Value with a Vengeance

Is it possible for any one of us to exist as an individual without association to any community, society, tribe or organisation? The moment you are born, you are already a part of an organisation--your family. You don't get to choose that. You are a passive recipient of their love, care, advice and admonitions. The overriding concern is your survival and your role as the progeny of the family line.

You are taught to speak and you learn to express your needs, your likes and dislikes through the medium of language--which you now know as your mother tongue. The words, phrases, idioms, sayings and proverbs that come with that language become a part of you, shaping your thinking and your view of the world.

So, no one is ever born free. You are born with very specific initial conditions, or what I often refer to as boundary conditions, that limit and constraint the way to think and interact with the world. It's like the instruction set of a processor. Your primordial personality is cast in the assembly language of your mother tongue.

As you grow older, you learn more things--specific subjects and life skills that are independent of the language of instruction. But how well you master those skills depends to a large degree on your genetic makeup--in other words, your hardware--and the primitives of your operating system. The skills are like the applications you have on your computer. They are 'installed' through a process called 'education'.

When you go out and work in a company for instance, which is set up with a specific purpose, you become a node in a larger organisation, applying your higher level skills and knowledge to serve a particular role and function demanded by the organisation. The company attempts to impose its values on you too, through its corporate culture.

You also realise that there's an even larger organisation that you belong to--your country of which you are a citizen. It too has its own aspirations, values and culture, imposed upon you through the law and constitution and the public education that it provides you. As a good citizen, you are supposed to express a love and affinity towards these values and be 'patriotic'.

Emotionally however, the temperament and the values that you honour were forged during your upbringing by that default organisation that you were born into. That, is the culture of your family and your tribe, which to a large extent, shapes your personality. Even though genetics do play a big hand in determining who you are, it's the culture that determines which genetic traits get expressed or suppressed.

Your choice or music, religion, food and movies that you watch, and perhaps the political party that you vote for, are determined by these more primitive layers of your psyche. but are the values of your lower layers in congruence with the higher layer ones? 

A lot of the problems of humanity are caused by these differences in value. What you think is self-evident truth to you and your tribe might not be so to another. Are we able to appreciate these differences as 'diversity' which makes an ecosystem thrive and agree to celebrate them? Or are we bent on out-arguing the other party so that you can convince them that your values are greater than theirs?

Some values, especially religious ones, are deal-breakers. There's no compromise, because these values are already embedded in the psyche of the people.  When we can't convert the other party to ours, we resort to doing so by force. That's how humanity has been spending their time throughout history.

Whenever we find ourselves pursuing our cherished values with a vengeance,  let's ask ourselves, how did these values arise in first place? Can we co-create better ones? That is definitely a spirit that I would value.