A brief discussion on identity, and considering what it means to love or be loyal to someone, even as people change with experience and time
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When we love someone or are loyal to someone, where do the bounds of this commitment lie? Do we always give our unwavering support to their causes even if we disagree with them? To what ends do their personhood reach? Does their personhood comprise only their physical being, or also their mental state? Do we still love them or owe them our allegiance should they unfortunately come to be incapacitated or are "no longer themselves"?
I have no definitive answers to the above questions. This piece serves to present some possible perspectives on the topic, but is by no means a model response or completely representative of what I may fully opine.
The discussion of loyalty is complex in its own right. We may first consider the following claim: Loyalty is usually given to a cause or a set of values, more so than to the person representing them. This allows, for example, for the situation where a general might go against the wishes of an incapacitated king who has turned to the side of the enemy, thus seemingly "betraying" the king, but remaining loyal to the kingdom. This means that more often than not, to be loyal to a king or a country is to be loyal to the fundamental principles that they uphold, where the king's orders or general's commands are heeded by the followers out of faith that the dissemination of these orders were made in alignment with those core ideals.
Thus, when we say that we are loyal to our friends, perhaps we do not mean that we will always remain loyal to them, but rather, our loyalty is bound to the values that they represent that we believe guide their thought processes. If we accept this claim, then the implications are twofold: This allows us to look out for them in situations where they may face temporary impairments in executive cognitive function, to go against their wishes expressed when they are in such a state, in order to remain consistent to what they stand for when they are sober. However, this implies that we have staked our loyalty against a set of criteria or values that we have defined them to consistently act against.
If our loyalty references our perceptions or understandings of what values are important to them that are also important to us, then this may be a problem if we have misjudged these values in question, or if they come to massive personality change within the period of time when we know them, to deviate from our expectations of their morality and behaviour. Therefore, in the aforementioned rationalisation, it follows through this line of reasoning, that we have never been loyal to anyone, but only to those values and principles that they represent.
However, this is not a functionally useful conclusion, but more a clarification of nuance that serves no purpose beyond the clarity of written prose. Perhaps a more productive discussion can be found in the consideration of identity.
We may consider our identity to be the amalgamation of the different roles that we choose to take in relation to other people. This would explain how we are able to assume different roles in different contexts and yet be unique in our identity because of the interplay between the experience that our other roles affords us in this context, and why some people seem more committed than others in some roles (such as as an overbearing superior in the workplace), typically because they overstate the importance of the role that they play. Similarly, the identity crisis develops if a person leans too heavily into only one aspect of her identity to fully envelop her life, such that when the basis of that role comes into question, she does not have any other aspects of her identity to fall back on.
In our personal lives, we can mitigate this by recognising the multidimensionality of our character in that we can play different roles in our lives, as opposed to solely that which is issued to us, empowering us to reduce our risk of identity crisis that may occur when the grounds of any of our roles are threatened. In identifying with different roles, we therefore diversify the risk of developing an all-encompassing identity crisis when any role aspect of our lives are shaken.
If we assume the truth of the claim that our identity is unique to us (that's what makes it an identity), then it necessarily follows that no two persons can have the same identity. Therefore, identity cannot be solely a function of the present circumstance, since it is possible for different people to be faced with the same situations. Thus, we may further consider identity to be in relation to two periods of time: the past, and the future.
In Detroit: Become Human, police inspector Hank has to discern between his sentient humanoid machine partner Conner from a duplicate "fake", ill-intentioned Conner clone that has the same memories uploaded. He resolves this situation by "asking [them] a question that only the real Conner would know" (but really this is just a convenient plot device that would not work if both Conners really had the exact same memories). Perhaps the real Conner, having developed sentience, has a unique personality that the databases of Cyberlife cannot replicate in the "fake" Conner, and has been irreversibly influenced by any and every interaction that he has had with his external environment since his initialisation.
Similarly, even when faced with the same situation under the same circumstances, two different people may act differently. This is because our upbringing and personal experiences shape our perspectives and mental models, from which we individually derive our core principles and value systems that influence our lines of reasoning, degree of objectivity and opinions. This unique combination is what enables disagreement, and allows different people to have different or even opposite opinions or interpretations of the same situations or data sets. Therefore, it follows that who we are today is a necessary result of the cumulative effects of our past experiences and actions, which means that our identity must be a function of our past.
However, how might we reconcile this with the common platitude of "forgoing the past", especially traumatic memories, because it "no longer defines who you are" today?
I think this discrepancy can be resolved by first recognising that the past must have had an indelible effect on who you are today, but not necessarily on who you may become in the future. In book Atomic Habits, James Clear writes "Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become"; The person whom we may become in the future is affected by the choices that we make today, just as how the person who we are today has been affected by our actions of the past.
Therefore, since the past cannot be changed, it is up to you to decide whether you will continue to allow the experiences of your past define the actions that you will take today to affect your future. Perhaps it is not so much the case that the past defines who you are, but that no one can take your past away from you, and only you can choose how much your past should matter in shaping your decisions today.
Returning to the discussion of loyalty, I think it is not true that we enter any relationship or contract free of expectation or judgement of the other person or system in question; If it were the case that we have no expectations, then surprise or feelings of betrayal would not be possible, since they are necessarily a function of deviation from a forecasted outcome. Rather, perhaps we project the trend of their future actions within the realm of the adjacent possible, based on our knowledge of the actions that they have taken in the past, as well as their current mindset in the present that they seek to take into the future, in the faith that our mental profile of them is sufficiently representative of their holistic identity to conditionally stake our commitment upon.
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