The purest form of honor is synonymous with the values of excellence, integrity, and compassion. Honor in general, however, is associated with certain negative connotations such as defending one’s “honor” in a duel, which in reality may simply be an attempt to mend or bolster the ego. Pure honor, thus, ought to be seen as self-imposed law, a personal moral code to abide by when all else fails, not a self-righteous promotion of ego. Throughout time, greed and corruption have plagued the human race, turning our perception of honor on its head, instructing us to view adherence to a moral code as a disadvantage in a dog-eats-dog world. However, now more than ever, integrity and honor are the only lights of hope for the human race, lest morality and justice be forever undermined in the name of greedy ambition and pursuit of power.
There are many possible excuses for any person’s lack of honor. Perhaps they were deprived as a child of role models of integrity, the means of subsistence, or a sense of non-materialistic happiness. The aforementioned issues all share the common element of indirectly instilling a sense of “you versus me” in the innocent and gullible children they affect. Every greedy, corrupt, and evil person began their life with a tabula rasa that, unfortunately, was stained black by their surroundings. Much like attempting to remove black ink from cloth, it is difficult to wash out a sense of greed once it has been created, thus the quickest and undeniably easiest way to live honorably is to have grown up knowing nothing else. However, much as honor is directly associated with integrity and integrity associated with structure, one has the potential to construct their moral code and strengthen its foundations. There are ways in which one can do this, such as passionately studying philosophy. However, no amount of schooling can replace an unadulterated, omnipresent sense of compassion for all things, for this is the foundation of moral code and can only be developed in immoral adults over a relatively lengthy period of time.
As nauseatingly cliché as it is, I personally attempt to live honorably through upholding the core values of my high school, excellence, integrity, and compassion, in everything that I do. Though this list sounds most phonetically pleasing in this order, their path of execution follows the opposite. Compassion is the most important value in existence, for someone who truly feels compassion and not its fraudulent counterparts, pity and contempt, is truly at peace with the world. In fact, excellence and integrity are but the icing on the cake, for if every person in this world had an intrinsic sense of genuine compassion for absolutely everything, the vast majority of our problems would be instantaneously solved. However, because I, along with most of humanity, could not look a child rapist in the eye without boiling over in palpable rage, compassion must be accentuated through my first two values. Integrity is the structure that forces us to act on our compassionate feelings, commanding us to chase down the purse-snatcher, save the drowning child, or carry home a friend or stranger that has had too much to drink. Realistically, however, we are but mere mortals, unable to single-handedly solve all the world’s problems. Excellence, therefore, dictates that we must help others to the best of our ability, fulfilling our true potential.
Violence, at times, is a necessary tool for a person of honor to use. However, it must be employed with great cautiousness and with consideration of potential consequences. Perhaps the mugger could not have been stopped without the use of force, but this does not mean he or she deserves to be beaten senseless. As such, like all other tools in our moral utility belt, we must appropriate violence in a manner that adheres to our moral code, not in one that infringes on our gut-sense of compassion or our personal integrity. This code, thus, defines the way in which we manipulate our means of fulfilling responsibilities. Therefore, it also defines us.