Values and Value

This post is not about the plural and singular forms of a noun. This is also not just about the two different meanings of a word. It is in fact about the two meanings taken together. This is the post I promised to write in my previous newsletters (Ed 13 and Ed 14, mentioned as Valueless values there). Yes, I am lazy. Thanks for the kind reminder.

Does the second meaning carry any first meaning?

In many recent conversations I have had with friends as part of my quack-counseling practice (all but one were male, JIC you wonder), this came up as a theme: Is there any value to the values I hold dear? Or are they just cul de sac (path with a dead end). No one said it in so many words, of course. It is my interpretation of various things they said, like “Why am I not being understood by…”, “Has everything I stood for gone waste…”, “I always thought I was doing the right thing for…” or variants thereof. And of course colored by my own experiences (in a big way).

I spent more time thinking on this (with a little help from my 0430 hours alter ego) and the following questions emerged:

• Do values have a value?
• Should values have a value?
• Is holding values actually a selfish act?
• If you are holding this values thing expecting some value, are you really living up to those values?
• How about enlightened souls who held values? Say, Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Ramana, JK etc. (with whatever we know of them after hundreds or thousands of years)? Versus us normal folks?
• For us normal folks, who decides what the value is?
• How is the value of the values measured?
• What is the success criteria to hold certain values?
• Under what conditions should a person change their values (or pivot, if you will)?

At first level (and probably after several hours of diving deeper — remember, every concept in the world is circular¹), the answers are simple: Values are not supposed to create any value. They exist as a compass to guide your actions come what may. If you hold values to extract value, you are not really holding those values. Or you are holding them in a perverse way. Etc.

But if you want to get into the messy middle and see why many of us who are not enlightened beings that don’t hold values without expecting any value (or outright jerks, who don’t even think about all these) struggle with this, read on.

Before you do, digest this quote: Values do not exist as a sort of aura surrounding things in the world itself; values comes from valuing. It comes from the fact that people, and perhaps agents other than people, seek some things and avoid others. Without valuers, there are no values. (from here).

Still from the movie “Baba” where the man in the left of the screen (Delhi Ganesh) bathes 4 times a day, prays 8 times a day etc. but laments that God decided to provide boons to the man in the center (Rajinikanth), who does none of those. What point holding those values to bathe/pray regularly?

Examples

I will give a few examples here where it appeared as values having no value:

1. A parent holding the value of treating children respectfully, maintaining that balance between indulgence and dictatorship etc. Every decision they make is intentional (or so the parent thinks) and the child’s point of view considered etc. It should be one well-formed adult that should come out of such parenting, no? However, after several years, the child turns out to be middling in many areas including hard and soft skills. And the parent is accused by the child of not guiding them well. More discipline was needed; or more indulgence was needed etc. In spite of the parent never having compared the child with other children, the child now compares the parent with other parents and complains about how they should have acted like their friend/neighbor/relative. In the parent’s mind though, this friend/neighbor/relative was someone who did not treat their children well or bothered enough about their long-term well-being. The parent now feels that the values they held around parenting and treating children did not produce any value
2. A man holding the value of treating his wife respectfully, maintaining the post-modern value of leaving decisions that impact the wife more to her (whether they should have a child/another child; whether she should continue to work before/after child etc.), being mindful of her preferences (her love languages, if you will) and accommodating them in their life etc. They should have a blissful married life, no? However, the wife finds his behavior annoying and without saying it in so many words, would in fact like to be dominated by a man. She finds his decision to leave the final say on some matters to her frustrating. In casual conversations, she mentions about her friend/her husband often and how the husband may starve the wife of some pleasure in the short-term (say, a vacation, a new smartphone etc.) but compensates for it by doing things in style when he does provide. In the husband’s mind though, this other husband was someone who was selfish, did not treat his wife well, and the occasional splurge as well is with some selfish motive. The husband now feels that the values he held around marriage/treating-wife etc. did not produce any value. (I said all my friends were male — so I don’t really have a wife perspective here. I assume you can connect the dots in reverse and see it from the wife’s perspective also)
3. A son/brother/nephew/cousin behaving in a loving, respectful, and generous way with his family. He makes it his priority to be the provider to many/all of them, without assuming the powers that are usually accorded to the primary providers in traditional families (like: better conveniences at home, priority for deliverance of food, better quality of coffee etc.). They don’t even need an acknowledgment that they are the primary providers. However, after a few years, he is questioned/criticized like everyone else in his peer group (siblings, cousins etc.) with respect to how well he provides, what more he could have done, how someone else did better, and so on. As far as he could tell, no one else in his peer group followed his values. In particular, this comes up when there is this expectation of how this person should behave with different family members. i.e. each family member thinking they should be the most important in that man’s scheme of things in life. You may expect this to play out between in-laws (i.e. mother/father-in-law versus daughter/son-in-law) but there is more to it. It happens even between cousins/uncles etc. At some stage, this man is suddenly lower in status (in terms of how loving/respectful/generous/unassuming they were) to others who had no such values. Due to recency effects or so, due to this expectation of behavior with family members, another sibling/cousin gains status though he/she may not have any of the values. Our man now wonders if all his values were worth it — He could have been selfish/disrespectful/assumed powers accorded to the primary providers and made sure everyone understood that; it would have made no difference to the result. If anything, it may have created a sense of fear and he might be in a better state, apart from having enjoyed the fruits of selfishness and the powers earlier. Instead of complaining about his behavior, people would actually compete to get his attention as the lead of the pack.
4. A friend behaving with other friends in an unselfish way, being compassionate, going out of the way to help, and what not. This plays in a similar way to what we said about family members so I will spare you the specifics. Instead of family members, it is the various friends involved in the game. Some suddenly favoring another friend; some suddenly turning indifferent (even without another common friend involved) etc. The friend (our protagonist) feels all his values about friendship were useless. Though he did not display those values expecting a return or with selfish motives, and did them because they were the right things to do, the nagging thought/feeling of the opportunity costs that were incurred with it could have been avoided doesn’t die.
5. Another variant of this friend thing is between managers and their team members — It works either ways. A manager feeling his values did not help them do any better with respect to how they are perceived; As well as a team member feeling his values like loyalty to manager/company were useless because the manager/company did not reciprocate etc. Unless the relationship between the manager and team member has gone deep, (or if this is a case of a different personality defect in the person masquerading as these “values” — which I have noticed in most instances) this is relatively easy to let go of and modify one’s values.
6. A person being good to the society’s greater good: Not indulging in cheating behavior in social interactions; Paying taxes regularly without evading any amount even if the chances of getting caught are low to nil; Parking properly only in areas designated for it; Always going to the end of the queue when joining it; Sticking to lane while driving; Not disturbing others even in cases where it is not illegal to disturb; etc. Basically, follow the rules both in letter and spirit. Though the values also come from a sense of fear in some cases (may get caught if I park in no-parking zone), the person tries to do the right thing always even if the probability of getting caught is low/nil. However, after several years of doing this, the person finds that people who don’t bother about these lead better lives and are more satisfied with themselves — They are even proud about their skills to somehow get ahead in the queue by elbowing others, their knack to avoid taxes, their charm in managing to walk into an ICU even if it means creating risk for all patients there, and so on. More than anything, for very innocent and unintentional mistakes, this person actually ends up paying more in fines and taxes than others. Things come to a boil one day when he is caught for a wrong U-Turn (on a low-traffic day) because a new “No U-turn” board has been put up at a traffic junction in an almost invisible way. This U-turn of his caused no inconvenience/danger to anyone whatsoever but the policeman actually demands a fine for that, mostly because he needs to complete his target of fines collected for the month! Our man wonders if all the ‘be a good citizen’ was worth it.
7. While #6 was about societal stuff at a macro-level (with people you don’t know personally), it also extends as general behavior in micro-social level too, with people you know. This includes values like: Not taking credit from others; Not boasting about oneself; Being considerate; Being punctual; Being thoughtful — in terms of remembering birthdays, buying gifts etc; Being frugal with family finances; Being truthful to spouse (in things like a drinking/smoking habit or even larger taboos); and so on. In all such cases, the person holding such a value wonders time to time if those values produced any value at all. People who don’t have those values don’t seem to lose anything. In contrast, they seem to do better. For example: the marital life of someone who hides his smoking habit from his wife seems more at peace ceteris paribus.

If you analyze these examples above, the big contention that the values-holders seem to have turn out as follows:

• I expected the values to produce a certain value but it is not producing it
• Or worse, my values are producing negative value
• May be I got the value by sticking to these values but even others without my values got the same value
• So did it matter if I held those values or not? What is the opportunity cost of my holding to those values? I could’ve done something else more fruitful.

When I asked people on why they were holding the values, the first level response seem to be one of “it gives me satisfaction”; “It is after all the right thing to do” etc. But as I dig deeper, it moves to one of status/some other benefit. The value people expected seem to come in multiple forms: in monetary terms; in status terms; or simply in warm-feelings terms. People get annoyed if none of them are satisfied. Not even warm-feelings remain.

Why is this happening?

My armchair analysis reveals the following reasons why this happens:

• People hold values of a different era. The expectation of what a child should do to his/her parents and vice versa stems from this. Remember our child rearing has evolved from being farm-children to domestic-children to now pet-children. At a societal level, the general outrage people have about past generations and particularly people who we otherwise venerate comes from this same issue. Calling Gandhi a racist, Washington a slave owner etc. fall under this bucket. The statements are indeed true but then we should understand that they were operating in a different era.
• The purported beneficiaries of you displaying your values have other motivations. Their objective is not to make you feel valued for your values. If there is someone else who may not have your values but provides them with some other value, they may choose them over you. They just want to maximize their value. You may call it selfish but that is not fair judgment. Your expectation was wrong.
• The values expected in you by others is different at different times. You may have started at a time when your values aligned with the value that others received. But life marches forward for everyone. And they started to expect different things. Just because they seemed to positively react to something you did doesn’t mean they should do that forever. You may call it hypocritical, opportunistic etc. but that is not fair judgment. Your expectation was wrong

The way out of this

Short answer: There is none. But doing a periodic review of one’s values answering a few questions in the process might help. Find answer a generic question: How complicit were you in creating this situation? Go deep into the values you claim to hold and see if others benefitted from it? Or should you pivot? Think about: When you know you are holding a value, may be you don’t hold that value really. You only hold the value of holding such a value. If after this exercise, if your ego still wants you to hold that value (may be even in a good way; remember ego is not always bad), do continue to hold them.

Always (try to) do the right thing. But keep asking if the thing you are doing is the right thing for everyone. Ad infinitum in a recursion? No. All I’m saying is — Keep looking for biases, and if complicit self-serving is involved, pivot.

You may like to read

• What preferences do you want
• Desires, Morality, Self Interest (audio)
• How to choose the right right thing to do

1. Everything and its opposite converge at their extremes — remind me to write a post on this man