A REVOLUTION IN VALUES, PART I

What is value?

If we as a global culture are to define ourselves according to a new set of values, should we not at least take a few moments to consider what value actually is?
So, what is value, and how do we create, and relate to, it?
Value is that quality of the self, projected outward, that embeds itself in ideas and objects in order to generate a certain feeling of recognition or connection in us. It is the process of locating ourselves in the tangible materia of the world.
Value is the indefinable residue that remains behind when all other qualities are stripped away from something. It is supremely personal because it is in some real sense already-existing-as ‘us’.
To create value in a thing is to bring more of ourselves into it, through an act of awareness, a kind of devotional ‘noticing’.
Those objects which lack value- the mass-produced detritus of pop culture- do so not because they lack craftsmanship, but because they lack attention. To a child a stuffed bear becomes something treasured precicely because he ‘sees’ it intensely, pouring himself into its form as though its were a pure recepticle for the potency of his emotional being. And when after many years the aesthetics fail and the fabric becomes thin and worn, such an innocent and naive object retains its value. For the adult the process is hardly any different, only differentiated by a matter of degree. The great power we hold is the ability to abstract ourselves into intellectual and political philosophies, wholly divorced from the constant forms of youth. But it is here too that we create value, in the idea of each other as worthy of attention, as deserving to be ‘seen’. This then becomes the basis of empathy and compassion, those strong threads by which we bind ourselves to the world and each other and find the ability to remake society according to that ‘vision’.