A Man must have a Code

"There is no shame in the world, and without shame, you cannot have honor. We live in a world ruled by consensus."
-Milius


This is what I think. Everyone needs to have a code, a set of standards for themselves that set a bare minimum of expectations below which they will not venture. I think shamelessness has yielded the most critical wounds of cultural sin to our collective humanity. A person's sense of their own self and the meaning they convey through to those around them may be all that separates us from the brutish realities of unkempt human nature. Pure self-interest, moral isolation, and complete social de-evolution. It would be impossible for anything resembling a real society to exist under an atmosphere so inhospitable to cooperation, and upon parched land purged of all the fluidity of thought imbued through the ability to let life's lessons guide future decisions to a better end. It is the perspective of our own selves as members of a society, accountable to more than just our own individual interests that we seek to protect when we hold ourselves to admittedly difficult standards. But the case has always been that some of us require only the immediate, instantly gratifying comforts that really only come when we choose to regulate our behavior based on nothing beyond ease and impulse.
I know many people like this. I know few people who actually hold themselves accountable to a thoughtful purpose. It doesn't have to be anything grandiose or transcendent in scale, but just humanistic. Something that will allow you to preserve your sense of dignity, and not require constant reinforcement and external validation in order for you to carry it. If you can't carry your own life in a dignified manner without giving yourself over to purely self-serving, hedonistic interests, what kind of world are you leaving for the one's that come next, our own children even? I think having a code in life, no matter how big or small, is all that really separates us from the people we encounter in life who we thank God we are not, and to whom we can only hope our own children don't assimilate.