“He who is swerved from a course he knows is right, through fear of ridicule, taunts, sneers or sarcasm of those around him, is not a man—self-directed by right. He is only a weak puppet pulled by the strings of manipulation in the hands of others. He is a figure in a moral Punch and Judy show—without its entertaining quality.” ~ William George Jordan
It is said that every man has his price. I do not agree. Every man does, however, arrive at a critical juncture in his life wherein he must choose “right” over “popular” if he is to maintain his integrity.
Make no mistake. This choice can be difficult. Man is a social animal and the deep inner compulsion to belong creates a gravitational pull that can be hard to escape, yet if you are to be true to yourself, you will overcome. The funny thing is that this is not a matter of willpower, it is a matter of letting. The high and noble truth in you cannot be arbitrarily forced out and it most certainly won’t find expression if your conviction of weakness outweighs your belief in the incredible power of the life in you.
Written prior to the era of political correctness, Jordan’s “The Crown of Individuality” offers specific instruction to men and women separately on this point. First, to the men he cautions:
The man who knows he is doing wrong, may realize it coolly, calmly, considerately, and even confess it with a sort of bravado, while he is too cowardly and selfish to do the imperative right is not—a king over his higher self but a weak slave of his lower self. That he knows the right and sees it without illusion merely emphasizes the depth of the abyss into which he has fallen.
While ignorance is no excuse for violation of law, a significant part of human misery is caused by those men who fail to “man up” and do the imperative right at any cost. We as men, should strive to become familiar with the truth in both principle and in application.
Jordan offers a separate set of observations to the women:
The woman who lets bitterness grow in her heart until it poisons judgment, kills the love that was dear to her, deadens all her finer emotions and lets petrified prejudice usurp the throne of her justice while she shuts her ears to all pleas for understanding, commits one of those little tragedies in everyday life that may scar for years the soul of the one so cruelly misjudged. She may recklessly throw the golden crown of her individuality, with all its dear, sweet love and tenderness, into the weary loneliness of the years.
The trouble with the coarsened state in which most people live is that they are unable to perceive, let alone act in cooperation with, the more subtle essences of life and human interrelationships. Like a tongue burned by hot tea, the consciousness of man is numb to the wonderful tastes and textures that life has to offer. Misjudgment and prejudgment (prejudice) lie at the root of this chronic insensitivity.
If you develop the habit of choosing righteousness in living over the shortcuts, quick fixes and popular decisions so commonly preferred by the weaker of both sexes, you will gain new sensitivities to the wonders and marvels of life. And it won’t stop there. You will gain perspective on and space from your fears, enemies and lacks. You won’t be fooled by the well-dressed poor alternatives offered up by those who have let themselves become enslaved by their weaker selves.
What do you have to lose?
Gregory Hake 
Thanks for the awesome post!
LikeLike
You’re welcome!
LikeLike
Great post and the series is outstanding, thank you. Like the ghost of Christmas future, this reveals our destiny based on the shadows our lives are casting today. If we’re reading this, it’s not too late change it. The choice is an individual one!
LikeLike
There are specific choice patterns that become habitual to people over their lives. Sometimes it is not easy to make the less popular choice that is right, but if you have a long history of doing the right thing regardless of what people think, it will likely not be much of a struggle for you when the stakes are high. And the right thing is not always what people think, either. When you lose the ability to discern the subtle interactions in your life, you really lose the ability to discern between right and wrong, except in a basic sense.
You can keep making excuses about why it was too hard to make the decision that you knew was right, or you can just buck up and do it. You have a lot to lose if you don’t do the right thing, that’s for sure.
LikeLike
Actually there is nothing to lose and everything to gain when one, instead of having a price, listens to that voice from within and focuses on doing the right thing. Yes, doing the right thing might not be (likely isn’t) the most popular thing to do; it might even be your exit from a peer group for example, or rejection by family. Or cost you a job or position which you craved. Certainly, at the minimum, there will be lots of questions. Yet over the years i have discovered that those who do the criticizing are those who do have a price.
One of my early business lessons (it applies to all aspects of life) was, if you want to be more successful than others in a given situation or endeavor, to look at what they are doing and be willing to do the exact opposite. This of course is not always true but it has been amazing to me over the years to see how often this attitude has assisted in breaking the mold and being able to discover more effective ways of doing something. And it always equals change and the stretching of oneself. To me that is a classic way of being true to yourself – the constant quest to become better at who you are, the constant quest to develop your character.
LikeLike
There is a hypnotic quality that accompanies the weakness of convenient conformity. Having accepted a lesser standard than ‘exactly right’ in a particular instance,excuses are marshalled to justify not just that choice but a whole level of choice. “Here is the world; you can’t expect anything more.” In this mind and emotion set, those whose expression makes apparent the falsity of such a general view become threats and objects of derision.
Here we can see again that regardless of the importance and the potential fulfilments of related patterns between people, each person’s integrity is a singular matter. It begins alone, without compromise and immune to either sweet persuasion or crass blackmail. We maay anticipate that those who pass this test may find themselves arranged in wonderful patterns of relationship, but that can never be the objective or the motivation. We are ourselves first.
LikeLike
Perhaps a good question for anyone- man or woman- is ” what is growing in my heart today?” Is it worthy of the space and nourishment I give it or will it grow to be a harvest of failure and disappointment? This is a choice we have the power to make.
LikeLike
Tragedies that have become so commonplace in our homes, schools, workplaces etc. would become a distant nightmare if what is being said in this post was taken to heart. Hate, prejudice, gang violence are all problems that snowballed from a single thought by one individual. What would happen if the next time someone through a hate party nobody went? The snowball of hate would melt in the hand of the host. End of story!
Sounds simple but I think it is.
LikeLike
Every person probably faces this issue by the age of 8. Will I be swayed by the pugnacious chiding of my peers to do what I know is the wrong thing or will I stand, on my own if need be, and stay my own course. This is an interesting juncture in all lives. There are those that will succumb immediately and we all know that person, they become sharks to the blood of others misfortune, for the rest of their lives. There is the other type that will only be swayed to misguided action if singular ones are leading the charge, they too spend a life enslaved by “friendships” that asks more and deliver less until the disparity is so cavernous their only refuge will be sarcasm and bitterness towards everything. What of those that resist the “comfot” of joining the conforming taunts or adolescent hate, they begin to breathe the rarified air that is only available to our higher selves, it too is habit-forming. This conscious choosing may begin early but as long as we can still see we have a choice we can change our inclination at any age. The only factor with inclination is it tends to be harder to get out of it the longer we are in it.
Excellent post, thank you for this constuctive analysis.
LikeLike
That’s great! There it is, the cure for mediocrity, cynicism, and conformity all together. Righteousness. I bet it is a cure for many other ailments as well. Insensitivity, bitterness, fear, immaturity, hatred you have all mentioned and the list goes on. Just getting in the habit of doing the right thing. Sometimes it’s hard to know what that is exactly, but I’ve learned that the wisdom to perceive that gets better the more you do it, and at least the mere wish of genuinely wanting to do what is best is more than half. It’s something you learn for sure, but it’s like you say, which is so true!- it’s more a matter of letting than exerting willpower. When you let something be, what’s mainly required is taking your foot off the brakes. What that is comes back to is righteousness. Practice righteousness in the little things and it becomes easier in the big ones. I get it! Now that is a brilliant analysis of this whole problem along with its accompanying solution….priceless!
I must say also, that in reading the description of the absences in the particulars of male and female psychology, I felt sorry for the men’s manifestation and deeply saddened by the feminine. I began to think of my own experiences of people throughout the whole course of my life where these traits were apparent, and thinking of them in these graphic terms allowed me to see why they were this way and that is sad because they were/are consumed by their own intemperances, regardless of circumstantial triggers. That i mean to be the external conflicts of our lives. The trigger is not the cause, just merely a potential catalyst that can set off what you carry in your heart. You carry a deep sense of being wronged, then you will express wrong when the triggers come. You carry righteousness, then there is no sympathetic resonance for these negative triggers to attach to and you then have the power to vanquish negativity. Makes me ever more vigilant to ‘thirst’ for righteousness – and as the good book says, it is its own reward. I believe it now more than ever!
LikeLike
Such a great series… thank you!
LikeLike
Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Awesome post!
LikeLike