Today we went somewhere uncomfortable, a place from which the students wanted to back away from. Let me retrace our steps and perhaps you will feel the same as they and I did.

Values

We all agreed that we had values, such as love, friendship, honesty, freedom, equality. In addition to this one student who was very honest said that money was one of his values. Why is money a value? The answer is that those with money have power. They can buy what they want and have much more freedom to choose what they do with their lives. All of us value money and have it as a value (if we are honest).

Inconsistency

So why then do we not keep to our values? For example if honesty is one of our values, why do we lie? If love and friendship is one of our values why do we hurt our friends? This is a very hard and personal question. To help the discussion I gave an example. Why do we lie? One student answered “Self preservation.” That hit the nail on the head. So we have values that we hold to but there is one overwhelming value, so that if there is a conflict one over rides the other. We lie, steal, cheat and hurt to protect or advance our self. So our ultimate value is our self, how something or someone impacts our lives. If it suits us then we keep our values of honesty, love, friendship etc. But if it will cost us too much or if it will advance our cause then we will break these values. So far we agreed with this with some hesitation.

Selfish

The conclusion is that every single person is selfish. We are driven by our own interest. This is a pretty tough place to go. The students didn’t like that conclusion so we backed off and discussed a lighter issue, where do we get our values from. Apparently we get them from Shane’s mum.

Thanks

I would like at this point to commend the students because there are not many people who are willing to explore really important issues like our values. Thanks guys.