We think we live by our Values.
Well, we don’t quite!
I think is it laudable and very helpful to identify your Values and try to live them (personally or as an organisation).
But then indiscipline and emotion gets in the way, and we fail to live up to our own expectations of ourselves. Poets and writers are renowned for this – some have had lofty ideals which they can rhetoricise beautifully for us – and mean it. However, their lives may be chaotic and disastrous. And not contain much of the Values in their behaviours.
So we identify our Values in order to live (behave) in certain ways.
But in addition to the poet problem in all of us, we also have the problem of Perception. You see, Perception works so FAST! How long does it take you to start making judgements about someone new? It’s tiny fractions of a second.
“Don’t think of a Pink Elephant!”. See what happened? The unwanted intrudes in microseconds, and we are no better than the Poet we derided.
So we all share a problem of being too good at Fast Perception. And the Perception is not based on our Values, no matter how hard we try. Experiments show, for example, racist perceptions and judgements when shown video clips that turn out to be innocuous. And this is true in people whose Values are the opposite to the intrusive perception (those who don’t even believe in Pink Elephants!). Unfortunately other experiments show that such ‘fast perception’ cannot be moderated by training in Values. It seems to be our innate biology. That’s not to say we can’t deal with our fear of spiders, for example, but like the Poet, we behave a lot in ways contrary to our ‘preferred nature’.
It’s circular because in our brain our Perceptions then inform our Values! So we hold Values that we wouldn’t necessarily want to admit, even to ourselves.
It seems Human Nature exists, and is imperfect, and our stated Values act as a valiant and partially-successful attempt to improve ourselves for good, taking us beyond the drag of the evil lurking in our Nature. This contradicts the theory of Rousseau, the 18th Century philosopher, who said, “Man is born free, but everywhere in chains”. He believed the chains were caused by the bad effects of the society and institutions around us. But it seems we are not born free or perfect, nor can become so. And so maybe we overestimate the societal chains. Applied Critical Theory can suffer from this problem of magnification or exaggeration of ills. What we are then left with is simply a responsibility to recognise our own propensity for doing ill, consciously or unconsciously, and to work hard to learn our own false paradigms and turn ill to good. It’s a lifelong battle.
Complacency about the downside potential of our Human Nature – in others but particularly in ourselves – is perhaps our greatest enemy.