There are many ways to live life. One approach is to follow your values during volatile times.
People who take this approach often take time to reflect and focus on their inner compass. They then make a conscious decision to follow certain values.
Sometimes they translate these into working towards a clear vision in their personal or professional life. They then do their best to achieve visible results.
Some people took this step after the shocks provided by elections in Europe and the USA. After a period of mourning, they mobilised themselves by focusing on their deepest values.
Some chose to follow caring values in a potentially uncaring world. They aimed to demonstrate caring in action by encouraging their loved ones and other people in their daily lives and work.
Different people follow their values in different ways during challenging times. This was exemplified by how different people behaved during the Covid crisis.
Some people chose to care for their neighbours, support medical staff, supply food banks and help others. Others chose to make a quick profit by selling faulty medical equipment, marketing fake cures or phishing.
Samual and Pearl Oliner have studied when people when demonstrate caring values in extremely challenging times. Their books include The Altruistic Personality and Do Unto Others.
The Altruistic Personality chronicles the activities of people who protected Jews during the Holocaust. Up to 500,000 non-Jews risked their own lives to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution.
These were ordinary people, say Pearl and Samuel. They were farmers, teachers, entrepreneurs, factory workers, rich and poor, parents and single people, Protestants and Catholics.
Different people helped the Jews in different ways. Some offered them shelter, some helped them escape from prison and some smuggled them out of the country.
The rescuers committed themselves to helping Jews, knowing that capture would mean death for their families. Why? Many said, “It was the right thing to do.” Individuals also said things like:
“I was always filled with love for everyone, for every creature, for things. I am fused into every object. For me everything is alive.”
“I sensed I had in front of me human beings that were hunted down like wild animals. This aroused a feeling of brotherhood and a desire to help.”
“We had to help these people in order to save them, not because they were Jews, but because they were persecuted human beings who needed help.”
Let’s return to the genesis of The Altruistic Personality. Samuel illustrates the moral of the book by describing his own experiences.
As a 12-year-old Jewish boy in Poland, he fled the Nazis after his parents were captured. Knocking on the door of a family he hardly knew, he was taken in by the mother, Balwina.
Protecting him from the Nazis, she gave her instructions. Change his name to Jusek; go to church every Sunday; learn the Catholic Catechism; get a job and ensure nobody saw him undressed.
Balwina protected him for a while, but then the situation became too dangerous. He trekked across the country with other refugees and finally found safety.
Samuel wrote another book on the theme of helping other people called Do Unto Others. In it he focuses on heroic, moral and philanthropic individuals who translated these values into action.
In addition to well-known names, he describes the activities of hidden heroines and heroes in many countries. Here is the introduction from the page on Amazon.
A passing motorist stops to help the passengers of a car that has crashed into an embankment. A hospice volunteer begins her shift in hospital ward caring for people with AIDS.
A Vietnam chopper pilot stops the brutal execution of innocent civilians at Mylai by American soldiers. A firefighter responds to a routine call. All of these people are considered heroes, but what motivates such brave and altruistic acts, whether by trained professionals or just ordinary people?
In Do Unto Others, Holocaust survivor and sociologist Samuel Oliner explores what gives an individual a sense of social responsibility, what leads to the development of care and compassion, and what it means to put the welfare of others ahead of one’s own.
Weaving together moving personal testimony and years of observation, Oliner makes sense of the factors that elicit altruistic behavior – exceptional acts by ordinary people in ordinary times.
Samuel discovered that many such people had learned optimism and concern for others from their parents, teachers, peer groups and communities. They then chose to translate this moral code into action in challenging circumstances.
Following Your Values In A VUCA World
During the past twenty years it has become a cliché to say that we live in a VUCA world. The term was coined in the 1990s to describe a world that had become increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Some people find such a world to be frightening. It creates opportunities for demagogues who promise simplistic solutions or who create scapegoats. Some people yearn for a return to what they believed was a more predictable world.
How to live in such a world? How to deal with challenging events in the midst of what sometimes appears to be chaos? As mentioned earlier, one way is to return to your deepest values. You can ask:
“What are the values that I believe are important in life? How can I follow these in my daily life and work? How can I translate these into action?
You can make these values the anchor for your life. These will help to prevent being tossed around by events like a cork on the ocean. When in doubt, you can return to these values. These can provide stability in your life.
Looking ahead, can you think of a specific situation where you may want to follow your values in a potentially volatile time? How can you follow these in your own way? What may happen as a result?
If you wish, try tackling the exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentences.
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