The Hierarchy of Loyalties and Ethics

Guest Article by Edgar Lores

"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Plato

Part I - The Making of a Model

Genesis

On a midmorning at the turn of the century, I sat down to examine my life using that indispensable tool of quantitative and qualitative analysis known as Microsoft Excel.   I must have been between projects, and so I started tabulating how I spent my daily hours.  This table is a summary:

CONSTRUCT	PRIORITY	TIME	PERCENT	COMMENT
Family	1	14	8.33
God	2	2	1.19	Contemplation, meditation
Self	3	71	42.26	Ablutions, meals, sleep (56 hours)
Work	4	55	32.74	Includes commute time
Pastimes	5	26	15.48	TV, reading, surfing
TOTALS		168	100.00

Let me explain the columns:

• Construct. This is a classification of the main entities or activities I spent my time on.
• Priority. The relative importance I gave to each construct.  Note that 1 and not 5 - I wish! - is the highest priority.
• Time. In hours.  The total of 168 hours is the number of hours in a week.
• Percent.  The ratio of the hours spent on a construct in relation to the weekly total.
• Comment. An explanation of the activities within a construct. 

The details of the spreadsheet contained more than what is shown.  For each construct, it included (a) what you get, (b) what you give, (c) the dominant feeling, and (d) whether change was possible.  For example, the entries for Family were respectively: Love, Subsistence, Love and Impossible.  For God:  Meaning, Devotion, Reverence and Must!

What is interesting about the exercise are the Notes to Self embedded in the spreadsheet, to wit:

1. Might add constructs of community and country.

2. If Sleep takes 33% and Work another 33%, only a third can be devoted to the others.

3. Work represents a full 49% - make that 50% - of waking hours if you include ablutions and meals.

4. The time spent on the higher priority constructs are incredibly the lowest!

The Development of a Hierarchy

In mid-2012, after clearing the Bush in the front and backyards of a property acquired for retirement, I started commenting on blog-sites and in news and social media.  Yes, I started hoisting my thoughts on an unsuspecting world, leaking into cyberspace the peculiar views of a heretofore closet iconoclast.  In August 2012, Joe Am published "The Foundations of Patriotism" and in a discussion between the distinction of sacrificial patriotism and pride-based patriotism, I listed, based on my spreadsheet, the constructs to which the ordinary man pays loyalty:

1. God

2. Country / Church

3. Community

4. Family

5. Self

After some discussion and inputs from the members of the Society, the list was finalized as:

1. God

2. World (Suggested by commenter Jim-e.)

3. Country (The separation and sequence of Church and State was suggested by Joe Am.)

4. Church

5. Community

6. Family

7. Self

This is the base model that comprises what we call the "Hierarchy of Man's Loyalties".  That's a mouthful so I will shorten it to the "Hierarchy of Loyalties".  Since August, I have involuntarily thought about the importance of the model in explaining the behavior of man in terms of his relationships with himself and the other constructs.  Why involuntarily?  Well, the universe creates birds that have no recourse but to sing (or, if you wish, Forms arise from and fall back into the ocean of the Unmanifest).  In a psychological and even philosophical sense, the model may be as useful as Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" in understanding that most rampant of earthly species called Homo Sapiens.  If you will, all the actions of our days arise from Maslow's needs but they are driven in intensity by feelings of loyalty, whether that loyalty is to an idea or to an entity.  It may be said that the loyalty we display is the measure of our need.

The base model is what I refer to as the Psychological Sustenance Hierarchy (PSSH - pronounced "shoo", with a silent P, like the sound to drive away wayward children and animals).  It is a "base" model because, unlike Maslow's, the Hierarchy is dynamic and not static as we shall see.  Basically the Hierarchy is comprised of real and ideational artifacts created by men to sustain his psychological and spiritual being.  The artifacts are bounded by man-made rules - naturellement - and are composed of men with the exception of the God construct, although some men are wont to think they are Him.  The ideational constructs have actual representations in the physical world and - who knows? - perhaps even in the spiritual world.

I have extended the model downwards to include what I call the Physical Sustenance Hierarchy (PHSH - pronounced "push" like the word to invoke babies).  These are non-human constructs that also command, to varying degrees, man's loyalty.  Like the top Hierarchy, they also sustain his psychological well-being but more importantly they nourish his physical being.  A quick glance will show that the elements are arranged in a descending level of order that is reflective of that inexplicable attribute called consciousness:

1. Pets

2. Animals

3. Plants

4. Minerals

5. Planet Earth

6. Solar System

7. Physical Universe

I am developing a paper that attempts to explain the model as a whole as well as to describe each element and their interrelationships.  What has caught my attention is that the model may be a useful tool to view, if not to resolve, questions of ethics.  This notion has been with me for some time, but its significance grew on me as I tried to understand my reaction to the controversy over Carlos Celdran.  But before we go into that, let me make some observations about the base model.

Some Observations on the Psychological Hierarchy

I will not fully explain all the observations I make.  These will be in the paper, so I will just give examples, to some but not to all, as we go along.  Just enough to give you an idea of where I am going.

One, the PSSH can be seen as concentric circles, with the Self as the innermost ring and God as the outermost ring.  

• Except for the Self, each ring is a parent that encompasses child rings.
• Thus Family encompasses Self, and Community encompasses Family and Self.

Two, the model is dynamic.  It is Expandable, Collapsible and Substitutable. 

• Expandable.  A man may have more constructs than the base model.  He may belong to a social club like the Rotary Club, and this construct would normally be positioned between Family and Community.  He may also have a mistress, and she, too, would be positioned (no pun intended) between Family and Community.

• Collapsible.  A man may have less constructs than the base model.  He may be an orphan and not have a family and moreover - poor soul! - he may not belong to a church.

• Substitutable.  Within a construct, a man may direct his loyalty to a substitute or replacement.  A man may change his country and the ex-mistress (God forbid!) may replace the wife.

Three, the constructs have in common certain inherent characteristics like Integrity, Identity, Viability and Substantiality.  They also have common acquired characteristics like Growth, Persistency, Changeability, Mobility and Porousness.  Some examples:

• Integrity refers to the quality of oneness or wholeness.  A man is himself and no other.  A country may be an island, an archipelago or a continent.

• Identity refers to the name of a construct.  A man may be called Jose; a church St Mary's Cathedral or Mormonism; a nation Japan.

• Viability refers to the ability to grow and develop normally.  A baby has biological viability.  A church with plausible doctrines has institutional viability.  A nation with resources has economic viability.

• Substantiality refers to the nature of a construct.  Some constructs are natural, that is occurring in nature, and others are unnatural or artificial. 

• The first three constructs - Self, Family and Community - may be said to be natural.   I have included Community because fish and birds do organize themselves into communities.
• The middle two constructs - Church and Country - are artificial and man-made. 
• The last two constructs - World and God - are ideational and the last is super-natural.  By World we refer less to the planet Earth and more to the different major classifications of mankind:  East and West; First, Second and Third Worlds; the Two Kinds of People; and the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (kidding!).  

• Growth is an extension of Viability and refers to the ability to extend in the dimension of space.  A man physically grows from a baby to an adult, and a country in terms of additional territory, or even infrastructure and economic development.

• Persistency is another extension of viability and refers to the ability to extend in the dimension of time.  A man also grows in age from a baby to an old man.  A man has a short persistency compared to that of a country.  A country may have a shorter persistency than a church.

•  Porousness refers to the quality whereby the composition of a parent construct is fluid with respect to its child constructs. The composition of a community, church or country may increase by addition, with members being born or moving in; or may decrease by deletion, with members moving out or dying.

Four, the interaction of the constructs in terms of loyalty can be characterized by Direction, Intensity and Reciprocity.

• Generally, the Direction of the feeling of loyalty is by choice, but while volitional it may also be circumstantial.  A man's loyalty to a church may be strong and true but his particular attachment may arise as an accident of birth.

Five, there is a "natural" Direction, or a bias of loyalty, which is reflected in the sequence of the list.  

• The natural bias seems to be that the Intensity of a man's loyalty is directly proportional to the proximity of the object construct.  What construct is closest to Self?  Why, his own self!  Thus a man's highest loyalty is to himself, followed closely by that to his family.  I call this the Natural Upward Bias (NUB), in contrast to the Natural Downward Bias (NDB) of the Physical Hierarchy.

• The NUB starts at Self and ends at God.  The progression is from something physically real to something ethereally nebulous.  Moreover, the progression is also from selfullness (or selfishness) to selflessness.

And six, I cannot resist pointing out a neat symmetry: the first construct, God, corresponds to the last construct in the Physical Hierarchy, the Physical Universe.

I will not discuss the Physical Hierarchy (PHSH).  My thoughts are still very much with the PSSH.  But just as a glimpse, some of the related concerns in the bottom half of the model would be:

• Should we eat Ben, our pet pig?
• How do we humanely treat animals that we use for food?
• Should we all be vegetarians?
• Are we taking enough care of our planet to sustain future generations?
• What is the protocol for visiting extraterrestrials?

In Part 2, we will discuss how the Hierarchy provides a new way of looking at the world.

Psychological Sustenance Hierarchy

  

Heirarchy of Loyalties