Loyalty
A dissection of the word used to title this timely piece, using a concise contextual transition from a chaotic past, to the ambivalent present, and hopefully all leading towards a progressive future.
Ton
7/13/20233 min read
I believe I can list down at least a couple of often-used L-words in modern day speech and literature. But from my own personal observations, not a lot of them can elicit thoughts of 6 other L-words the way the word "loyalty" can. Here are those 6 words presented in pairs:
Lord and Land
The universal value of loyalty can be traced back throughout the history of human civilization. Empires, kingdoms and dynasties had all been built on the concept of warriors and even common folk who fought for their lord, often in pursuit of more land or in defense of whatever land they already held.
The world had been very different then. Ideas were not employed as often as loyalty was as the primary means of survival, which is yet again another universal concept that I believe adequately supplies context for my next pair of L-words.
Lawlessness and Laziness
At a time when laws had been generally written by those who proved victorious in battle, loyalty to the king or ruler who commanded the most men wielding the greatest number of swords and guns determined a person's very survival. It did not matter if the ruler was benevolent or tyrannical. The default equation was genius in its simplicity of choice - "Bend the knee. Swear allegiance. Or die."
In modern times, and sometimes even in the most sophisticated halls of the corporate world, survival would sometimes call for an often undetected but nonetheless-harmful form of laziness, the kind that defines loyalty by years of service, never mind that more emphasis had been assigned into the years, rather than on the quality of the service itself. "Bend the knee. Swear allegiance." had effectively been re-worded into "Don't think. Don't question. Keep your head down. Just do as you're told, even if there's a far better way." The old equation seems to persist, as though everyone had resigned themselves to living in a land of tyrants and gangsters, where blades and guns seem to cement loyalty as a perennially adequate substitute for lawfulness, diligence and reason.
Lack of imagination and Longevity
It is encouraging to hear stories where individuals are no longer measured by their job titles and wallet sizes nor by their associates, but rather by the work they do and how all of that contributes to genuine progress for the greatest number of people. But the reality is that all of us, without exception, are limited by our own mortality, our longevity. We can only do so much with whatever time we have been given. Money and all of its trappings actually have a lot less to do with our shelf lives, than time does.
Citing a metaphor, a frequent traveler may secure memberships in all airline loyalty programs promising maximum rewards for boarding their planes more frequently, but one can only get on just one aircraft at any given point in time, and unless the goal is to permanently reside in planes as the apex of one's life, trying to make the most of the rewards in all those programs is simply not sustainable. Some choices have to be made over other choices, especially if every airline is pretty much offering the same set of rewards as the others.
For any airline to expect loyalty from any traveler by insisting that the latter boards more of the former's aircraft is understandable only on the assumption that the airline has flights to all the places the traveler wishes to go to in his or her lifetime. But this is rarely the case, and the airlines know it. And so, with a little imagination, airlines will often attempt to seek new routes to cater to the ever-changing aspirations of actively traveling members, hoping to accomplish this way before the travelers become too old, too sick, too dependent, too senile to even get off the plane on their own.
Longevity recognizes the relativity inherent in the passage of time, while loyalty seems to fixate on the concept of "Stick with me. Acknowledge my irreplaceability." The former would more often stimulate imagination to make things genuinely better, while the latter would often stunt critical and strategic thought by defaulting to patting oneself on the back.
The hard truth is that longevity, and the limits associated with it, makes loyalty very expensive not only for the person expecting it, but also for the person expected to pledge it. And what makes it all very expensive is, plainly and simply, a dreadful lack of imagination.
Loyalty, while often mouthed because the word seems simple enough, actually has 7 sides to it. In my view, longevity should replace the word loyalty in many conversations.