| the blog of human failure
Today let’s talk about priorities. Sometimes we can more objectively understand the things we value in life just by stepping back and seeing what attention we devote to each activity and person. The businessman if questioned would say he loves his wife most, but the 18 hours a day he spends at the office indicates a higher priority. A woman might say her favorite author is Dostoevsky, but hour for hour she spends twice the time reading James Paterson.
A man in Darwin, Australia got into some trouble because he had a case of beer and his five year old child in the car at the same time. The man wasn’t drinking and driving, the problem was that he didn’t administer his young son’s seatbelt. He did, however, administer a seatbelt to his case of beer. The five year old sat on the floor in the backseat.
Now if you asked this man which he valued more, his case of beer or his son, I’m certain without ever meeting this man that he would say his son. And I think he’s telling the truth. “But look what he put the seatbelt on,” you might say. “Doesn’t that indicate his true pecking order?” I don’t know. I can point to dozens of examples in my own life where I say I value one thing over the other but if you were to record my time spent or action taken the converse result would be observed. But even knowing that I don’t think I’m lying by proclaiming my proclivities in the prescribed procession.
So where does the truth lie? What do you have to do to cross the line so that just saying you value something over something else is not legitimate or essentially true? We can just resolve ourselves to believing that someone saying something is his priority makes it true because he’s the only one in the position to make proper judgment of his own values.
If we agree with that line of reasoning, then I think we should all be lying about our values in order to be making ourselves as attractive/employable/desirable/seemingly-educated as possible in order to advance our personal causes of having sex, making money, and impressing others with our empathy and intellect. We could always just rationalize it afterwards by saying that what we claim to value are the noblest things anyway and we really do value them the most in our hearts even though our actions for the most part show otherwise. Then when our actions accidentally coincide with the things we claim we value, we can use these points as references for argument of our validity, even though we were spuriously motivated. Aren’t we doing this already?
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Never forget the imperfection of human nature. Your actions don’t define what you do or are; most often things we do are based on wrong judgment or biased by our personal experience.
A man put a seatbelt on his can of beers? He probably cannot conceive his son dying. Though he has seen a bottle of beer break many times. Does he value the beer more? Of course not. Is he not realizing what he’s doing? For sure.
The truth lies in the fact that we don’t know the truth. How much are you aware of the fact that you like/hate your job? How strongly do you believe in your values to act strongly about it? How confident are you in believing in them? And most of all, how many of these values are just us lying to ourselves about what we’d like to believe in instead of just what we do believe in?
So before thinking of lying to others about our values, why not starting by not lying to ourselves?
Comment by Elie — May 19, 2008 #