If you have integrity, it makes you feel like you’re a better person.But integrity is not something you are born with. It is something you gain as you get older. That’s why a person can take pride in having integrity. Otherwise, would you take pride in saying that you’re born with integrity? I would not take pride in something I was born with because I didn’t do anything to earn it. If you’re born with integrity then, how do others get it? You aren’t born with integrity; you have to earn it.

John Locke said we’re born as a blank slate. A blank slate means that we know nothing nor do we have any skill. Locke might be correct with knowledge and skills, but I actually think that everyone was born with strong sense of empathy and other emotions. The way that we get all of our knowledge is something called malleable intelligence. That means a brain that you can sculpt or shape. The way that malleable intelligence works is that you pick things up as you go. Here’s an example, baby is crawling around. He touches a hot pot and cries. The next time the baby sees a hot pot, he knows it will hurt him and doesn’t touch it. That is the way we learn things- from experience. You wouldn’t go towards a wall of flames knowing it would hurt you. So how would you learn about integrity? Read on to find out.

Sometimes we see people in the world that have a lot of integrity. They show kindness and you want to be just like them because you respect them and you see what they are doing makes the world a better place. How much you value something helps you to carry out those actions to the world.  When you value kindness for example, you want to make sure you have the actions of kindness and that’s what integrity is–you actions matching your values. On the other hand, let’s say that someone lied to you about something and you felt betrayed. It made you feel so bad that you didn’t want others to feel the pain of betrayal. If you have had a lot of betrayals in your life, you might have more integrity than someone who didn’t because you learn from the bad examples too. That’s not always the case, but it’s likely. Another way you can gain integrity is from your own mistakes. If you have betrayed someone and you felt really bad about it, you might feel really terrible about that choice and never want to do that again.

Now we should go to the people who don’t have a lot or any integrity. They probably don’t have a strong sense of guilt when they tell a lie. If someone has told big lies, they feel little or no guilt at all. The other way they lost their integrity is that they had small little lies that began to escalate and they began to stop gaining integrity and continue to lie. Another way they lost integrity was because they were never betrayed, and they never felt the pain of the lie. For instance, someone who steals a toy from another may lie about it becasue they only want to keep what isn’t even theirs and they don’t even think about how it would feel if someone had taken their own things. They don’t feel badly about their lies because they are not the one who got hurt by it, and they just are happy to try and keep the toy and lie about it. The last reason a person may lack of integrity is because they had no punishment for lying, so they continued to lie and this could have escalated into them not listening to their hearts about the truth. There are times in this world where you can get away with doing something wrong and there is no punishment from others. But at the very least, our heart tells us that it isn’t right, and we should learn from our mistakes. We all have this ability, but some choose not to use it at all. If you don’t have any integrity, you don’t think about the pain in your heart, and you just do what makes you happy for the moment even while others may suffer. Even though these people were born with the empathy to know what they are doing is wrong, they ignored their hearts time after time.

As you can see the evidence shows that you aren’t born with integrity, you have to earn it by using the empathy that all people have. It takes listening to that tugging in your gut to know right and wrong, and then you have to make sure that your actions represent beliefs of right and wrong. Afterall, that’s what integrity is; your actions represent your morals. You just don’t come into the world with integrity. You earn it,and that’s why you would be proud when you have integrity :).