Is it true or false that establishing an effective value system will pave the way for the development of your integrity?
This makes it smack of artifice, which is not necessarily apt.
Can we define “system” very, very loosely?
If so, then it is:
True.
But what I mean by that could be made more clear. An illustration is indicated.
Example of “value system”
- One goes through life finding and valuing good in experience.
- This “good” is of all kinds. “Moral good,” sure - catch as catch can! However, good of use, good of advantage, good of pleasure or enjoyment or satisfaction, or anything otherwise found and known desirable swings and weighs heavy in the mix. We rate and weigh these different types differently.
this is Values. - As one goes, one notes values are not all of equal weight or charge. We rank and order them by importance.
- This is hardly an operation that requires thought. It is stimulus and observation of variegated response. Thought can be put in, too, on top.
these are Priorities. - As one goes, one notes which things tend:
- …to create, enable, support, protect found good.
- When the thing is an action, these acts are called “right.”
- Where the thing is a condition or element or other factor present, we merely regard them as propitious. Perhaps each a good in its own right! Yeah! (We trust ourselves to prioritize)
- …to risk, harm, diminish, destroy found good.
- When the thing is an action, these acts are called “WRONG.”
- Where it is a condition, element, factor present, we mark them as hazards or similar. Watch out. Or: oppose! Root out! Circumvent! Such WRONG CONDITIONS may find themselves at RISK of HARM, DIMINISHMENT & DESTRUCTION when we spot them! RIGHT-ON!
For it is not destruction, but what is destroyed that makes for telling right from wrong. And in these stakes, it is all about the good. Which good, too - and how much we know it’s all worth. - Our inchoate attempts to apply these sensed (or imparted via rote to-do/to-don’t lists) guidance and decision aids prove probably laughably bad. We have to gain in moral judgment by ownership of and examination of consequence. Outcomes, traced back down causality to our part, for inspection, identification of fault (if any), rectification, and reason back up to reconciliation throughout the system in tipoffs, hints and self-allegations of implications to ramify. Reason back up from rectified flaw spotting all parts that flaw touched. Popping out misfit modules, clicking in upgrades - reasoning out from each such point to where that flaw touched. It’s not work, unless you call artwork work. It is recreation. Re-creation. Remaking, and it’s good of use and pleasure to boot.
For while truth never conflicts with truth (a thing cannot be both truth and untrue in the same time, place and sense), goods can be in competition. Goods may conflict. In the event, to choose one good precludes or may preclude others. Moral judgment gains in aim, grasp of values and priorities deepens and strengthens, as we drink in the cleansing and effervescent ever-flowing beverage of our consequence of being.
Advantage ours: the more we take in, take on, take apart and own. Consequence of all acts, inaction, decision, indecision, speech. All consequence, whether unintended or deliberate, whether foreseen, unforeseen, unforeseeable. In taking on and owning it all, we grow into and know our own part all the harder, sharper, brighter and softer! What was once unforeseeable glints to foreseen, and we deliberately avert course, change our aim to glide by without setting off a chain, chain, chain of woe. Aimed intent lengthens by kilometers and contracts at need to pinpoints. Dang-on.
this is conscience. It is nothing but the faculty of judgment exercised in the moral dimension. - And all throughout we have a rollicking ride of nature - human, ours - to contend with. So we amplify and civilize, go wilder as we grow wiser, all by turns, each by our own lights:
- We feed and strengthen the drives that do us right, and they become more prominent, sure and acute. Instinct drives forward into intuition as the sensory end of the driveshaft swells, and grows rational and irrational antennae.
- We starve and neglect the drives that do us wrong. We do not OPPOSE THEM. All resistant, denial-based energy we pour down them strengthens them. They GROW.
- No. We pour that energy down better, chosen and aimed channels and the drives that do us wrong atrophy and shrink. They never go away or die. They revert, birdlike and featherless to naked hatchlings high up a nest, whose cheeping and peeping are powerless as velleity. You almost wince in compassion, hearing/feeling that lil’ pipsqueak plaint to do yourself bad! But you smile and laugh. It’s only you, and you’ve wisely grown so weak in such ways, they shan’t ever fly.
this is integrity.
Integrity (our stated aim, here, though there’s tons other good to pick up on the way) is merely self-consistency. As one wag put it, “Honor is two things only: 1, know thyself. 2, never betray that.” Integrity’s just honor with the fancy dress off, and perhaps a stick or two removed from its sweet ass.
But integrity’s coherence depends how deep down it goes. Ideally rooted sure in a coherence core of well-known full-grown deeply-held values & priorities, whose radiant penumbra and emanation brighten right in view, and throw shade on wrong.
Merely as an example.
You can see how a system like that would make it a piece of cake to develop, and even ramify, elaborate and elucidate integrity. A piece of cakewalk - and don’t mind the icing on those roughshod high-gloss spit-shined steel-toed sh!tkicker workboots you’ve grown into, at some well-missed point during all this dance!
You know.
I must cop to being a bit foolish, here. At first you spoke of system, and I was like “SYSTEM! PAH! IT DON’T TAKE ALL THAT! It flows in natural nested dovetailing of splendidly-dependent and radiant parts in sensible, even reasonable relation! It just happens.
Yes, well, so it does. But as I teased it out up there in steps…that thing IS a system.
Well, so is one’s heart plus all attendant vessels.
And so is one’s brain, plus all attendant nerves.
So yes.
A system like those two is essential. BOTH are needed. And a system like I laid out exemplar-style, as an example - that’s simply the natural outgrowth of those two, fed at need or want by eyes, ears, skin, tongue and…the other one. Nose. And it unfolds into place in a process of progress untamed and undesigned, mostly, with a bit of constant-gardener action throughout, in thoughtful pruning here and there as the whole thing - it does not tame, no - it trains.
The system trains itself, and you with it. And you grow yourself, with system well-schooled and unruly in your train.
So yeah. The answer is:
True.
There is a considerable profusion and embarrassment of other systems available.
“Try mine!” I pointedly do not say.
“Use your judgment not mine,” I say.
The system I outline is rightly called a consciention (or “consciension”) system. It’s purposeful aim: to do all that is right and necessary to the case, case-by-case, catch-as-catch can. Naturally spotting wrongs is a given, pfft. Avoid or oppose or destroy those, they are neither right nor necessary.
There is also the flip-pole of conscientious: scrupulous. Here the emphasis is on BAM. STOP. EYES WISE for bad and wrong, and DON’T.
Neither way is more childish. Either way serves. Each ways top aim trails the other’s bottom in its wake, and is not necessarily neglectful of it, it’s just not the focus.
The system you find or make to embrace suits your strengths and weaknesses to a “T,” ideally: to feed grow and train the former to better and farther aim. To stunt and whup and disdain the latter like the mutt-mongrel inobedient domestically and hunter-gatherly USELESS nondogs they are, only perhaps gentle it up a bit.
To find what suits is the key to unlocking all your coping, thriving and defense mechanisms (most of them taken off the shelf at Culture Nurture Mart) and disassemble, upgrade and weaponize them - preferably in a nonviolent way, but you get the idea. Hard, horrible world betimes we’ve got to stride with feet or roll upon, fly or set sail over with device. It takes strong kung fu to walk this world without armor and armament.
Well, you’ve got some in you. Integrity is its mastery.
Mastery is effortless aim to whatever end’s desired, in one’s chosen field.
Let yours be life.
Morality is any concern in right and wrong, to tell between in order to further right or oppose wrong.
Morality’s deepest, highest aim has always been self-control. For it’s always been we, each individually, who have to find, cobble, design or practice to discipline (rising towards mastery) such aids and guidance.
Self-control doesn’t work on others.
Self-control is made in two main parts: self-restraint, and self-aim.
Some do it all one way. Some do it all the other. Most rock an interesting mix.
I am an original, unscrupulous but highly conscientious unprincipled moralist.
A value system is one way to get to integrity intact! There are probably others I haven’t properly noticed or known. These things are clearest on the inward glance, if you care to look. Another’s is harder to judge.
Cheers.
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