YEARS ago, while we were still in the Jesuit school, we often heard that education was more than a profession. It was a vocation. Men and women for others was never intended to be a slogan displayed during retreats. It was supposed to become a habit of decision-making.
Old habits, it seems, do not disappear easily.
Perhaps that explains why some of us still struggle to ignore unfinished responsibilities, even when no one would fault us for doing so.
Recently, my daughter said something that initially sounded rather uncompromising.
She told me she simply has no time for people who regard violence, intimidation, double talks, propaganda of lies, rule of the blind mob, gaslighting, misinformation, and even cognitive dissonance as just another political opinion.
I initially thought she was being too absolute. Then I realized she wasn’t talking about politics at all. She was talking about values.
On second thought, I realized she was not rejecting political diversity. She was drawing a moral boundary.
Democracy welcomes disagreement over taxes, education, infrastructure, or foreign policy. Those are genuine political differences. But when violence becomes strategy, intimidation becomes leadership, falsehood becomes identity, and truth becomes optional, we have quietly crossed from political preference into moral preference.
The people who normalize those things also become part of our weighted mean.
So do the people who resist them.
The same principle quietly governs our workplaces.
Culture is seldom created by official policies. It is created by what the people closest to us repeatedly excuse.
We often think our beliefs are entirely our own. They rarely are.
Every conversation leaves a trace. Every friendship nudges us, however slightly, toward what we eventually accept as normal. If those around us excuse dishonesty, intimidation, or indifference, our resistance slowly weakens. If they choose truth, empathy, and accountability, those choices become easier for us to make as well.
No wonder character behaves like a weighted mean. Not everyone influences us equally.
Which is why I still believe the old adage deserves an update.
Show me the people you listen to most—not just the people you know—and I will show you the direction your life is taking.
Show me the people whose voices carry the greatest weight in your life, and I can probably approximate your convictions, your politics, your priorities, and your sense of right and wrong.
Perhaps that is the more difficult question each of us should ask.
Not “What do I believe?”
But “Who have I allowed to shape what I now believe?”
Because long before we cast our votes, choose our careers, or decide what is negotiable and what is not, we have already been solving an equation.
And more often than we realize, we become the weighted mean of the people we choose to keep closest.
***
Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with./PN
