DIALECTICS

Integrity

Author Herman Hesse wrote some 60 years ago of the importance of integrity to a nation's economy.  Here is a partial quotation from his book The Glass Bead Game, which I agree with wholeheartedly, and which I believe sheds light on the root causes of some of America's most challenging contemporary problems, including our economic woes:

"[I]f thinking is not kept pure and keen, if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.   The externals of civilization - - technology, industry, commerce, and so on - - require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality."
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Don't Hate; Elevate
I believe that there is a crippling syndrome of behavioral dysfunction with which more than half of the human race is afflicted.  It is insecurity, also known as low self-esteem.  Once I finally managed to get past my own case of that debilitating impairment I could for the first time see that the great majority of the behavior of others which I had long been unable to comprehend was nothing other than the virulent by-product of the degenerative process by which insecurity consumes one's heart, soul, and mind.

One axiom which was long taught to American elementary students, and which, not only contributed greatly to the rise of our country to the very top of the world's cultural, scientific, and ethical hierarchies, but served to inoculate many of us against low self-esteem, is . . .

Be Yourself!
I'm thinking maybe some of these banks should try that.