Is Humanity’s Integrity Dubious?

Do We Really Understand What It Means To Be Credible, Trustworthy or even what it means to be ………

“A Good Neighbor“?

The other day, I ran across the following TedX talk from Mitchell Levy. There is a lot of talk these days about what we need to do to solve our problems today. Mr. Levy discusses how our humanity is being directed by a perception that is being instilled in many of our younger generations, by previous generations.

I love to investigate words and the meaning they represent; so I found it very challenging to look at each of the words he discusses throughout his talk and how the meaning is affected by the addition of the word “dubious” before or possibly after, each individual word. Wikipedia.com tells us that there are 89 synonyms and antonyms for the word dubious.

I agree with Mr. Levy that humanity has become very non-committal to words like integrity, credible, trustworthy, authentic, genuine, and even words like honesty and empathetic.  We have learned to expect some percentage of dubious behavior from our human interactions and some may even live their own existence that way.  Even little “white lies” are dubious behavior, that we accept as normal interactions.  Learning to expect more from ourselves, is how we change humanity from being dubious with us; and hopefully others, that they interact with daily.

When we talk about Credibility, Integrity, and trustworthy, “dubious” is a very important, descriptive word.

Rationalization is a word that sometimes plays a role in our decisions.  We must be very careful because there is such a thing as “rationalized integrity”, “”, and “mostly credible”.  Our training, like Mr. Levy mentioned, has taught us how to use rationalization as a comfortable tool for our integrity, and can create “dubious integrity ideas.” This refers back to the father teaching his child to tell the fast food guy he is younger to get the burger special. Dubious does seem to fit into many of the aspects of humanity’s actions. We find, many times, that humanity does not always prove to be, “the best that it can be”.  I like to think that each of us are waking up and really want to live our lives in a way that is “the best that we can be.“

Our world has been upside down for a long time. Duality has ruled our world. Greed and “Service-To-Self” attitudes have divided humanity’s thinking and separated us.

Comparing the type of world we could inhabit using words like integrity, trustworthy and humane; with the negative actions aligned with the word…………..”dubious”, we see the word “questionable” added.

“Questionable” Definition From Merriam Webster

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Which world would you rather live in?

Mr. Levy’s talk is very thought-provoking.

Dubious is a word that is better left out of our life.

Adding a word like “questionable” to “Integrity”, “Credibility”, “Trustworthy” definitely, does not add confidence in the subject. We move in a sort of “Word Game”. The Game changes according to the perception of the players. Our discernment is critical. It has never been more critical than it is now. Each of us has our own perception of who or what we believe in. Our awareness is very important as our world changes.

Our world is going through changes and it is time for all those positive adjectives and actions to be put into operation. Ideas like “Working Together“, “Finding Solutions”, and “Respecting our Differences” are big ideas. These ideas call for those positive traits that Mr. Levy discusses.

We can live in the world we want to see, when humanity understands that it is up to us to become the difference. Living a life that does not see the world as dubious and open to our own personal choice of living through Integrity, Credibility and Trustworthiness is up to each of us. Changing our lives can be what changes others. At least, we may find that we are more aware of the dubious and stay away from those individuals or groups that live in that level of interaction.

I hope you enjoyed Mr. Levy’s video. He made some very interesting points, which do give us some interesting ideas about how we would like to see our world change.