CULTURE, INTEGRITY, AND QUESTIONING AUTHORITY

If you want to have your strongest and most positive impact on your culture, the way to do it is to live with integrity – meaning that you know your principles, and you live by them and speak from them.

There are solitary creatures like pandas and bumblebees; there are social animals like wolves and wildebeests; but we are the only living creatures on earth who have culture. Culture is created when your knowledge, wisdom, and innovations can be transmitted and have an impact over time and space, beyond your immediate influence.

With culture, when a problem is solved by one person, it has the possibility of being solved forever, and throughout the entire culture; which means that the culture can change in significant ways over time. While our human nature has not fundamentally changed over the millennia, our human culture has.

A culture contains and expresses the qualities that are common to groups of people living and working together; it is the capacity that we as human beings have to engage one another in creating a more complex and more advantageous way of life.

And our human culture has developed differently in different places, and within different groups of people. (Even the prehistoric culture of the San Bushmen that I wrote about in The San People of the Kalahari have a different culture than they did many years ago, incorporating bits of metal in their tool making, for example.)

If a culture values integrity and trust, the people within that culture are supported and encouraged by that culture to behave with integrity, and in ways that engender trust. If a culture values violence and irrationality, the people within that culture are supported and encouraged to be violent and irrational.

In America, we often talk about how our culture is going to hell in a handbasket. This is not a new development; I would venture to say this sentiment is one of the defining features of our culture.

Look at the 50’s and how disturbed many people were with the likes of Elvis Presley, or the Roaring Twenties with the flappers. Go back further and read Mark Twain or HL Menken; or Herman Melville, or Alexis de Tocqueville, and you will find profound and grand critiques and concerns for America’s culture.

I believe that this is actually an expression of a degree of self-consciousness and self-examination that flows from a society that values individualism and independent thought – rather than one whose values and identity are imposed from the top down – from a monarch or dictator or powerful leader or central authority.

We look to actively change and improve our culture in America, and that involves defining what’s wrong, and what we would have different; and in America, we all engage in this noble pursuit.

That said, there is much to be legitimately concerned about today in terms of our American culture; but   I want to distinguish between style and principle. The Metal music that my kids like to listen to is a matter of style. Whether pot is legal or whether marriage is considered to be between a man and a woman are, in terms of how they are generally discussed, a matter of style – meaning that one person may like any of these, another may not, but they both could share the same general guiding principles.

Those guiding cultural principles are much more important.

Does an individual have a right to own his own life, or does the collective or the majority or Rousseau’s "general will" hold a higher value? Is commerce considered a noble or a base undertaking? Are all men created equal, or are some legally superior to others based upon birth or endowed privilege?

Do we as a country, and as a culture, have the right to defend ourselves from threats to our nation and to our culture? Do we each, as individuals, have the right to our personal security, our property, and do we have the right to defend our person and property?

Is what we earn our own? Or does it belong to the state first? Does the law of the land limit the scope of government, or the scope of our individual liberty? Do we desire a culture based upon individual liberty and personal responsibility? Or do we prefer a culture that is based on coercion and entitlement in the name of some greater good?

These are cultural principles. It is these principles that are at war today, much as they were during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, or FDR’s, and to one degree or another ever since the European principles of progressivism/socialism/fascism began their ascent over a hundred years ago. But the conflict is palpable and inescapable today.

This war has been played out in violently dramatic fashion at the capitals of Michigan and Wisconsin, where Union thugs and leftist activists sought to use violence and intimidation to overthrow the legislation that served to weaken those union’s coercive power. In each case, men and women of principle stood their ground and prevailed.

This war is being shamelessly promoted by a media whose members and culture have chosen to firmly advocate for the leftist end of this cultural conflict.

This conflict has escalated not because people are not willing to work together, reaching across the aisle to compromise on legislation to "move this country forward;" this conflict has escalated because the cultural differences between America’s founding principles and the principles of the progressive movement are antithetical – they are opposites; they contradict one another. This conflict cannot be resolved through compromise.

This escalation of our cultural conflict makes it very difficult to sit on the sidelines and avoid engaging in the conflict. To live with integrity is to know what your principles are, and to actively live by those principles. To act and speak from your principles is the most effective way to impact the culture in which you live.

When you are at a dinner party, and everybody seems to be in agreement that the government should take more of what certain people earn, and should continue to expand entitlements for an ever larger percentage of the population, and such a stance is in conflict with your deeply held principles, what impact do you have on the culture if you say nothing? What impact do you have if you become irate and begin calling people names?

I would venture to say that the answer would be either no impact in the former, or a negative impact in the latter.

What about if you expressed your beliefs in terms of style – claiming that today’s music is bad, or getting caught up in the minutiae of personal preferences, or specific legislation regarding drugs or contraceptives or which politician is more caring? I think you’d find yourself frustratingly tangled in the weeds of political talking points.

In contrast, what impact would you have if you expressed your beliefs in the form of fundamental principles? I think you might find that you have a much deeper impact than you would expect – because such argument is actually pretty rare, and I have found that not many people on the left – and too many on the right – have much grasp of them.

When you understand the principles of individual liberty, of self-ownership, of self-government, and of the hugely benevolent win/win dynamic of the free market – as opposed to the win/lose mechanism of crony capitalist fascism – you are on much more solid ground. Understanding such fundamental principles gives you a moral compass that allows you to integrate deeper values, and to speak from a more grounded, deeply rooted position.

This kind of integrity with your principles can be a very powerful and positive influence on our culture.

In What You Say and Do Really Matters, I wrote about Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiments. I won’t describe those in detail (you can refer to the linked column for that) but the important finding that I described was that when people witnessed a person defying authority, they were dramatically more likely to defy that authority themselves.

One person acting with integrity to his or her deeply held principles can have a huge impact on the culture – a much greater impact than scores of people going along with the status quo.

If you want to preserve and expand America’s culture of freedom, if you want to steer this conflict toward personal responsibility and limited government, know your principles, study our founding documents and history, read Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises – read Mark Skousen’s Economics on Trial for a good overview of the different schools, particularly that of John Maynard Keynes, who’s theory is what the left is counting on to make things work.

Understand your fundamental principles, and why you hold them; and then live and speak from those principles. Your integrity will make a difference; it is how we can improve our culture at the roots on up. America is unique in that it is a country founded on clearly stated, powerful, and deeply good and true principles. These principles, and the political foundation they bequeathed to from those principles, are what make America unique; what has enabled her to alter the culture of the entire world for the better.

The more we understand these principles, the more we actively and assertively live and act from these principles, the stronger the chances are that our culture of freedom will endure and grow.

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What do you want to make happen in your life this year? What habits do you need to establish in order to be more effective and happy in your life? How will you go about learning those habits, and creating your best life?

I asked this question last week; this week I’d like to open that question up to include loved ones for whom you would like to offer support.

Changing habits is simple but not easy. There are strategies that are effective, and ways of thinking about your situation that are empowering. One of the main elements of making positive changes in your life is to have an ally, a guide, a coach.

Over the next year, do you want to help someone you love to make some significant positive moves toward this vision? Let’s arrange a free phone call and see if working together would be what they (or you) need to get going on these dreams and goals. There is absolutely no obligation; the worst that can happen is that we have a nice talk. E-mail me at [email protected], or call at (831) 464-3374.

Ps: my rates will be going up a bit in January, but you can lock in a block of time now at this year’s lower rates.

I have been honored to have been entrusted with this task many times over the years. Here’s what a couple of folks have said about it (more here):

"A few months ago, my 8 year-old son started experiencing OCD like symptoms.  As a mother, I felt so helpless seeing my son in this condition, which was affecting his whole life, and soon after we were referred to Dr. Joel.  From our first session, my son and I immediately felt comfortable with Joel.  He is an excellent, compassionate listener and has an unique ability to feel into the state of the child and meet him/her there.  Dr. Joel approached my son with respect and did not speak "down" to him just because he’s a kid. 

Instead, Joel quickly made obvious to my son that he was someone with whom he could open up to and trust.  With an easy-going manner, Dr. Joel suggested "missions" for my son to do each week that would help with his condition. Thanks to Joel’s suggestions, slowly but surely, the OCD-like behavior began to wane until now, seven months later, it is completely gone. Dr. Joel has helped us beyond measure and I highly recommend working with him!"

"Dr. Joel Wade was able to pin point our daughter’s greatest personal challenge: her lack of mindfulness.  He then helped her understand how important it is that she master this personal challenge.  Identifying and working on overcoming the obstacles to success is one of the most valuable things that effective coaching can do.  As she is succeeding now we can recognize the influence Joel has had. "