You set high standards. You're not a neat freak or a perfectionist, but you do have simple high standards for yourself--and therefore have high standards for the people around you. Now, something slips, you miss a couple days of work, your grades drop, you lose something maybe you did not intend on losing. Now what? Now, if everybody around you does the same, it makes it a little easier to accept.

I'm not talking about mistakes. I'm talking about very purposeful lowering of ones standards, whether it be because you are fed up, or because you were drunk, or because you no longer give a damn. Lowering your standards makes it Ok to you--to some degree--when others do the same.

Now what does that do to a society?

Lowers their standards.

Keep your head high—enough to be respectable; and stay that way.