"Face" and Honor

I don't like to judge a man by his motives because it is simply beyond me to look at what is truly in his heart. This sometimes makes it difficult to navigate the world because intentions, in many cases, are a better indicator than the action itself. At the same time, it is the mark of the immature to believe that intentions, even pure ones, can redeem irresponsible action or the often terrible results of such intentions. But I also believe what Tacitus said- that t know the character of any people, you have only to observe what they love. I guess the trick here is to divine what they really love as opposed to what they say they love.

I grow increasingly appalled the the liberal and left wing elemnt of our Country and their POWER-AT-ALL-COSTS agenda. The transgressions are either too numerous for me to name for you or they don't exist at all so I'll not bother to list them here. I only wish to make this broad unscientific generalization. While it is true that the Republican party and the Right wing portion of our Country has behaved in a similar fashion, and they, as a group, by no means shun power, it feels to me that the Right wing perhaps occassionally overzealously pursues a course of action in defense of an ideal whereas the Left seems to pursue power for its own sake. The actions may look the same but the intentions are very different. Why does this matter? Well, slapping a woman in this day and age is pretty unexcusable. But spanking her? That usually just leads to better things. That's why intentions matter.

Further generalizations: I think there is a very logical reason for this. Right wing people tend to be people of Faith. It takes a certain type of individual to place ethics- God-given or man-dervied- above his hown well being. Much of the problem with people in general is that they tend to view everyone around them as extras in their own little movie. To my mind, the act of maturing involves actively moving one's focus inward to outward. People are never good at judging their own actions in reference to tohers. The people who often speak the loudest in a movie theatre are often the first to complain if someone else does it. In martial arts, the novice never believes he is hitting as hard as he is yet is almost always convinced that his training partners mean to do him harm. Try to wait out exactly half and hour or measure exactly a foot with some empirical device and you'll see how an unbiased judgment call is impossible.

Faith and Religion counter this looseness with strict guidelines. For people who have no Faith, such as myself, we have a Code which for us is our Faith. These things tell us what to do when it would be so easy to justify an easier course of action. My dear friend OSO once said to me that without religion as a standard, people only have to live up to money and power. And that not a good thing. The Left is full of very smart people whose only goal is one they have set for temselves. Whose only standard is the achievement of that goal. Whose only Judgment blows in the direction of the prevailing wind.

I have friends on both sides of the political fence and I value all of their friendships and counsel dearly. But there is a key difference to the nature of their friendships. My left wing friends often try to shame me for disagreeing with them on a particular position. My Right wing friends, even if they disagree, would never do that but they would do me 10 times the shame if I dishonored my Code or my personal ethics. With one, I could lose face. With the other, I could lose the only thing that is really truly mine, my integrity.