Values – Custom Made or Off-the-shelf?
These days, it’s becoming more and more difficult to sort out what your personal values should be. This challenge, which psychologist Erik Erikson described in his “Identity versus role confusion” task, typically takes place when we’re about 14 to 17 years old, and usually involves moving from an identity based on group membership (e.g., the “jocks,” the “brains”) to one based on internal values. But clarifying values is a lifelong task; Dr. Harold Mosak says that the task of the self is another of the major life tasks, kalongside Alfred Adler’s tasks of love, work, and friendship.
These internal values are often influenced by many external forces: Our parents, and their spoken and unspoken values (which is what we try to get at with the Adlerian Family Constellation questions), the values of our extended families and the cultures to which they belong, the values of our friends, teachers, and coaches, our priests, rabbis, pastors and preachers, and the popular culture in which we are immersed. If we’re lucky, our values are influenced by inspiring authors we’ve read, by great philosophers, and even by fictional characters – from Charlie Brown to The Dude.
But the point is that we actually create all of our values ourselves, out of the raw materials of the messages and principles we read, see, and hear. The more we move from childish imitation to adult judgment and moral reasoning, the less likely we are to swallow pre-packaged sets of values whole. These are the rules we use for living, after all. They should first of all pass the test of common sense – they should help us to succeed in life,. Next, they should help us find meaning and pleasure in our lives. Third, they should help us to get along with others and meet the challenges of social living.
Unfortunately, in every era there are those who would like to sell pre-packaged sets of values to as many people as they can. We call those pre-packaged sets of values “ideologies,” and we call the people selling them “ideologues” (or “demagogues”). If you want to hear some good examples, listen to political speeches or talk radio hosts these days.
Sometimes it’s good to think about values as a package, even if doing so presents challenges. For examples, look at the “positions on social issues” written by some of the mainline churches in America. These give a sense of direction and cohesion to the value systems of their members, even though they often end up hedging on matters of conscience, recognizing that every situation is different and each person must trust his or her own moral judgment.
Where things become more problematic is when people set up “litmus tests” for belief, essentially demanding that if you want to be on our side you must stick to the approved beliefs. We’ve seen a lot of this in the political sphere, but is also takes place in organized religion. Those who disapprove of even some of the hierarchy’s positions can find themselves investigated, censured, and even excommunicated as “heretics.” One force that works to prevent this has always been our educational system, which is supposed to teach us (as children and as adults) to be “critical thinkers,” looking at the evidence and making sound judgments based on the reality principle. In higher education, the broad values of academic freedom and scientific thinking are intended to keep other, narrower values from dominating the educational picture.
Unfortunately, there are some who would hold that their values trump academic freedom and critical thinking. Sometimes there are self-serving reasons for this, as when those who make their fortunes from mining and oil drilling seek to put materials into school curricula that downplay the impact of human activities on our planet and its climate. For others, their religious beliefs lead to efforts to inject a particular point of view into our educational system. These people may have selfless motives, but intolerance for noble purposes is no better than intolerance for selfish purposes.
My son would give me a “TL:DR” warning about now (too long: didn’t read); so I’ll draw this to a close. But my main point would be to stress that our values – despite the emotional pull that they exert on us – should be arrived at by a process of reality testing whenever possible, and that feeling threatened by someone who disagrees with us may be a clue that our values are too emotionaly based, and could use a healthy dose of reality check.
Values – Custom Made or Off-the-shelf? by Fitzgerald Counseling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.