WHAT ARE YOUR VALUES IN LIFE?

Two recent online posts made me pause to really reflect on them. One was Tan Kim Lian’s blog on the 5 values that guided him in his life journey. The other was a Facebook post by lawyer Michael Han on “How will you measure your life?”

TKL listed his 5 priority values as honesty, fairness, being positive, courage, and public service. There is no right or wrong. We are all molded differently and have different priorities. This is not a blog out to criticise TKL. I am just using TKL to kick start my thoughts on the matter.

Values are a person’s belief systems, a basketful of attitudes, principles, ideals that govern how he conducts himself, manifested in his behavior, choices of priorities and decision making. Values maketh a person's character and moral fibres. What he is, comes from Nature and Nurture.

Qualities from Nature are innate. It is in the person's DNA and unchanging. Do the stars at our birth have anything to do with this? Western zodiac stars and Chinese zodiac animals do surprisingly predetermine some characteristic qualities in a person.

Exogenous factors that nurture or influence a person are upbringing, culture, religion, school, friends, influencers, personal life experiences, etc.

Value systems are thus never deterministic. They evolve as a person’s world view changes and his risk-rewards dynamics changes. Innate qualities are however, difficult to change. Parents play extremely critical roles as value systems are better imbibed at very young age. This parental duty is discharged either in the form of direct instructions or by being role models.

What are these value? Though there are many and varied values, they can generally be watered down to a few in terms of most people's priorities. These are some of them:

Loyalty, Honour, Courage, Compassion, Kindness, Generosity, Considerate, Selfless, Community-minded, Justice, Perseverance, Knowledge, Power, Stability, Security, Status, Wealth, Health, Happiness, Growth, Face, Recognition, Respect, Integrity, Honesty, Love, Gratitude, Forgiveness, Selfless, Responsibility, Humility, etc.

You may have your own to add, but these would be the most commonly listed. Some of these over-lap.

To make it easier to appreciate the wide array, psychologists categorise values into 2 types:

(a) Instrumental values or desirable ways to act or behave, e.g. kind and generous.
(b) Terminal values or end states, ie outcomes desired of or actions, eg more power, more wealth, healthier, etc.

Schwartz categorised values into 4 groups in his circular model above, namely (a) Self-enhancement, (b) Openness to change, (c) Self-transcendence, and (d) Conservation.

Knowing your own values are important as you get to understand why you act the way you acted. Being aware of another person’s values are equally if not more importantly because we can fairly predict his reactions to events or stimulus.

There are often times when values clash. For example, an honest guy forced to take bribes in order to obtain badly needed cash for medical expenses. Or a clear-headed educated guy who knows the dangers of untested vaccines get the jabs anyway in order to visit malls or stay in his job.

Dissonance occurs when there is a clash of values. Possible consequences are guilt-ridden, frustration, damnation, tension, depression, sometimes suicidal, etc. To return to balance and sanity, some choose to re-align their values, mostly in the manner of lowering one’s value in personal standards.

So what are your values? List your pick of priorities.

Having mentioned Kin Lian, I need to be upfront and list my own top values - Justice, Compassion, Loyalty, Consideration for others, and Inquisitiveness.

Justice is my innate value, the albatross I hang around my neck given at birth under the Libra stars. This is a value that has gotten me into trouble and made me put myself at risks. It overlaps with Kin Lian’s ‘Courage’. Kin Lian talks of the courage to speak up and do the right things. I feel my ‘Justice’ is a bit deeper than ‘Courage’. It encompasses action to seek redress as well. In my younger days I once had my fortunes told. Over a table with fleeting smoke of burning joss-sticks, the wise one told me he saw some dark hatred in my heart and that’s what was pulling me down. I thought it was hogwash as I consider myself a dreamer, a harmless pacifist who love life, nature, people. In later years I realised that incidents of injustices, however far removed from me, pricked at my heart. It pained me much even though they have nothing to do with me. I believe that was the darkness the fortune teller saw. This ‘Justice” thing shape my thoughts and actions from important to mundane ordinary events. For example, I tend to buy stuff from poor looking vendors rather than a successful looking guy. In social events I avoid the crowd puller, you know the attention seeker or the power-endowed personality who has such magnetic pull that everyone wants some of the glitter to rub off on them. I tend to gyrate to those the crowd abandons, the down-trodden, the disadvantaged. the underdogs, the bullied, the dis-enfranchised. Guess I sucked at networking which I see as selling one’s soul to further one’s path towards financial freedom.

Compassion is more than empathy. It connotes action. One does not show care and concern by words alone, but act on it. I feel compassion is one defining value that sets humans apart from other animals. If a person has no compassion, he can’t qualify as a human being. This value was ingrained into me by the attitudes of my parents and our Buddhist heritage. We were once as poor as church mice, but I witnessed close up how my parents have never ever denied anyone who turned up asking for food. No matter how poor one is, there are always others in worse plight. I have always held the view money is not a sin. The desire to seek financial success is not a sin. It is what one does with the money that measures a man. Two shining examples are Keannu Reeves and Chow Yen Fatt.

Loyalty is something that is very old school. I sense the younger generation tends to downplay this. Loyalty can be in varied context – loyalty to family, friends, to ideals and principles, to relationships, employers, a cause, etc. All these loyalties have a conflict eventuality. Would you lie for a family member in a criminal case? Would you still work for the employer who sustains your livelihood if you discovered he was defrauding customers? Blind loyalty is a misplaced loyalty which unfortunately, is prevalent. The kind of loyalty I am referring to is loyalty to motherland. The state is amoral so there can be no value conflict eventuality. One has to be loyal to the motherland, there is no option. For me, I think this idea of loyalty is ingrained culturally since birth. As a tiny tot in a Chinese family growing up in Singapore, I was exposed to tales my parents told, or listening to chit chats of village folks. Chinese folklores are strongly grounded on themes of loyalty. And so I drank from the cup of brotherhood of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, or stories of General  Yuefei (岳飞), or Journey To The West.

Consideration for others. Again this is something I picked up young. No one sat down to give me a lesson on the ABCs of living in harmony with others. I think if one has consideration for others, it goes naturally, to an extension of appreciation for nature. As to consideration for nature, I give credit to my scout master for raising my awareness. Would you believe I once bought a house and unconsciously factored in one of the points was abundant parking spaces for my visitors. In the scheme of things, I bet consideration for others probably ranks last for most people's priorities. Yet this is the single value capable of bringing harmony in an overcrowded competitive society.

I call the 5th value Inquisitiveness. Others may call it Knowledge. Some may say curiosity kills the cat. Many have told me why I bother with this or that, it does not bring bread to the table. Indeed, other than skill sets necessary for employment, the vast world of knowledge has no application or benefits personally. Intellectual discourse is dead in Singapore, that's my perception. To each his own. I am not encouraging anyone to join the Dead Poets Society. Rather I am simply lamenting the disinterest or lack of curiosity to exercise the faculty to explore or question. Humanity progressed only because man have the innate curiosity over things they see and experience, and they exercise their God-given capacity to reason things out, something other animals cannot do. Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. If you understand this, you understand what I mean. If you don’t understand and don’t bother to find out what Socrates meant, then you are exactly what he was describing.

I come to Michael Han’s interesting post “How will you measure your life?”

Will you consider your time here on Earth is a success because you conducted yourself with ‘terminal values’ having quantifiable outcomes which you achieved admirably. You have 10 properties, several businesses which set your family up comfortably and you secured a good life and future for your children? Or will you consider yourself a success because you have lived a life true to the values you carried with you throughout your life?

I round off with a religious message.

Values are internal codes we live by. To guide us, God gave Mosses the Ten Commandments. In his time, Mosses re-codified to micro levels about 600 prohibitions and positive commands. King David encapsulated them into eleven commands in Psalm 15. Isaiah further summarized them to six (33:14-15); Micah bound them into three (6:8).

To make things absolutely easy for us, Habakkuk, one of the lesser prophets, condensed everything to one. He taught “The righteous shall live by faith” (2.4).

Whatever you do, live a righteous life, my friends. 

A parting shout out :

Plato said:
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
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