Loyalty vs Integrity

A recent exchange on Facebook about loyalty got me thinking about how high it is in our scale of values.

An article entitled “Honesty vs. Loyalty: Which is More Important?” by Horace Underwood, the great-grandson of the founder of Yonsei University in South Korea, serves as a take-off point (mckinneyconsulting.com).

Underwood was a professor at Yonsei for 30 years and was named a Professor Emeritus. He has since returned to the USA and has had a chance to look back at the crucial difference between the ways Western and Asian societies look at loyalty.

He summarizes his insights with this opening sentence: “In Korea as in the West, honesty and loyalty are both virtues. In the West, in general, honesty is the higher virtue. In a Confucian society like Korea, loyalty is the higher virtue.”

He speaks mainly about the behavior of students in the classes he taught. In general, he writes, “my students will engage in behavior that I call cheating in order to be virtuous.” Students cheat because their classmates ask them to cheat. “If your friend asks you for help on an exam or to copy your homework,” he writes, “you must help your friend or show yourself to be inhumane, disloyal, not a friend, lacking in virtue.”

I could not help but think of the situation in our government, now and in the past. The president (any president, not just the current one) is always loyal to his or her cabinet members and other appointed officials. Similarly, the president’s official family is always loyal to him or her. Many times (particularly in past regimes), that loyalty has led to an inability to imprison or at least to fire a colleague or employee.

The president’s loyalty to his or her appointees usually exceeds that of the loyalty of the appointees to him or her. Think of how teachers in government schools (like the University of the Philippines faculty, who rarely realize that they are part of the government) routinely criticize the sitting president. Or think of soldiers (also part of the government) who plan and stage coups. Having mutineers merely do push-ups and allowing alleged jueteng lords or plunderers to voluntarily resign rather than be fired outright are only a few signs that relatives, friends, schoolmates, and fraternity brothers are not subject to the same vigorous prosecution (persecution?) that awaits political competitors, personal enemies, or unknown little people.

When the president changes, however, the balimbing mentality takes over. People supposedly loyal to a former president suddenly repackage themselves as loyal to the sitting president. Here is where Filipinos differ from Koreans. Koreans are loyal to certain people no matter what. Most Filipinos (mainly politicians, but business executives, too) are loyal only to whoever is in power at the moment.

What about honesty and integrity? Do they count at all? Not if we look at our history. Think of what happened after the Pacific War or after the Marcos dictatorship. Think of people presumed guilty unless they proved their innocence suddenly presumed to be innocent even if they appear guilty as rumored.

Once, when I was asked to assume office as a high government official (not in the current administration), I was floored when the president’s man asked me, “Will you be loyal to the president?” I lost that post, not because I said something, but because I did not say anything.

Clearly, under some circumstances, loyalty may be a virtue. We would not have Christian or Islamic martyrs if nobody were loyal to a particular religion. We would not even have exciting basketball games if alumni were not loyal to schools they went to ages ago. A Filipino who badmouths a father, mother, sibling, or child in public would not last very long in Philippine polite society.

On the other hand, when loyalty becomes a blinder to someone’s faults, crimes, or sins, it clearly ceases to be a virtue. It becomes a hindrance to everyone’s welfare, including that of the one at fault.

Since Underwood was an academic, a good counterpoint would be the statement by someone who used not to be an academic. Jane Robbins writes in insidehighered.com:

“Until I came into academia, I had never heard much discussion of loyalty. In business, the talk is more about commitment and accountability to goals like quality, performance, or merit rather than about loyalty to an institution or to an individual. I had always thought of loyalty as a political construct – something despots and totalitarian regimes seek to extract as a means of control, something that breeds blind obedience and a culture of fear. So in the theory of groupthink, one of its symptoms is pressure to be loyal to the group – to not speak up, not disagree – because to be ‘disloyal’ is to be punished or ostracized. You could be made to feel wrong – indeed, you could be fired or blackballed or worse – for daring to object. Loyalty in groupthink is creepily tied to obedience and perpetuating a positive view of the group, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”

In the drive towards “daang matuwid,” loyalty should fall by the wayside. Integrity, not loyalty, should be the word of the day.