Trust is a big word for me. Loyalty and trust, for me, are everything. It's the core of what I'm about and what the people around me hopefully are about. It's a certain thing that gives you a sense of security. It's the biggest factor in everything I do.
Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.
He didn't say anything more, just waited for me to tell him what I'd been thinking. It was pure speculation, and I was opening myself up to ridicule by saying anything at all. I sat on the stool and realized that I had my loyalties, too.
“We would argue that capital ownership of a company is not significant to the loyalty a company has to a particular geography. When a foreign company acquires a U.S. company, vs. when a U.S. company acquires a U.S. company, there's often less job cuts because of less duplication.”
My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.
For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the French, those great anti-venerators, those relentless beheaders of Great Men, worshipped Voltaire.
Loyalty cannot be blueprinted. It cannot be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it cannot be manufactured at all, for its origin is the human heart -- the center of self-respect and human dignity. It is a force which leaps into being only when conditions are exactly right for it -- and it is a force very sensitive to betrayal.
The true object of loyalty is a good legal constitution, which, as it condemns every instance of oppression and lawless power, derives a certain remedy to the sufferer by allowing him to remonstrate his grievances, and pointing out methods of relief when the gentle arts of persuasion have lost their efficacy.
We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.
“THERE IS NO WEALTH IN THE WORLD WHICH CAN BUY OVER THE INTELLIGENT & WARRIOR RACE, HETKARI BHANDARI AND THEIR INTEGRITY, LOYALTY, TRUST, HONESTY & FAITH IN SOVEREIGNTY, NATION & GOD. MANY SUCH RACES WERE PREVALENT IN ANCIENT, PRE-MEDIEVAL, MEDIEVAL & MODERN ERA AND STILL EXIST IN BHARAT OR INDIA.”