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Keep Your Values to Yourself

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by Jason Roth

I just read this news story, reported by Agence France Presse yesterday:

Anti-nuclear protester killed by waste train

Here are two excerpts:

"The 21-year-old man, who had chained himself to the railway near the city of Nancy, lost a leg after he was crushed by the train and died despite receiving emergency treatment at the scene...

"A spokesman from French nuclear energy firm COGEMA, which manages La Hague nuclear plant said the incident was 'a tragedy' and that officials organising the convoy had been 'extremely shocked'.

The word "tragedy" wasn't the first word that came to my mind upon reading this story. Actually, a smile appeared on my face before any particular words came to mind. Then a few minutes later, I had to chastise myself for smiling about a 21-year-old getting his legs torn off and bleeding to death.

Yes, it's a tragedy that someone's science-phobic, anti-progress philosophy led to his own death. But this guy endangered the lives of everyone in the train. People like he have no qualms putting other people's lives in danger for their own causes. Whether it's animal rights lunatics who burglarize testing labs, or environmentalists who bomb SUV dealerships, or Islamists who murder civilians, or voters who choose to outlaw gay marriage, what they all have in common is the willingness to sacrifice other people's lives for the sake of their values.

What happened to "live and let live"? Everyone seems to agree with this proverb, but too many people are content to make their own exceptions. There are times when I feel like making exceptions. But once you make your own "exception", that is, once you decide that your ends are more important than your means, you've thereby changed the nature of your ends. This goes for political causes as well as personal ones. The exception becomes the rule.

I bet if you look at people like anti-nuclear protesters or anti-gay marriage advocates, you'll find people whose values aren't self-sustaining. They've probably found that their values don't work in their own lives, so they need to force the values on others to help themselves live the charade. Seeing someone else living by different values is a threat to their own.

This reminds me of my own contempt in high school for girls we used to call "japs". Most people know that "jap" stands for "Jewish American Princess", but we used it to describe any seemingly pretentious girl with a lot of jewelry and too much makeup. The mere sight of these girls made my blood boil. I couldn't stand their pretentiousness and stupidity, and most importantly, the fact that they seemed to be happy. The exact qualities that I despised seemed not to affect their ability to be happy, or, mind-boggling to me, they were even the cause of their happiness. Their idiocy seemed to be making them happy. This pissed me off to no end.

My contempt for the "happy idiot" outlasted high school and is still with me to some degree even now, fourteen years later. So I understand why people have contempt for seeing antithetical values exhibited by others. What I do differently now, though, is try to focus more on myself. If someone else seems to be succeeding despite having values that "shouldn't be working", I try to do three things:

1. See if there's anything I can learn from them, despite whether they have qualities I dislike.

2. Remember that the apparent success of their values is irrelevant to the fact that I need to identify my own values for myself and implement them in my own life.

3. Acknowledge that people's superficial appearances or first impressions can contradict (in my eyes) their true character.

1. Life is so complicated that it's easily possible that some moron who is a complete putz in 95% of his life has somehow managed to find something that works. Maybe it's taken me some time to learn to detach one positive quality from an otherwise annoying person and consider it on its own. It's called the art of abstraction, and it certainly is a worthy skill to have. And it's just as much an emotional skill as it is an intellectual one. You need to calm the fuck down, isolate a particular attribute or action, and whether or not you think the person is an asshole, make your evaluation as to whether it is positive or negative. If you can do that, you're pretty cool in my book.

2. There's no point in getting frustrated by the sight of someone who seems "successful" with bad values. I could argue that bad values will necessarily lead to a bad outcome, but that's not my point. The point is that focusing your attention on the result of values only helps you so much. For example, someone you respect can provide inspiration, but they can't achieve values for you. Similarly, the sight of OJ Simpson enjoying himself on the golf course cannot destroy your values. The fact that one person may achieve a gain by immoral means does not change the fact that there are certain principles that can help you achieve values. Occasionally, assholes get lucky.

3. Let's say you just meet someone. It's fine to start evaluating the person with the given evidence, but it's important to remember that what people choose to present in a social situation, or what the circumstances allow them to present, are not necessarily representative of what really matters about a person. This reminds me of when I run around the track at my gym. If there's someone running in front of me, I will undoubtedly try to catch up to the person and try to pass them. But for all I know, this person could be recovering from a major operation, for Christ's sake, or could be in the middle of running their tenth mile. It also reminds me of people who base their arguments in favor or against politicians on one particular sentence the politician uttered or one narrow action taken. Politicians are perfect examples of people who have many contradictory aspects of their character, and of the need to judge the fundamentals and judge them in context.

It's amazing how complicated we can make things for ourselves. I wish people would care as much about the importance of values in their own lives as they do in other people's lives. But this has already all been said before:

Clean up your own backyard
Oh don't you hand me none of your lines
Clean up your own backyard
You tend to your business, I'll tend to mine

Elvis knew what he was talking about.

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