Fealty

Today, another thought struck me: fealty... feverish fervour for foolishness?

While it is an obvious alliteration, the ideas that come from its utterence is something that I have been pondering about for quite a while. ``Fealty'', to the uninitiated, is the idea of loyalty or faithfulness, while ``feverish fervour'' refers to the concept of being in a state of near blind support, without the inkling of doubt whatsoever. And ``foolishness'' of course refers to this entire concept as being something that is not really meaningful nor particularly rational by most counts.

So why the sudden alliterative mood? I was thinking a little about some of the things that I had been through, and it seems to me that many of the problems that I face consists of the problems with fealty, or rather, the idea of divided fealty---conflicting sources of loyalty that interplay with each other and tear the individual asunder with the issues on which choices are considered the most correct given the circumstances. Let's take some non-politically sensitive example to illustrate this point: suppose I like a particular peson, yet I still have some remnant emotions from the last relationship that didn't just go away. Is it considered being unloyal to my feelings to accept the new person?

Or for a more politically charged version, if you are working for a company, do you entrust your entire working ability towards getting your job done, or do you be loyal to your own beliefs and ensure that you do things in a more ``sustainable'' manner, at the cost of some supposed lost efficiency?

These are hard questions to answer, and it seems that many of the problems I face in life fall roughly into this category. I have been brought up from a young age to be mindful of the global optimum case---thinking from the perspective of the greater good, which may, at times, mean that one sacrifices the self to advance society in general. Once upon a time, when someone asked me if I were willing to die if a thousand could live, I would have no hesitation.

Now I have second thoughts.

I'm not sure if this is related to the development of my misanthropic tendencies from having realised that many people in the world are just plain dumb. From the principle of the greater good then, it casts a doubt as to whether one thousand supposedly dumb people are worth the sacrifice of one able-bodied person---I believe this is a question that has no simple answer. Thus, the fealty to the populace under such an extremist view seems to suggest that it is merely foolishness on the part of the person who is intending to make the sacrifice.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that we all work towards a completely anarchist perspective where everyone is selfish. What I'm saying is that the idea of fealty itself needs more justification from the logos perspective, and that it is not always to the benefit of the self (nor of society) that people have blind fealty. An obvious case is with the recent highlighting of the extremists; no one can deny their fealty to their cause, be it religious or philosophical. But everyone can clearly see that in pursuing their fervour, they have left large swathes of society in shambles, and that cannot be a good thing.

Anyway, I think I've mumbled enough about this for now. Till the next random thought.