When a person is self-critical, there are conscious or subconscious criteria upon which these criticisms are based.

In a previous posting, I wrote about the difference between Right and right. To distinguish between what is Right and what is right, we can use the terms Principles and Values.

A value is only important if you as a person place an importance upon it, but a principle is important even if you try to ignore its existence. For example, you may try to ignore the principle of integrity and may even develop strategies and techniques for living without integrity - but you will have to cope with dissonance and discord and inconsistency and self-contradiction. Ignoring a principle is like ignoring gravity - while you fall, until you hit you can keep on pretending but eventually you will pay the consequences.

Values, on the other hand, are only important if you consider them to be important. Different cultures have varying values. You may suffer from the societal consequences if you ignore a shared value. Even if you are unconcerned regarding society's opinion, you may suffer financial loss, physical harm, imprisonment or even death as a result of the societal consequences of rejecting the shared values of the society in which you live.

But is death or financial loss important? For someone who believes that principles are more important than life itself, the rejection of a cultural value and the subsequent consequences, including death, are worth being true to what one believes is True.

Nations, cultures and religions continue to honor for many years those who either died or who risked death rather than give up what they believed were principles. India honors Mohandis K. Gandhi. The US honors Nathan Hale. Yet I know of no nation which continues to honor Vidkun Quisling or Neville Chamberlain, even though both were highly honored at one point in their lives.

In May of 2001, at the University of Pennsylvania commencement speech, Senator John McCain said:

For me, many of those tests came in Vietnam. I knew no one who ever chose death over homecoming. But I knew some men who chose death over dishonor. The memory of them, of what they bore for us, helped me see the virtue in my own humility. It helped me understand that good character is self-respect, and courage and humility are its attributes.

and again later in the same speech:

In that confrontation, I discovered that I was dependent on others to a greater extent than I had ever realized, but that neither they nor the cause we served made any claims on my identity. On the contrary, they gave me a larger sense of myself than I had before. I discovered that nothing is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself; something that encompasses you, but is not defined by your existence alone.

Another criteria upon which people criticize themselves is that of relationships with other people. If you value your relationship with another person, your failure to uphold your side of the relationship may cause you to suffer dissonance and internal discord.

If you are serious about developing personal integrity, you need to identify the principles, the values and the relationships which define your objectives. Having identified these, you then need to set longterm objectives for what you desire to acheive in each of these areas.

In future postings, we will discuss the KBLT approach to setting objectives and ranking techniques for determining importance.