The impact of your values!

Submitted by Swatcat on October 4, 2025
Your values become your actions, and your actions become your circumstances!!

You really notice this when you travel! It’s easy to see that some people value the least in their society, more than others. That, to me, is the hallmark of an evolved civilisation.

This could be how a society treats its women, its labourers, its old, its physically and mentally challenged.

So, ultimately, a land ends up reflecting the values of the people who live there. Overall.

Loving your neighbour as yourself, or your countrymen, doesn’t come easily. It has to be embedded in your values or it will ultimately lead to a deteriorating society.

Random thoughts, people.

9 Comments
+3
Level 51
Oct 4, 2025
I would travel but I cant cuz I'm broke
+2
Level 78
Oct 4, 2025
I hope you get to, in the future. One way that I’ve experienced some of the magic of travel, when I couldn’t actually trave, is through books. A poem talks of that.
+2
Level ∞
Oct 4, 2025
One thing to consider is that there are competing theories for how to help the extremely disadvantaged.

1) A hands-off approach that provides services but doesn't enforce rules. Drug use is decriminalized. People with severe mental illness are allowed to live on the streets, use drugs, and even commit crimes if they wish to do so.

2) A strict approach in which people are institutionalized against their will.

If you go to California (or Seattle), you might see people with untreated mental illness and substance abuse disorder. That is a choice made by voters that ultimately comes from a place of empathy. In fact, California spends more on the homeless and drug addicted than anywhere else in the world.

Unfortunately, mere empathy isn't enough to solve problems. There are other reasons a society might deteriorate besides lack of empathy.

+1
Level 75
Oct 5, 2025
Fortunately there are countries who try to find more balanced solutions than these only two.

Here in France, the hands-off way tends to be generalized on the territoires BUT drugs use is criminalized. This doesn't give perfect results with drug traffics getting more and more powerful and organized, but the effort to include the people with mental illnesses is also a reality that gives positive and encouraging.

I hope this "balance" way will keep giving long terms results.

The answer is always between the extremes.

+1
Level ∞
Oct 5, 2025
Ultimately you have to decide whether to let the severely addicted and mentally ill make their own choices. Or not.

I think France (like most places in the developed world) chooses not.

+1
Level 47
Oct 5, 2025
The law is important but I always said this: The enforcement is even more important as well as punishing those who abuse the system.
+1
Level 78
Oct 5, 2025
I agree. Genuinely progressive values include creating boundaries for law, order and structure, consequences for crimes and harmful habits, vision and wisdom, not just empathy.
+2
Level ∞
Oct 6, 2025
I wouldn't call those values progressive. Progressivism is defined as moving forward. So I would say those values are regressive, moving back to a former ideal state.

At least in the context of the modern, developed countries.

+2
Level 78
Oct 6, 2025
That’s why I called them ‘genuinely progressive values’. It does not necessarily mean liberal values. I do strongly believe in boundaries, structure and clear consequences, as well as a network of people that can help the ones on the fringes.

This starts off with values that people have, who they vote for, what they consider to be boundaries and what they will not put up with! And the values that the powers-that-be abide by!

Sometimes, first world problems, sound like nothing, compared to the issues that third world countries face. However the principles are similar.