You can initiate a mutual accountability process that will help to nurture the restoration and maintenance of a healthy conscience  in yourself and others.

I’ve identified some dangerous dimensions and the phases that lead toward the demise of a person’s conscience. Recognizing, intentionally taking action to reverse the demise, and nurturing your own and others’ consciences back to health are hallmarks of the high integrity leader.

You can help reverse the demise by establishing clear, worthwhile operating values. Then establish a Personal Accountability and Commitment Team process (See library article.) at home and encourage your colleagues at work to do the same. Participating in a PACT requires a personal decision to be a person of intentional integrity by seeking in every way to think, say and do the right thing. The Accountability Tools chapter in my book, Intentional Integrity, covers this process in detail.

Now let’s take a “snapshot” look at the various phases as we journey through the demise of a person’s conscience.

The Decisive Conscience

Our conscience planted at birth, giving us a natural sense of right and wrong. We can see it in toddlers when they have that, "I know I'm doing something wrong" look toward their parents when they are present. People possessing a decisive conscience have decided to think, say and do the right things intentionally. They understand the timeless principles related to right and wrong conduct and make a genuine effort to obey and live by them.

These people are filled with a capacity to think, say and do the right thing more consistently than not. They are relatively unpolluted by wrong thinking. They are open, vulnerable, and are sorry when they say and do the wrong things. They take steps to get back on track when they do fall short.

The Distracted Conscience

The distracted conscience is the beginning to the end of a high integrity, quality life, marriage, family and career. The points of distraction that move a person away from a decisive, strong, clear conscience are the most subtle but critical turning points that lead to the atrophying of the conscience.

When we are young children, we are very vulnerable to tapping into our most base conscious and unconscious desires. In the absence of parents who hold and live out worthwhile governing operating values and standards for conduct, wrong standards for conduct are modeled and taught in the home. Add to this their parent’s latch-key style of supervision and the TV programs that mentally and emotionally bombard the young with counter-productive values, and you have a child waiting to become a disaster as an adult.

Compounding the problem and further contributing to the development of distracted consciences are: Supreme Court decisions that have removed Biblical standards for conduct from the walls of schools and public buildings; free-floating pornography passed off as entertainment; a throw-away society where wives and husbands easily discard one another through our society’s accepted system of easy marriage and divorce; teachers and others modeling, and even promoting, ungodly values; morally sick sports heroes capturing the headlines and the adulation of the moment; movies that glorify decadent acts of crime, violence and sex.

The Deluded Conscience

This level of conscience develops as false type of “rational thinking” and is singularly taught, encouraged and acclaimed by too many of those who teach in America’s schools, universities and business settings. A false type of rational thinking is too often taught and reinforced at the expense of moral, conscience-driven thinking. With only “half-a-deck”, the morally uninstructed young remain uninformed and unaware of the dangers of single-sided thinking. They are in the dark morally baffled and confused at best, deceived at worst! At this stage in the demise of one’s decisive conscience, a person is positioned to move more quickly and easily into the pit of moral and economic bankruptcy.

The Degraded Conscience

It is in this dimension that the “virus of dishonesty” applies full throttle. The process of rationalization has enabled the person to think, say and do immoral, wrong things with very few, minor “feelings of guilt.”

The person appears debased to those around them who have retained their strong, clear decisive consciences, people who would feel disgraced and humiliated if they were to exhibit the same talk and actions.

As degradation continues, the person becomes depraved, wicked and highly vulnerable to moving to the next dimension of demise.

The Degenerate Conscience

With the full development of self-will and an attitude of “I am my own god,” any moral convictions and actions the person in this dimension may have possessed in the past have all but disappeared. His integrity and effectiveness as a functional, loving human being have disappeared. Worthwhile operating values have been dissipated or are extinct. He is fast on his way to becoming a permanent casualty of the “virus of dishonesty” and has rejected or never known God.

The Defiled Conscience

This person’s heart and mind are contaminated more completely. Many of the people and events he touches become tainted and impure. Whatever is left of the conscience that was his original birthright has been seriously diluted. His conscience is on the way to becoming an adulterated monster... corrupted through and through.

The Depraved Conscience

This person is skillfully corrupt and purposefully gains personal advantage through illegal and immoral actions. His degenerate and mean behavior impacts the lives of others with suffering and misery.

The Demented Conscience

The person living at this dimension is plainly crazy... insane! His unbalanced, lunatic, fanatic behavior puts fear into the hearts of all around him. He is a crackpot who is unpredictable and can’t even be trusted by his cohorts. Because he is deranged, he is capable of horrible acts of violence, while believing he is justified, even righteous, in carrying them out.

What’s the bottom line? Do what it takes to keep your own and others’ consciences healthy and strong! It will prove to be a worthwhile moral and financial investment over the long term.

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