The Last Act of Honor

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." - Socrates

Honor.

Honor is an enigmatic premise. With honor comes the responsibility, or perhaps burden, of maintaining one’s pride and integrity. This maintenance occurs within one’s mind, unbeknownst to an audience who’ve long dismissed the idea, deeming it as a selfish and/or stubborn act. In assuming an honorable stance, your decisions can sometimes dismiss other valuable characteristics, such as reason and compromise. Honor is a stern distinction. It doesn’t budge from its stance, or bend its truth. It lives in the black and white, while most of us have evolved to blur the lines, and live amidst a foggy, more forgiving haze of grey. We consider this grey area to be acceptable in today’s society.

We are a society, after all. While honor is true, it is merely true to the self. We are a people, but we are individuals, each with our own legacy and laws to abide by.  Honor is built from the roots of our ancestor’s principles. But, over time, these roots have tangled outwards from their origin; forging different paths, breaking off and falling from their birthplace, only to become new roots with new paths in new birthplaces. 

We now live in a vast forest of varying truths. 

Because we all form our own respective codes to live by, we must reason with one another when faced with conflict. Otherwise, we would constantly be at war with not only each another, but also ourselves. So the grey has become common ground for us all to amicably reside within, offering each other an understanding. We communally agree that honor’s truth must be allowed to bend, that its stance must be allowed to budge, in the name of individuality.

However, in doing so, what happens to the nature of truth? 

In choosing to compromise, we are essentially changing the rules of our honor which, as it seems, violates the very idea of honor itself. We can exist in the grey. Our honor, however, truly cannot. Yet, perhaps, the act of compromise could be considered an honorable one. Perhaps compromising, both individually and collectively, is our last demonstration of honor, as we allow the white to give way to the black, and blend into an irreversible, undefined grey fog. In compromise, we dismiss our honor, thus dismissing ourselves to become a people.

But are we less at war with one another? Are we less at war with ourselves?