Loyalty

I have often wondered about the concept of loyalty. As a Marine, we were taught to be supremely loyal (our motto Semper Fidelis is Latin for "always faithful"). We were also reminded of times when we would have to disobey orders, such as the soldiers in My Lai, Vietnam should have. I really had trouble with the concept of when to disobey and appear to be disloyal because war contains so many gray areas. Also, the consequences of disobedience are deadly. Perhaps that is the excuse of some of the Marines from 3/5 who followed their squad-leader in Haditha, Iraq that allegedly killed innocent civilians--they were torn between loyalty and morality.

Even today, there are times when I wonder if I should be more loyal to my customers or my corporation. Loyal to my boss or to my corporation? Loyal to myself or to my company? Loyal to my wife or my mother?

Mark's blog has produced a tangent that I would like to include here: a surface analysis of loyalty. I do not know that I can do more than graze the surface on a subject that can cut so deep and requires a broader experience than I possess. Even so, loyalty is a subject I must face often, as well as teach to my children and nephew. Therefore, I might as well get started now cleaving the fine points of loyalty. Perhaps I by analyzing it now I will have a better grasp of loyalty when I really need it.

Loyalty, it is argued by many, is a binary condition: either you are loyal or you are not. There isn't a gray area of loyalty according to conventional wisdom, and there isn't a reliable method of choosing when to be loyal, or not to be, that everyone would agree with. If I asked my father or barber, they would counsel me that I should be totally loyal to the institutions that I benefit from: my family, my company, my church, my nation, etc.

However, we have all seen what happens when we are blindly loyal: I think Nazi Germany is the most popular and best example of misplaced loyalty. Even in America, we cannot be expected to be loyal without negative consequences. My company has laid off loyal employees, families have been known to do horrible things when inheritance or scandal is on the line, our nation drafted boys for Vietnam even though they never intended to win the war (nor should we have been there in the first place), and churches...well, don't get me started on that. You know what loyal religious zealots can do, regardless of what name they give their deity.

Perhaps Shakespeare grasped the essence of the right kind of loyalty: "To thine own self be true." This is the kind of loyalty that I have clung to so far in my life, and I do not think it has proved to be a shallow, selfish loyalty that leads me to rationalizing unethical behavior and disloyalty. You may predict that a loyalty that is based on situational ethics is bound to be imperfect. I would argue that all loyalty is bound to be imperfect, but situational loyalty based on personal values that are aligned with societal mores is the most accurate loyalty we, as humans, can muster.

Benedict de Spinoza argued that the highest virtue of man was to know God; this knowledge would make us ethical. He argued that God is always ethical because that is His nature to be so: everything God does is right because He embodies what is right. According to this argument, the more we know God, the more we will desire virtue and our actions will begin to match God's ethics. The end result of knowing God is to imitate His nature. If everything God does is considered ethical, and if we know and imitate God then everything we do will be ethical too.

Spinoza goes on to argue that if we seek our own desires, we will conflict with the desires of other men seeking their desires. We will be hated and opposed in achieving our desires, which is obviously contrary to an ideal life. However, if we are all seeking God's desires, we can all be happy. We can help each other, receive help, and all end up equally receiving our share of the one desire.

I lean towards agnosticism, or at least Christian cynicism of some sort. Even so, I can follow Spinoza's logic most of the way. I believe that we can all agree as a society on some level of moral absolutes (against stealing, killing innocents, etc...) If we are examining our life and our society, as well as ourselves, we will know instinctively when loyalty is called for and when you should blow the whistle.

Also along Spinoza's reasoning, I think most of us are fairly honest and try to do the right thing for ourselves and our society. I have accidentally left my car unlocked with CD's and electronics visible and been glad to find them unmolested. If we are seeking to do what is right and in the best interests of ourselves, which includes doing what is best for the objects of our loyalty, then we will know where to cleave the limits of loyalty.

For instance, as a Marine I hope I would know at the necessary time that shooting unarmed civilians is actually disloyal to the Marine Corps. In the end, I should know that such an action is not only morally outrageous but it will damage the image of my beloved Corps and my nation, as well as my family and myself. Therefore, even though resisting the order to fire is disloyal to my squad leader and unit, it is an act of loyalty to all Slobodzians, all Marines, and all Americans.

We could even carry this further to say that shooting unarmed civilians is disloyal to the human race of which we are a member, and that disloyalty will have a direct, adverse effect on me (besides a blackened soul, I will enjoy less stability and more animosity. I may lose my life or a friend's life in revenge for the killing of an unarmed civilian). It would be better if our starting point was here at the highest level, but as humans we tend to be loyal to the lowest orders first.

I plan to talk more on my blog about how we are all symbiotic. At this point, I would like to define symbiotic as the state of interdependence; we all need each other; when we help each other we help ourselves; when we hurt someone else, we have hurt ourselves. The dictionary calls it symbiosis, but I am creating the word Symbioticism to define a philosophy I am developing.

For the subject of loyalty: if we understand Symbioticism, we realize that we act in our own interest when we help others. Therefore, if we make a decision with Symbioticism in mind, we will always be loyal to a higher order, even if we must be disloyal to a loyal order. Moreover, we know that if we choose a cowardly loyalty over known morality, then we have harmed ourselves as much as if we had polluted our own drinking water. The Germans should have known they were not better off by exterminating the Jews; they lost many of their best scientists, logisticians, and entreprenuers when they "cleansed the race".

I agree with Spinoza's reasoning: If I am a bad person, then I will make a bad decision when faced with a crisis of loyalty. If I am a good person, then by definition my actions are usually good; as much as is humanly possible. The result will be a right decision when faced with a crisis of loyalty: though I may choose to be disloyal to a certain organization or institution, I will have chosen rightly and it can be considered loyalty to a higher institution.

Now if we could all just agree on what is good and bad (what is quality?) in every situation.