The failure of OpSec will always be a moral weakness.
We live in an age when even the most mundane human activity can come under attack. Treat your very existence as a mission. Operational Security starts in your soul. Not just your mind, but something more substantial; it’s your sense of who you are.
The mission is always first. If you take yourself too seriously, you have already failed. That is, the fundamental mission is to do what’s morally right for its own sake. Everything else you do is just a stone to lay on that foundation. Build morality first and foremost. The ostensible mission might appear to fail, but that simply means you don’t understand. By the same token, moral truth is more subtle and complex than anything you can put into words or action in the first place. In the heat of the moment, moral justice will be obvious and you can ignore the apparent cost. If you have nothing else to work with, just obey your own conscience; that’s mission enough for almost anyone.
A corollary to not taking yourself too seriously is the necessity that you discard any last shred of dignity and public shame. In reality, it often works out that those terms become redefined. However, the starting point is to throw aside what everyone may have taught you about them. You’ll rebuild them from an entirely different substance. Don’t be somebody; be the mission. You are defined by your commitments, and your pride and dignity are in the mission.
Don’t trust. Distrust yourself first, and you’ll understand how you can rely on others without fully trusting them. Anything worth doing always requires including others. There is no purity and perfection anywhere in this life, so get used to measured risks. The calculus may well change entirely with the flux of real life and you will surely fail at some points. Don’t measure success with your mind but from deep in your soul. Sometimes you go along with something you were taught was awful because the alternatives are worse, and because you cannot know how it will turn out. What you seek is not precision but peace. If you sacrifice your peace, nothing you gain will mean anything at all.
Be honest to your moral commitments. There is plenty of deception, but no such thing as objective truth. Thus, any putative debt to be honest with folks in what you say is itself a deception. The Western concept of lying is simply a control mechanism. You may not actually know the whole truth, and your understanding will surely shift along the way. It’s wise to avoid knowing things that can become a liability, but in dealing with people, don’t throw pearls to swine. Most people in any given context warrant no information at all; a great many warrant nothing of importance. Let them be wrong about you until the mission demands otherwise. Accept kindness you don’t want, as if you really appreciate it. Shrug off rudeness because it doesn’t warrant a response. It’s the mission, not you.
You aren’t any better than anyone else, but if all you have is a drive for a clear moral conscience, you will be quite alien to most of the world. Embrace that as your role. You owe the world a life of moral truth, but if they don’t seem ready for it, don’t choke them. Stay with the mission and move along as if you were mere scenery for them. Let them go about their business without ever realizing you were there; it’s often the greatest kindness you can offer the world.
Beyond all that, satisfy your sponsor. Sponsors often enable far more than they request. Give him as much honest truth as he can handle and do your honest best to bring back what he says he wants. Of necessity, there will be some measure of interpretation in that, but give it your best shot. That is a critical necessity within the larger moral frame of reference.
Train yourself to be totally unsurprised at the depth of human depravity. Predators are hoping to catch you off your guard, to shock you enough to disable the mission. Don’t shy away from your own depravity in the sense of making sure you know it well. You can explore it without acting on it. The only time you’ll face heavy artillery in terms of major temptations is at the intersection of your weaknesses with the importance of the mission. You’ll usually be surprised when someone correctly guesses what will get to you unless you tend to keep fresh in your mind just how ordinary you are. It’s not that they consider you a major target, but your mission is the real threat to them. Recognize any attempt to cultivate your ego as an attack.
Everyone has a breaking point; most people have no idea where it is. That’s because it tends to have a life of its own, and isn’t always exactly the same place in every context. Don’t be surprised when it’s closer than you thought, but don’t fear to chase it away. Moral strength often doesn’t announce itself until you are past the worst tests. You’ll recognize it in retrospect. Put your confidence in the mission, not yourself, and moral strength hangs around more.
Lose yourself in the mission.
