Thanks for engaging with this difficult subject seriously and carefully. When I talk about keeping loyalty in your core identity, part of what I’m trying to point to is a tendency to interpret criticism of particular loyalty behaviors (e.g. the depiction of Eddie Willers) as an attack on your essence as a person. Sometimes that kind of criticism really is just an attempt to lower the prestige of the loyalty drive, other times the content of the critique is just a claim that some loyalties are misplaced, and very often things are going to contain some mixture of the two, and you have some choice about what part to focus on.
It’s possible that unconditionally accepting your preference for justified-loyalty as a part of you might make it easier to accept such critiques. I expect that to work best if you’re also willing to believe in an integrated way that they also serve who only stand and wait, i.e. able to go a while without external validation of the loyalty trait.
Thanks for engaging with this difficult subject seriously and carefully. When I talk about keeping loyalty in your core identity, part of what I’m trying to point to is a tendency to interpret criticism of particular loyalty behaviors (e.g. the depiction of Eddie Willers) as an attack on your essence as a person. Sometimes that kind of criticism really is just an attempt to lower the prestige of the loyalty drive, other times the content of the critique is just a claim that some loyalties are misplaced, and very often things are going to contain some mixture of the two, and you have some choice about what part to focus on.
It’s possible that unconditionally accepting your preference for justified-loyalty as a part of you might make it easier to accept such critiques. I expect that to work best if you’re also willing to believe in an integrated way that they also serve who only stand and wait, i.e. able to go a while without external validation of the loyalty trait.