trust in people, I always gave them the benefit of the doubt. He was right. I wanted to believe that people treasured their integrity. I think I cared more for their integrity than they did.
I witnessed people going out of their way to fabricate lies. I witnessed staff scheming against their supervisor in an effort to bully the supervisor into looking the other way to overlook their own incompetence. I was dumfounded in getting a call from our HR Department in which staff wanted to draw attention to their supervisor by calling anonymously to HR, claiming that their supervisor(s) returned from lunch with alcohol on their breath; just to make the life of their supervisor miserable. The claims were obviously false. I was further dismayed that HR protected these troublemakers by claiming protection under whistleblower policies. We are becoming an ugly society and societal norms protected these people under First Amendment Rights and Whistleblower policies. We began to lose our organizational vision because we were constantly putting out infighting fires caused by hateful people.
It is discouraging to watch the daily news to see that we have become a society of over-reacting children in desperate need of parental guidance. Animal welfare and politics seem to have so much in common. We daily watch the confrontations that occur and wonder if anyone is going to step up and be the adult.
This evolution of the degradation of society has taken its toll on me. Although I have always been an introvert, I’ve now become a recluse. I keep hoping to see the rise of role models to lead society back to honoring personal intregrity.