Tuesday, 12 February 2013
Loyalty needs to die.
Why is loyalty considered a positive quality? It's one of the most dangerous, insidious and poisonous attributes a person can have.
Loyalty to Christ was responsible for the Crusades. Loyalty to nation led to the Holocaust. Loyalty to family and tribe continues to tear Africa apart by fueling corruption and nepotism.
It was loyalty to God that enabled a dozen lunatics to fly into the World Trade Centre, and it was loyalty to the U.S. that enabled millions of lunatics to blindly support the U.S's blunt and destructive response. Loyalty to China keeps Tibet oppressed, and loyalty to Australia keeps asylum seekers imprisoned.
Loyalty to ideology is the block that so frequently prevents people coming together in compromise. Loyalty to humankind is responsible for all manner of atrocities in animal testing labs and factory farms.
Loyalty to community = redneck. Loyalty to class = snob. Loyalty to self = arsehole.
No matter how you look at it, loyalty fosters a cycle of separation and segregation. The more loyal you are to your own, the less favourably you treat me in relation to your own, the more I resent you, the more threatened you feel by me, the more loyal you are to your own....
As the most advanced species on the planet in a time of rapid globalisation and growing inter-connectedness, I think it's time we rethink the real worth of loyalty, and abandon it on the scrapheap of history with all the other unhelpful paleolithic relics that so plague us.
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7 comments:
Interesting... some of what you were saying reminded me of a passage that G.K Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy about how peoples' alliegance to their country often ends up entirely counter-productive - they will fear change and end up hamstringing their own growth/success because they are too involved and invested.
Now in fact this doesn't necessarily agree with your overall sentiment because the 'successes' of the nation will often still come at the expense of others. And it sounds like you're essentially wanting to remove some of the distinctions between countries/cultures/species.
I wonder about the feasibility and desirability of this. I think it would make for a great sci-fi novel (i think we were talking once about how great ones can project really interesting "what if" scenarios and explore how they would work out). I feel like making good decisions is already hard enough, without having to completely disregard one's own interest. For example, do you choose to place more value on your family than another random person? Sounds like the continuation of your thought could also hope for familial loyalty to die(and I can see how that could be good for some things, but it also starts to sound sociopathic ;) though you could argue that society is fucked up enough so that being labelled an outlier wouldn't be such a bad thing).
Thanks for your response, Stru. Always appreciated.
Though I'd argue that if you're calling into question the feasibility and desirability of my 'loyalty must die' sentiment, then you're calling into question the validity of the Golden Rule (do to others as you'd have them do to you), and every religious, philosophic and social system that it underpins. Because the Golden Rule and 'Loyalty must die' are one and the same idea.
Of course, there are plenty of people who do think that the Golden Rule is indeed unsustainable or undesirable (nihilists, nazis, neo-cons, and most humanists, to name a few).
But I think there's a strong case that can be made that the breakdown of traditional loyalties (aka application of the Golden Rule) is not only something that humans have demonstrated that they can move towards, but that when they do, it's usually to their own benefit.
Take Europe as an example. For thousands of years loyalty to king, Caesar, church, or tribe created an atmosphere of almost constant atrocity and bloodshed. 100 years ago, loyalty to nation led to countless bloody uprisings, genocides, and ultimately to two world wars.
In more recent decades, the Europeans finally decided to try and put their national differences aside and instead cooperate, forming a system that fostered loyalty to all European nations rather than just one. The result was unprecedented prosperity, peace, and social progress.
Recently, this prosperity and peace has been threatened by economic turmoil in certain countries such as Greece. Turmoil that was created by self-interest and national loyalty. Selfish, greedy Greek citizens cheated on their taxes by the millions while dishonest, corrupt Greek politicians lied about it so they could keep borrowing money at the rest of Europe's expense. The Greeks had been let into the EU in a spirit of co-operation, yet they dishonered that spirit and chose instead the 'look-out-for-number-one' approach, and have subsequently endangered the entire region.
Don't get me wrong, I AM a practitioner of familial loyalty, just like everyone else. Don't worry, I do consider my needs to be more urgent than yours. And believe me, if both our mothers are drowning and I can only save one, I will swim past your mother without blinking an eye and let her drown while I save my own. (though I'm not sure why you see this as the less sociopathic option, but ok).
Self-interest (and by extension, favouritism to those who are closest to us), will be always with us. Evolution has bestowed it on us, and the habitual fear of the unknown or the the daily necessity to do smelly a shit, it's something we need to live with.
What I'm saying though is that we should recognise loyalty for what it is: an artifact from different, older times that is only sometimes useful, and the rest of the time is either obsolete or downright dangerous.
Within reason, we should try to eliminate loyalty where it causes the most danger, and temper it everywhere else. One thing we shouldn't be doing, in my opinion, is culturally glorifying it as a virtue, when any plain assessment of social history shows that it is anything but.
Yeah that's true, I guess I am voicing the difficulty I think the Golden Rule brings. Which is not to say that I see it as undesirable (though it could have been clearer, my choice of 'wonder' at the start of the second paragraph was deliberate to simply muse upon what it would look like).
I think your last paragraph of the comment is great, and captures the heart of your argument. When you say 'eliminate loyalty where it causes the most danger' and also particularly not glorifying it, I can wholeheartedly agree with that. I already find that I can feel paralysed when faced with decisions that affect other peoples' wellbeing (directly or indirectly) and that's the case even though I only partially manage to live out the Golden Rule (which I do place value on). But when you talk about that multi-tiered approach (i.e starting with excising loyalty from the most problematic areas) and working from there, it makes more sense.
I guess the ongoing question I have is, to use your example, how does Europe as a whole kill their loyalty and extend that same co-operation to other nations? While I would love for it to lead to world peace and share-the-wealth-ing, it seems unlikely.
Although I guess that doesn't invalidate your argument because the other nations that would then take advantage of Europe (or whatever would happen) would only occur because THEY chose to ignore their side of the Golden Rule coin...
And now i'm just rambling :)
Hey there...
Came here after seeing your breathing earth visualisation, which was cool. (btw how are the stats it uses stored? Are they easy to update?)
You blog seems really interesting - I'm looking forward to reading more...
In relation to this particular post, I vehemently disagree with you, but only on a point of semantics.
I have never considered loyalty to primarily refer to ideology, creed, nation etc, all of which are repugnant ideals. Those things I would consider 'allegiances'.
'Loyalty', as I think most people understand the term, refers to one's relationships with individual people, such as friends, family, pets etc.; and I think it's a splendid thing.
Giving preferential treatment and affection to those who have been especially and consistently kind to you, or to whom you owe a special duty of care, is highly ethical to my mind.
This extra care for those dearest to you, based in mutual reciprocation or personal responsibility, is "loyalty" to me.
The converse, of treating a total stranger as well as you do your own mother (to paraphrase an example from Jesus, in which he promotes this idea) seems totally wrong to me...
Little Gold Eunuch, I believe your understanding of the word loyal is off.
Firstly, if you look up loyalty and allegience in the dictionary you'll see that they're essentially synonyms. If you see them as significantly different concepts, then you're pretty much on your own there; your disagreement is with the dictionary, not with me.
Furthermore, when it comes to describing devotion to monarchs, governments, or ideologies, "loyalty" is actually the word of choice in many cases, rather than "allegience". For example: people who are fervently devoted to such things are often called "Loyalists".
As for your belief that filial favouritism is ethical while egalitarianism is not, you've given no reasoning or substantiation to back that up other than to say that that's how you feel about the issue. So there's nothing meaningful that I can add to this.
Hi Volnaiskra.
I really appreciated your post on Wacom pointer circles in in Windows 7. So I figured I'd check out your blog. I was pleasantly surprised to find some interesting commentary and decent discussion going on.
On the topic of Loyalty... I have been thinking a lot about this... especially because of eating meat and how we treat animals and nature. We're so loyal to our own species that we are undermining the ability of the planet to sustain everything... not just us.
There was this great story about how as we grow and mature our concept of "Who we care about" grows... from just us... to just us and mom and dad... to our family... then our social groups... then society at large... And then conceivably to aliens from other worlds... then to all forms of life... To the fabric of the cosmos.
I always thought this insight was profound and poetic. It takes out the primal brain of "Who's in the popular group and who's out" to "Wait, we are all awesome here."
This is how I view loyalty. A way to define who's in the cool group and who's out. And once you make that meta step backwards (Which I believe you have) that everyone is worth valuing and it's the loyalty you hold that keeps you trapped in your mind then you finally experience freedom.
I had someone point out that nobody is "Loyal" to facebook. We'd all go someplace else if all of our friends went someplace else. I thought that was a fascinating observation.
Beautifully said, jonnydark!
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