People of Honor
Long before George Martin invented the Starks whose game is thrones, two words became my motto though I was a child then, “Duty and Honor”. I do not know exactly why – the word combination just occurred to me and stayed. Probably I had read a lot of books with noble heroes and officer traditions of the male part of my family had their part to play.
But that is not the point here. The point here is why honor and a sense duty are so necessary for the country that wants to live, survive and prosper having won respect of the world.
So. Honor is absolutely not the same thing as reputation. Because reputation is an external category that depends on the opinion of the people or societies we are interested in. And honor, first and foremost, is a category closely connected with a person’s self-identification in the society, self-respect, and self-esteem. For any particular man or woman or for a group of people, the boundary between honor and dishonor goes along the line of fulfilling or not fulfilling one’s duty (in terms of the assumed obligations) and abiding to or breaking one’s absolute moral imperatives. In the cultures that permitted suicide, simple and terrible solutions made it possible to wipe out disgrace. Other ideological and religious systems tried – not very successfully – to make the humanity follow the difficult and painful road of making amends for foul deeds or to remove the opposition of “honor-dishonor”. Post-Modernism preferred non-duality that is why nothing is shameful, nothing is villainous today because “a person must be understood” and because there are “circumstances”. And also because “nobody owes anybody anything”.
That is why a modern officer can break out of encirclement leaving his soldiers to their fate.
But real non-duality is good for those who have taken the path of enlightenment. It is inevitably oversimplified at the mundane level. And it may mean an officer who leaves his encircled soldiers to their fate just because “he has children to raise”. A pyramid investment schemer or an unscrupulous developer who “want to live in style”. An alimony dodger who “just doesn’t have enough money for the two families” and a killer doctor who “was just improperly taught by the medical school and is underpaid”. Because if nothing is black and if nothing is white it is no use striving to see the light. There is no officers’ honor and no merchants’ honor.
Hence, for a human being’s and a society’s earthly life it is necessary to have not abstract “bonds” that are so easy to fiddle with/profit from but the sayings of Confucius suitable for practical application. The philosopher differentiated noble deeds of noble people and, correspondingly, mean deeds of mean people.
· The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.
· The noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting.
· The noble-minded are all-encompassing, not stuck in doctrines. Little people are stuck in doctrines.
· It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.
· The nobler sort of man emphasizes the good qualities in others, and does not accentuate the bad. The inferior does.
· A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.
· Etc.
And the most important thing getting back to the theme of “Duty and Honor”: “The noble man puts fairness first. If the noble man is brave without fairness, he will be rebellious. If the inferior man is brave without fairness, he will become an outlaw.” A state of rebels and outlaws cannot be stable. It means that the governing elite should at least be made up of noble people taught and ready to do their duty to their people. Also, they should have a uniform, farsighted and clear understanding what this duty is about.
… I do not know whether there will be at least a quarter of this kind of people among those who have power in this country (it would be weird to expect more in the Kali Yuga age). But I am positive that the meanness of the “elites” can be compensated for by our people’s moral virtues. And this is the only hope for today.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1378472-lyudi-chesti
Tags: Psychology