What Matters Most?

What matters most? This question sent me into a period of introspection that can best be described as the inner ramblings of a madman. It’s so simple a question, yet it’s so hard to do its answer justice because we live in a society that “answers” it for us. I think a short story might best illustrate this. Imagine a teenager, let’s call him Dan. Dan is applying to college.  He’s trying to answer a prompt that has plagued students for years. “What matters most?” Dan’s stumped. He’s never before been asked this question in such broad terms. He starts to think. Nothing. He thinks really hard. “What does everyone else say is important?” They, he decides, will tell him what matters. “Who am I to decide? It’s much bigger than I.” Dan writes his paper. The conclusion of this story isn’t that he got accepted, but rather, it’s that twenty years later, Dan is confronted with the question again. This time, he’s voting for the next U.S. president. He had always been a member of his political party, without really understanding why. “My parents were,” he supposes. He votes for his party member. “What matters to him matters to me.” His vote helps secure a victory. Within a year, martial law is declared, and U.S. democracy is effectively dissolved.

This is an extreme example, but often, examples like this are the best way to illustrate a point. Dan never realized that what matters is the ability to individually decide what matters. He left his responsibility to determine personal values up to “society,” failing to realize that nobody could pinch hit for his reason. Ironically, the society that taught Dan “what matters,” paid the price. When we can’t define objective values, we leave ourselves open to a whimsical interpretation of value based on whatever we are “supposed” to believe. These values can never be upheld, because they’ve never been rationally justified. Around the world the results can be seen: Religious radicals who claim that killing is evil, yet are willing to take a life should someone disagree with them; Politicians who preach family value, yet cheat on their spouses; Rioters who demand "equality," but who are willing to violate the rights of others by burning private property, or, in Dan’s case, a vote for a president that would one day destroy freedom. It would be simple to believe in the virtue of honesty just because society tells me it’s good, but I would be doing what Dan did: accepting society’s standard as a given. It is not a given, and because I considered the alternatives, I can value honesty for what it truly means. By the end of my struggle, I’d come up with this conclusion: in the world today, we’re so tightly handcuffed by tradition that we’ve forgotten the thought process that defined it; as rational humans, we can’t let this happen. We need to remember that it is our ability to create our own values that matters most.

 - L.C.