Loyalty is a strange concept, especially if you look at it in terms of priorities and conflicts. There is loyalty to your country, your family, your spouse, your kids, your siblings, your job, your profession, your religion, your ethnicity, your party, your principles, your faith (different from religion), your school, your team….I’m probably leaving out several important ones.
And these can all come into conflict with each other. Hard to see how they don’t conflict constantly. Few people will prioritize in advance, and those who do will often find themselves revising when a serious conflict arises.
I’m loyal to one of my old martial arts teachers. He was a major leader in our organization when we first started, but in recent years, there’s been whispering campaigns against him, personally, by some newer members of the organization. I know it’s all bullshit, because I was there and watched this guy build a world-renowned community for a rather obscure martial art, at great personal effort and expense, which the people who came later never quite understood or appreciated. They saw a working system, and thought it would be easy to do it themselves.
Politically, he and I are on the losing side of this, but I still refuse to go along with the new bullshit.
I’m pretty loyal to a lot of people, though. Sometimes to my own detriment. But I’m super loyal to my Aunt, my grandparents, and many friends.
I don’t even know how to describe it, it feels like being someone’s champion. Putting on armor and riding into battle. I’d take a lot of hurt for them. It’s not arbitrary. They earned my loyalty.
There are people that receive “the benefit of the doubt.” I’ll assume they are acting honorably, until I have strong evidence otherwise. But “loyalty” has negative connotations for me — it’s something gangsters and dictators ask for.
I don’t have loyalty to a government or a piece of land, but that said, I would take up arms to defend the USA against most military attacks, just from pragmatism. Most attacking countries would be bigger assholes than mine, and I wouldn’t enjoy having my assets seized, being forced to adopt a new language, or having myself/friends getting assaulted by the invaders.
I do have loyalty toward a couple sports teams, but that doesn’t amount to much at all. Just some casual tribalism that I’ll abandon if there’s a reason.
I am totally loyal to my brother and my SiL who are fantastic people. Our love bond is unbreakable and eternal. I am loyal to my job. My attendance and punctuality is impeccable, and I work hard to do what I do as well as humanly possible.
My wife, my kids, my cat, in that order. I stayed loyal to my kids, even when they weren’t speaking to me (my divorce, etc.). They eventually came around. I remained loyal to my middle son throughout his drug/alcohol problems through the years. Loyalty to others is something that has to be earned, and at this point there are none deserving of it.
Is there a difference here between degrees of loyalty? Your generic, run-of-the-mill loyalty vs blind/absolute loyalty vs outright zealotry?
I’d like to think I’m loyal to my partner, my cat, my friends, etc. I’d certainly never do anything to deliberately betray or hurt or deceive them.
But, say, if my partner or I unexpectedly became total assholes, or simply changed a lot over time, I’d like to think first of all that we’d try our best to figure it out (and probably could), but if that failed, I’d want and expect her to move on. I don’t think any person (or animal for that matter) should be stuck in a situation that causes them long-term suffering out of blind, ritualistic devotion that they agreed to under completely different circumstances. Oaths that don’t account for this sort of possibility and change — whether to a partner or to a country — should be considered invalid, IMO. In other words, if they betray you first, are you still bound by loyalty?
I also have a lot of loyalty and affection for my cat. But if, say, he caught some new strain of rabies or got a brain tumor that made him uncontrollably aggressive… I don’t think I’d consider him the same cat anymore or be bound to keep treating him the same way just on account of “loyalty”.
My country… well… 'nuff said there.
So, is loyalty is a best-effort thing given reasonable circumstances, or is it more blind and unwavering devotion regardless of circumstance?
I don’t feel unconditional loyalty towards any person, so personal loyalty always, for me, has some level of conditionality (?) in it. There is a hierarchy there, the person who has the fewest conditions to my loyalty is my husband, second would probably be my sister, then a friend or two. After that, everyone is pretty nearly the same.
I have strong loyalty to certain concepts, such as accuracy in facts, a strong ethical code, and not being a jerk. I am, as anyone can attest, not perfect in my loyalty to these concepts, but they are always out there in front of me. As Robert Browning might have written if he were alive today: A person’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a concept of an ideal for?
Same here. We’ll always have 2019, and I’m old enough for it to last the rest of my life. My highest loyalty is to my wife, then our kids. I have no room for blind loyalty, though. There’s too much of it going around these days.
I think this comes closest to my sense of loyalty. I cannot be blindly loyal to a person, there has to be some give and take there. I’m too much of a cynic when it comes to people
If I’m loyal to anything it’s to the Democratic concept, to the ideal of equality in the world. It’s getting kicked black and blue right now though.
I’m loyal to my animals and my husband in that I will do everything in my power to see that they don’t suffer needlessly.
At school, we got a newspaper once a week, on Sundays (boarding school). Most people interested in soccer followed the top league.
But my friend and I, in a form of anarchism, supported this one team from a small town named Gweru. They were forever drifting around low second league, mid to top third league. Never made it near the first league.