Cate Blanchett once said that her moral compass is in her vagina.
I don’t know what that means and probably will never do. However, recent events and all the related discussions with friends and family members lead me to seriously think about one thing: is life easier without a moral compass?
I have long been known as a very black and white person. There was a period that I was obsessed with grey, but that’s my life outlook, not about how I see the world should operate. My parents were worried when I told them I wanted to be a barrister. They think I would turn into a morally corrupt monster just to win an argument or a case, and the money I earned will be tainted by innocent people’s blood.
Well I did not become a lawyer, out of some stupid reasons (yeah more than once I shunned law school for stupid reasons), but that’s a story for another day.
However, now looking back, if I did finish law school and become a barrister, I could still be a very good barrister, but not a very popular one. That’s because I see the world in an overly black and white manner. I am good in my current profession because I am black and white. I am about proper governance in organisations and how to improve them, but that does not win me a lot of friends in the organisation, as I became the person who constantly asks questions they cannot answer about their practices. One thing they forgot though, I was employed to do such things, whether the organisation wanted to perform lip services by just having my position to make it look good, or being serious about really improving.
One of my colleagues once questioned my ‘black and whiteness’ and I told him, if what I do allows any shades of grey, then might as well not do it. Standardisation has no room for any shades of grey, good knowledge has no shades of grey and knowledge management is about upkeeping good knowledge and discarding bad practice and bad knowledge.
That leads to the discussion of the moral compass in relation to our world today.
In a world that champions post-truth, a decorated word for lies; and in a world that cares about national and identity pride over treating others fairly and humanely, where should we stand?
A lot of the people took sides. They felt compelled to take sides because if you are not on one side you are on the other. Being constantly reminded by my parents that I am an annoyingly emotionally detached person, my personality of staying firm with the truth and only the truth without any ethnic, cultural and personal affiliation or attachment will not do me any good in this world. They are correct in many instances. That’s probably the reason both my current career in the business world and the acting world are not going anywhere. I just don’t use emotional or personal scale to measure things. For I firmly believe that there is only one truth, and anything deviated from it marks a lie, and lies should never be perpetuated. We can have different angles and views about the same truth but these should never be drifted from the anchor of this one single truth.
However, this is not the world we are living in now. I have seen a lot of people taking sides because of potential for personal gains, or cultural advantage to be presented to them or simply because they liked this person over the other. Whenever you are not on their side, you are their enemies and must be aggressively taken down.
I am ok with this with strangers, for they really have no bearing or relevance to my life. But I feel sad when I see families I knew were divided because someone believes a lie as a truth, someone advocates cultural pride and advantages over humane and respectful treatment of others, someone sees personal gains are more important than equality. Christianity was once a solid emotional and philosophical anchor for me, but nowadays what I saw were a lot of so called Christian politicians are actively oppressing and persecuting others, forgetting the fact that their faith was once being persecuted themselves, and they were supposed to be representing a force for the oppressed and the persecuted.
My moral compass of staying with the truth and nothing but the truth did not take me anywhere good. I have lost friends and connections because they believed in lies about me, or they believe that if I am not with them I am against them. Surely my life could be much better and more successful than it is now if I chose to bend along with the wind like a willow tree, but then I will just be a willow tree, and not a person. Is that what I want? Probably not. Would I change anything? No because this cost, the highest value option forgone, had already been paid and that gives me peace deep inside.
I certainly hope that the world would improve, but I am too small a force to instigate any change, so I can just bank on living my own life with the integrity I understood.
