Value System Disorder

If you told me government was corrupt and broken, I would say I agree. If you told me banks and businesses were causing at least as much harm as good, I would say I agree. If you told me the social system was unfit for purpose, I would also agree.

These are all standard complaints about the society we live in from a significant minority of people who dare to dream better. I proudly count myself among these people.

What’s much less heard of in my experience is questioning our personal values themselves. Usually when one opines on the question of our value system, people will say that our values are simply a function of the society we live in. To this, once again I would agree. We reflect our culture.

But is that the whole story? For what does our culture reflect if not ourselves?

I believe there is a common misconception about what makes society the way it is, and what makes us the way we are. For sure, we reflect the culture we were brought up in. Only an idiot would argue that point. But if you then ask what makes culture the way it is, then you have a problem. Does culture make culture the way it is? This seems absurdly circular. At what point do we consider that our own range of choices—even within our given cultural mindset—are what make culture what it is?

At this point, we need to side-step a little to deal with the topic of free will—or the lack of it—as championed by the eminent neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky.

I’m not for a moment questioning the work of people like Sapolsky who contend that we are mere biological robots acting without agency on external stimuli and our gained knowledge. I am, however, saying that while free will may indeed be an illusion, this illusion still gives us the perception of agency, and it’s within this perception that our ranges of choices still exist.

One of the features of exercising ‘free’ will is that you don’t know the outcome. You are faced with a number of choices and you don’t know how it will turn out. Consider this: If I randomly say the word ‘potato’ in the middle of a conversation, and you could somehow access all the information about me and my experiences, you could probably quite reliably map a causative path that led me to drop the word ‘potato’ into an otherwise non-potato conversation. However, if you had access to all that same information, could you reliably predict I would say ‘potato’ before I said it?

The point is that the argument for no-free-will is generally contingent on a known outcome. It’s easy to back-step from a known outcome and see how you got there, but not so easy to forward-step to an unknown one. Because of this crucial lack of utility, I think it’s important to keep the no-free-will argument in its correct context of a scientific curiosity and maintain our sense of agency—even if it is illusory—to keep our responsibility for what happens in society firmly on our shoulders.

So, free will arguments aside, we do get to decide things and make choices about our actions. We can choose to call in to our elderly neighbour to see if they’re okay, or we can walk on by. We can complain about the price we are charged, or we can say nothing and pay. We can choose to volunteer to clean the local beach, or we can stay home and watch TV.

It’s these small decisions that each of us take every day that shape our culture. And, I believe, it’s these small decisions that ultimately will change society for the better.

Society is the sum of our acts. Individually, we can’t make big changes, but that’s okay. We’re not supposed to. Big changes in society require changes from many people, not just one. Thus, if you’re frustrated that your actions aren’t making a difference, then know that the problem is not you, but that there just aren’t people like you doing the same.

The choices we make about how we interact with society are based on our value set: What do I cherish? What do I despise? What’s important? What will I tolerate? What will I not tolerate? How do I value myself in respect of others? How do I value myself?

All these micro-questions fleet through our minds almost imperceptibly as we navigate our choices through the day. These are our value-based decisions. And, just as our collective acts are more powerful than our individual ones, what we collectively count as important decides what society deems important.

If our collective value set deems capital punishment as important and just, then so too our society will have capital punishment. If our collective value set deems our individual selves as more deserving than others, then we will have an individualistic society.

As someone who has pondered long on the topic of healing society of its many traumas, I have come to see that it’s these micro-questions—what we value as important—that shape us, our decisions, and ultimately society. These internal, private decisions depict our society on a microscopic scale. If we truly want to affect and improve society, then contemplating on and adjusting what we truly value is where it starts.

When more of us truly value compassion, cooperation and humility, then we will shape society in that image.