Values

One of my favorite sandboxes is the sandbox of Values. I like to play with ideas about what Values are, how people get them and what they really do for people. I like to try out new Values and go around and share them with people and see how they react. Then, I throw the made up Values away and see if anyone notices.

People are nuts about Values. Some more than others. I think I may get a third of all my insights about bad Value formation from one guy I know. He's a friend of mine, if by friend you mean person you care about, as opposed to person you want to spend more than 5 minutes a day with. I will call him Guy.

Guy is the poster child for Worn Values. His Values are all put on. Not consciously and one at a time as a game the way I described doing above, but unconsciously and all of them. Every last one of his Values is put on and he doesn't know it.

I've realized this at least since 1997. That was the year I grew my current beard. Guy reacted to my beard-growing by telling me that 1) beards show an unhealthy desire to withdraw from human company by wearing a kind of hairy mask, and 2) men who wear beards are unattractive to women, and 3) it's wrong to wear beards, and 4) "Damn it, Wes, shave that thing off!"


As for 1), Guy lives alone and at that time hadn't had a visitor in 10 years. As for 2) Guy told me about the same time that he'd had an affair with one woman in his life that lasted 2 years, long before. And that at that time he hadn't had a visitor for 10 years. If that wasn't enough to convince me that his beard Value was just put on, he disposed of 3) by growing a beard of his own a few years later, once he'd got use to mine. And of course he has no memory now of ever having said 4). Having put on a new beard-Value, to the effect that beards are OK, Guy now says he could never have said anything like that.

Which tells you what's wrong with unconsciously put on Values. If you put them on playfully you're in control. You don't identify with the Value. Guy thinks he IS the Values he has. But they aren't his.

All the best Values are organic. Invented Values like ideologies usually result in disasters when they're adopted wholesale. Guy's Values aren't ideological Values, they're organic, and I appreciate that. But they aren't organic to him. They're organic to his parents and their parents and masses of other unconscious human agar.


I like to be around people whose Values are as organic to themselves as their own skins. When they identify themselves with their Values, it means something.