VALUES

WHAT ARE VALUES?

What makes you to visit a sick friend in the hospital rather than stay at home alone watching television? Is it friendship? Care for others? Your fear of what your friend will think of you, if you don’t visit him or her. You sense of duty? Or, something else?

What makes you give away of your money to a poor man, the money you had set aside to go for a movie? Is it charity? Your concern for others? To get a good name? To please somebody? Or something else?

What makes you work very hard at your studies and aim at high ranks? Is it to please your parents? To become popular among your peers? To gain respect and recognition? Is it to get a good job and makes lots of money and live comfortable life? Or something?

What makes you do these things? The answer to what makes you do something, especially when you ar free to do other things, often reveals your values.
We may label values using words like love, service, obedience, duty, friendship, freedom, punctuality, patriotism and so on.

Your values will reflect your personal attitudes and judgments, your decision, and choices, your behavior and relationships. They influence your thoughts, feelings and actions. Values are central to your personality and will affect you almost in every aspect of your lift. For example, if you value honesty, you will tend to be honest always. You probably will not tell lies to get off the hook, you will not cheat in an examination, you will not shop-life, and you will return to the owner, if you found a purse full of money I the campus.

If you value knowledge, you will study hard, read a lot, watch informative television programmes, visit museums, go to listen to talks by learned men and women and so on.

People, particularly young people, are not clearly aware of their values, and how their values affect all aspects of their life. The problem becomes all the more acute today because of the prevailing value confusion among young people caused by a variety of factors like: the breakdown of traditional values without proper replacements, lack of adequate role models or influential role models counter-witnessing to acceptable values, conflicting ideologies and double standards practiced by adults in positions of power and influence.

Values are central in our lives. Hence, it is important that we take time to reflect to them, to identify and clarify them, to question, evaluate, confirm or change them, to live happy, productive and worthwhile lives.

CHAINING YOUR VALUES

Our values and priorities may change from time to time, as life situations change. But, how does change of values come about? We can think of two steps through which values changes take place breakdown of old values and buildup of new values.

In the past few decades, social scientists and psychologists have learnt much about value breakdown and how that can be affected. Brainwashing techniques were successfully utilized in destroying personal values in the concentration camps and on political prisoners in totalitarian regimes. It has also been established that people already possess. However, it has been found that neither brainwashing techniques nor advertising can be effectively used building up new values.

It is clear that so far no one has yet deviced a technique to create new values in you. You have to do it yourself. For example, if patriotism is your most important value, someone may be able to breakdown this value so that it may not be any more your primary value. But nobody can force on you security as your primary value in its stead. That decision depends entirely on you.

Values changes take place usually very slowly, through various life experiences, through the influence of people you live and associate with, the books you read, the things you see and so on. Your close friends have a significant influence on your values and value system; Often friends have common interests and similar values.

(selected article from ABAC's Ethics Text Book)