Upholding values is a dangerous game

Value, n. - principles or standards of behaviour; one's judgement of what is important in life.

Values are extremely useful. They're shortcuts for how to live a good life. They range in size from small to great; from "brush your teeth twice a day", to "all men are created equal".

Values are also extremely dangerous. They can fall short of solving the real problem but give a false sense of security that the problem is solved.

Values are relied on because staying alive and happy is difficult, and a good set of them makes that easier. They uphold everything in human society - culture, social norms, ideologies, economics, law, morality, identity, and more. 

But should they? 

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Biologists don't usually ask if traits are universal - they instead ask which traits are evolutionarily beneficial. And some positive traits in one species can be detrimental to the next.

Take bravery, for instance; needed for lions or cheetahs, might get you killed as a rabbit. Individualism; great for spiders, bad for bees. Hard work; essential for beavers, taxing for crocodiles.

If there's any takeaways from biology, it's that traits are environment and survival strategy dependent. There is no trait that is universally appropriate for any environment. 

When environments change, the beneficial traits change as well. Millions of years ago, being a giant was a plus, and dinosaurs ruled the land. Now, they're all dead. 

The ever changing environment is the only constant, and it determines which traits come in vogue and which go out of style. 

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Values are just societal traits. 

When environmental factors are just right, values and the people that live by them thrive. In the business realm, an environment of rapidly growing industries rewards risk taking, initiative, and breaking off to do your own thing. But when industries reach late-stage maturity, the abundance of incumbents and hyper optimized players and the scarcity of untapped innovation punishes entrepreneurship and those daring enough to attempt it. 

Similarly, going to college in the 70s and 80s was a universally good strategy. But the changing environment - shrinking economic opportunity, stronger global competition, rise in tuition costs, and divergence of degree and working requirements - has turned the universally good strategy into a trap for millions of students.

The value of upholding values used to be a universally good strategy too. Before the 20th century, change was incremental, resistance to change abundant, and innovation was rare; as a result, the world didn't change much and values could be safely passed down from one generation to the next. 

However, today the world changes extremely quickly. The window of relevancy for values used to be decades or centuries long; now, it's in years - and if you miss the boat, you drown in the ocean. 

A popular sentiment when I was growing up was to study law; many parents saw their lawyer classmates find wild success and wanted that for their kids. Unfortunately, the right time to become a lawyer was the parent's generation; the generation after ended up in a hyper competitive, saturated field with little prospects. The environment changed, too quickly, leaving the kids of principled and well-meaning'd parents embittered.  

Today, those that uphold values need to realize that it is a dangerous game. The environment is much too volatile for values to be anything more than a coin flip. And those that rely on and chase after values also need to realize the danger of it as well. 

The danger is three-fold. First, you delude yourself into thinking that the value is helping you, when it is not. Second, you close yourself to helpful things that the value demands you to eschew. And third, you may, through zeal, see only the value instead of the environment and the signs of the times. 

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But for how dangerous values are, they're actually needed even more than before. The world is exponentially more complex, and values help you navigate the complex world.

But they should no longer hold the sacred position they once held. They should no longer be blindly followed like the adages from the old and wise, reason mysterious but effect profound. Instead, values need to be contextualized in the environment. 

Modern wisdom is not in passing down values, but passing down the environment/value pair. It is not a set of proverbs, but the art of reading the times. 

A proverb adhered to is wisdom; a proverb strictly adhered to is ruin.