What Beats Integrity?

Values tend to arrive with pre-agreed head nods.

Families have values. Religions, countries, schools, companies, teams are all different kinds of tribes, and have them too. After any amount of time is spent together in a group of people, you're deciding what you're all about. What way of being do we prefer?

Usually the chosen words sound easy to agree with upon first contact. Honest. Loyal. Brave. So who is raising their hand for cowardice, mediocrity, betrayal, all the mirror opposites of the good words? "We stand for mediocrity." Yeah, no.

Because the "bad" words are so obviously dislikeable, values are basically only interesting, ever, when they have to battle like Godzilla and Mothra, when two good fighters want very incompatible things.

Be honest, but also: kind. Be loyal, to the extreme if you can, but also make sure you always tell the truth. Move quickly, but know that we also don't reward the careless. Treat everyone equally, but use judgment.

Now the automatic head nod is getting a lot harder. Mothra is mad at Godzilla; they are no longer working together, and the city is getting wrecked.

Because neither kaiju (Godzilla, Mothra) is technically a villain, the fight is hard to call at the outset.

Be honest, but also: kind. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Until somebody wants to tell the truth and ALSO wants to protect a person who is having an absolutely terrible week, which will get a lot worse once that truth (which is also not really a huge deal, maybe?) is revealed.

On a wall, values are agreeable little words.^[1] Off the wall, in application, they can quickly start behaving like (very) competing instructions.

Set aside the idea of kaiju as the best metaphor for a minute and step into the tennis world. Sometimes the situation itself tilts the match, like a clay court. Honesty and kindness may both be good tennis players. But square them up on clay and suddenly kindness has a significant edge. Kindness was born on clay, it seems.

What happens after the fight? Who does the group defend and which rule bends? What mistakes are moved to the background and which follow someone around for a year, for their entire time in that tribe?

Who is "direct," and who is "difficult?"^[2]

Rooms and groups just move on, after sorting the winners and losers, and everyone remembers at least a little. But even if one word may have won, on clay, now we're on grass, and then we're on a hard court.

Kindness beating honesty 6-0, 6-1 doesn't prove anything really about honesty. Which is why groups lurch into and rediscover the same arguments. We may like kindness, but now it's stepping onto grass and that's where honesty spent all its life practicing. See, the opposing force rarely if ever disappears from the scene because even losing the match, it still holds onto something we all know to be true at least a little.

Everyone's logging the day-by-day outcomes of the Value Wars. Stuff happens, and the matchup odds shift. You start to intuit when “be direct” is likely to dominate “be kind,” and under what exact circumstances the reverse is more likely to be the winner.

Someone's actions are defended (whole thing forgotten by Friday). Logged. Someone else really should have known better (whatever happened is now in their biography). Logged.

All the while, those values on the wall update their win/loss record.

And losing reveals as much as the wins.

Honesty keeps beating kindness. Okay then, honesty; that's what matters here. But every honesty victory also tells you what the group was willing to give up: little bits of kindness, someone's feelings, loyalty to xyz idea. Logged. But whatever Mothra wanted doesn't vanish when Godzilla gets the win.

A set of values is partly a sacrifice schedule, a log of exactly which good things this particular group is willing to lose for the others to win.^[3]

The problem is that tribes scale up and down from two people out to who knows how big? Earth? I see planetary tribes in our future.

On the lower end of the tribe size spectrum, win/loss records work because people are in the room and are logging what happened (the exception, the defense of someone) in high fidelity. But when the tribe is big, or growing bigger, every new member has to make calls without having watched the previous fifty matches. They know Honest and Kind, but they don't yet know enough that Kind usually wins on clay and Honest owns the grass.

So, we write the values down and try to take a whole history of judgment and turn it into something we can transfer into other brains. Three words on a wall or a manifesto book with marginalia, it doesn't matter what so long as it's a portable scouting report for someone who wasn't there when the words were racking up wins.

It's a compression problem. And there's always the next match, next game.

Words can easily survive compression. After you move it from ten different brains, capital-h Honesty still says honesty. Ten brains with their own accumulated memories can agree on that Honesty and print the word into a handbook.

What doesn't come along is all the weird little history attached to the word. Every time honesty won or the specific times kindness did. You'll have to take our word for it, the keepers of the flame. The one match where everyone thought honesty would win that we don't really bring up because...the line judge.

Portability sends surface-level labels but often loses most of the details. Because there's no substitute for being there, really.

Which is why the person reading the values for the first time is receiving something both useful and horribly incomplete. They can quickly come to know the roster, but how that roster performs on the different match surfaces will take time and a lot of trust.

At that point, there's a choice to make: either keep teaching through new matches, or pretend the scouting report is what's important about the game.

Stick to the game plan. Honesty will get it done.

The thing about scouting reports is that they age after every new bit of information. The scouting report is analyzing the past, and there's always new match tape where Honesty updates what you thought about it.

Maybe Honesty starts winning all the time on hard courts. Or, perhaps someone new with influence lives their life by it and cites Honesty in situations where the old group would instead have reached for Kindness.

"I didn't know Honesty could serve like that."

A few years in, everyone is still using the same word. Honesty. It sounds great! But are they carrying the same version?

We shouldn't ever be surprised; this is how words work. Just listen to the next generation throw slang at each other. Why would values not inherit the strangest property of words: they are nothing but labels, with shifting meanings underneath. Sometimes that shift is slow. But other times...

That drift is hardly ever announced by anything other than the win/loss record. A new handbook? Probably not. People watch the matches and remember how they turn out.

Long-lasting values have a strange property: nobody ever finishes arguing about them. And nobody truly, decisively wins. Here's what I mean by the originalist versus pragmatist thing: you can't really win because values need both a long memory and constant revision, and we never know how much of either.^[4]

Take "Freedom," which we all feel in our bones; we're also all unclear on exactly what it means or where it ends. Or take "Justice," about which humans disagree eternally. What is just?

Values are an inherited, unending argument. We get some stories on what got us to this exact point, where someone is playing tennis in a parking lot.

How we got here? It doesn't matter now, there's a game on. But whoever wins, the losing value will stay alive. Honesty wins today. Does Kindness get kicked out of the tribe? Absolutely not. Tomorrow, Justice takes the W, but Mercy will still be there, making a very solid case.

A value cannot win every match because, if it does, it's a command. No thought required or allowed. Do this.

Which brings me back to those head nods at the beginning. You value Integrity? That doesn't tell me anything. What I want to know is, around here, what beats Integrity?

That's the sacrifice schedule. We are going to argue about these things forever, because they're worth arguing about. Because somebody is going to put a tennis court in a parking lot.