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Which One of the Two Principal Values Do You Choose?

January 26, 2022 Dominic Reichl

Values are beliefs of the form “X is good,” whereby X is an abstract concept, and you know that X is good through life experience that you have reflected upon or, in brief, through wisdom. Values are distilled wisdom.

But the wisdom need not be your own. You may borrow it from your family, educators, mentors, or some broader social network embedded in your culture. Political ideologies, philosophical schools, and religious traditions are common sources of values, too. Whatever your source, in each case you rely on the wisdom of others and adopt an exogenous value system.

This has several advantages. Not only does it make your life a lot easier, it also requires less of you. You don’t have to acquire and distill wisdom for yourself, and you can stay humble enough not to deem yourself wiser than everybody else. Moreover, the wisdom of others has usually stood the test of time. A certain hierarchy of values might have served your family well for generations, enabled an ideology to dominate your culture, or helped a religion flourish for centuries, even millennia. What are your few decades of life experience compared to that?

But there are also downsides to submitting yourself to exogenous values. How can you ensure that the values are not outdated in your present-day environment? How do you know that they are actually good for you rather than serving the interests of others? And while you might have been alive to gather wisdom for only a few decades, you can, if you are aware enough, access—through the intelligence of your body—the adaptive wisdom of many millions of years of evolution.

Also, if you have enough self-knowledge to individualistically build your own self-determined, custom-tailored system of values, you can still benefit from exogenous values by eclectically picking those that fit best with your current stage in life,—although this does raise a difficulty: How do you choose the right ones and prioritize them optimally? When adopting an exogenous value system, the selection and prioritization has already been done for you.

Yet even then there remains one decision which nobody can relieve you of: the choice of the principal value, that is, whether you choose the path of collectivism with exogenous values or the path of individualism with endogenous values. So ask yourself: Do you prefer the warm security of belonging to a group and tradition or the cold freedom of going your own way? Do you want to subordinate your will to some higher order that transcends your petty self, or do you want your will to flow unrestrainedly from the depths of your being? The answer will depend on your social nature, your attitude towards duty, your introspective tendencies, and your tolerance for uncertainty.

Certainly, it is an important decision because it will determine most of your other values, which in turn will determine what you classify as good and bad in this world. This classification influences your thoughts and actions, and they bring about experiences that hopefully are on the whole more pleasant than unpleasant. It all starts, however, assuming that you live a conscious life, with your choice of the principal value.

On a Second Thought

The reality of human values does not divide neatly into two contrary basic values, because neither is your individuality isolated from collective influences, nor can you adopt exogenous values without idiosyncratic integration. Nonetheless, it remains important to be aware of (1) your likely hubristic sense of having life figured and (2) whom or what your values are truly serving.

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