How Principled Are Your Principles?

16 Oct
2018

Posted by Evolve College News

Do we realise the full effect of what we choose?

We all have a set of principles, or standards we live by. Have you ever paused to consider how steady or representative yours are? In other words, what is it that you represent in the way that you live? 

Our principles or our standards are what we determine are our bottom line, or our baseline of what we represent and live to in life. We may like to think we live to standards that represent the truth and benefit all, but is that really the case?

It is especially interesting to see what we do with our so-called standards or principles when we face adversity. For instance, if someone tells lies about you, or is aggressive towards you, do you simply hold steady in who you are knowing that lies cannot touch you if you do so, or do you cower or change who you are in order to make the “adversity” go away? Although we may not like to admit it, a great majority of us no doubt do the latter.  

Every time we compromise in this manner, it shows that our standards are not actually what we thought they were. In fact, they are lower. For our real standards are the baseline we will not drop below, no matter what. So what is that baseline for us all?

What we allow, or what we will compromise in the face of, has an effect on us. In effect, what it does is it says, I will allow this level of what is not true; I will morph and change in the face of things that are coming at me because I do not like to be attacked; I will put my head down and not cause waves if I feel people are watching because I would prefer to hide…. Et cetera, et cetera. If we are really, really honest, we would have to admit we do this. 

Every time we do this, it lessens us. It means that we are dishonouring something we know to be a truth or a standard, inside. We push that aside in order to avoid conflict or “trouble” of some description. And if you think about the magnitude of that occurring daily on a worldwide scale, it is very large indeed. 

The point is that this has an effect not only on us, but on everyone. 

For the fact is, we are all members of an overall, larger society – the group that is humanity as a whole. Together, the principles we stand by, are the principles our whole society is based on. It is we who set that as our collective baseline. Hence we may like to think that dropping our standards doesn’t matter and that we can just let things slide by, but each time we do so – our contribution to the greater whole is exactly that: our contribution feeds back out into that whole that it doesn’t matter if we drop our standards and in fact our standards can be malleable to suit the situation. 

All of that gives rise to the things we don’t like in life. All around us we see standards compromised every day, across multiple systems and in collectives worldwide. We see it in what we call corruption, at a very large scale. We see it in the way people treat each other, on a small, micro scale. 

While we may give the excuse that we cannot individually change the world (which is correct), that is not the whole truth and leaves out a massive part of the equation for us. The fact is, we can most certainly choose to take more responsibility ourselves. And each of us adds together to make up the whole – and therefore all those individual choices, that we all make, actually do amount to something; in fact they amount to what we collectively share and experience – as the baseline standards we will accept. 

So – we could say we are not responsible for changing the whole world single-handedly and that would be correct, but in another sense we actually are, because our decision to be true, or not, is our contribution back out into the whole that we all get to live in. We each make a choice as to the standards we will live by – and that collectively becomes our societal standard. 

Just what is it that is our contribution?