Value Systems

…because we tend to order things. That’s why we need value systems: we need to know what to do first, we need rules to make decisions.

Value systems are the concern of an individual’s character, which, in turn, is a component of his personality; they are developed during the individual’s life, starting from the early childhood.

They are never inherited genetically, but can be transmitted through education.

They are always present, even if we are aware of them or not. Hence, values can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Because our consciousness can vary in time, there is no immovable barrier between the categories; values can pass between these domains freely as our character changes.

Intrinsic values are those we use when we aren’t confronted with an explicit, generic situation of choice. In a majority of cases, these are the sensory (or sensual) and operational values. These establish the ways we are affected by different things and the way we act in different situations and are corelated with an individual’s experience.

Our social, theoretical and aesthetical concepts represent our extrinsic value systems. They refer to our moral, ethical, political, economical, religious, scientific and artiscical beliefs.

Note: The fact that there is a category of economical values does not establish an equality between the terms “price” and “value”. The attempt to value everything, even outside the economical domain, using solely its price as a value is a mistake lots of people make very often, usually with dire consequences.

Because it is highly unlikely for two persons to develop identical value systems, the differences must be resolved in a tolerant way; it is improper to try to alter someone’s values, as most differences can lead to methods of interaction that can be benefic to all of the parts.