Meeting discussion on loyalty

I just got home from our Ideas Cafe discussion on loyalty.

Boy did we move all over the place tonight.  It seems that discussions about loyalty easily move to forms of government, various political events, and just about everything else.

We started off trying to figure out what loyalty is.

It can just be a matter of habit, staying with the familiar.  Then there is the allegiance to one of one's many social groups.

We discussed the reasons why there is loyalty to the monarchy when none of us wanted a monarch who obtained power through hereditary to rule over us. The consensus was that it is better to have a separate entity (the monarch) other than the head of the legislature (prime minister) to represent the country so that governments and prime ministers can change but people can be loyal to the country through the monarch which seldom changes.

We can also disagree with the government and prime minister and still be loyal to the country through the monarch.

Bruce refer to the movie "The King's speech" where King George lifted the spirits of the British citizens during war time with his speech.  This is in spite of his difficulty with delivering speeches and the speech was written by someone else for him.  He was acting as the mouth piece of the country and people need a person to connect this to rather than the more abstract concept of the country.

In this case, the people connect to King George much like they would connect to a movie actor or actress as it is human nature for us to connect to the person we interact with.  While there is a speech writer behind the king and a movie script writer behind the actor,  we attribute our emotional reaction to the person who delivered the speech or appear on the movie.

Mike mentioned that loyalty to the queen comes from the immersion experience of growing up with the queen in the news.  It is just part of life.

Mano said that there is something similar between loyalty and the concept of "natural" which we discussed a few weeks ago.  We thought then that "natural" is not a very well defined word but impart some warm feelings that can easily be used to manipulate our emotional responses.  Similarly, loyalty to a cause or group may be open to similar abuses.  Loyalty is a word we need to describe our emotional tendency to act a certain way but we also need to be careful when it is used as a reason to act.

If there are good reasons to do something, do we still need to invoke loyalty as a reason to act?  So when loyalty is used to motivate, it may suggest that the underlying reasoning is weak.

Shula suggested that it may have a parallel with love in that it may not logically be a good thing or beneficial to love someone but we can love regardless of logically good reasons.

When we are asked to support someone's cause because we know that person, are we being asked to suspend our own judgment and conform with the group because of group loyalty?

After the discussion,  it seemed to me that loyalty may be another one of those short cuts we take in decision making where we defer to someone that we either respect, had good previous experience with that we can trust, or is part of our upbringing and past experience that we automatically identify with.

Together with the obligations we feel for the social groups that we belong to, all these considerations predispose us to make decisions emotionally before we put the situation to proper information gathering and  logical analysis.

Very often, the short cut and emotional social ties carry us or lull us into not taking the logical steps.

At other times, the situation is too complex for our limited observation and analytical abilities.

Loyalty is definitely a topic that we can visit again.