Have you ever found yourself excusing your behavior by saying, “I’m just doing my job.” You probably disagreed, in principle, with your own action. But you were paid to do it. You accepted the position, assumed responsibility for the outcome, and compromised your integrity.

Perhaps your job is to ensure customer satisfaction. Every asshole, regardless of how cruely they behave, must be treated like royalty. Why? Because the people in charge want their money. Integrity? Integrity is a state of being whole, consistent in action and belief. The world of work has been compromised, true service replaced by deal-making and a give and take attitude where employees give and corporations take.

I know you want to do the right thing, but you can’t. You need that job. This is a cost paid on credit, a little at a time, until one day you find you’ve paid a great deal more than you intended. You may have been rewarded along the way, moved up the ladder to find yourself enforcing those mind-numbing rules, standing firm on a foundation of just-doing-my-job.

The difference between a middle-manager and a paid assassin is merely a matter of degree. One has a little more conscience than the other, in theory anyway. Hurting another’s feelings is okay, hurting their physical body is not. Sucking the life from another slowly, one judgement at a time, goes unnoticed by all except perhaps the victim.

Killing is never justified, except during times of war. Are we ever not at war with someone somewhere for some reason? War is a word we throw about with reckless abandon to justify obscene behavior towards our fellow beings.

The worst war, the one that causes the greatest harm, is the war that rages inside of us as we trade our integrity for dollars.