Values and Validation

“Home” is a concept not easily put into words. It is our refuge, our sanctum, our institution for the whole. It evokes the pictures of the family around the fire, the yelling of playing children in security, and the nurturing environment in which people grow into themselves. It is the place you go back to, that you belong to.

Today’s times have a need for stable homes, in any form, more than any other. Teens at risk, high school pregnancies, disappearing morals, urban blight, the wonderful statistic that one in four American college students possess an STD, the “Jesus of Suburbia” culture, the 4.5% of the total population of the United States having a diagnosable mental illness, the rise of postmodernism and its moral irreverence (and irrelevance), the erosion of what is called “Judeo-Christian values”, the rise in cultural glorification of youthful promiscuous sex and violence…and as the song alludes to, the increasing feelings of victimization in a life that is usually seen as totally unconnected to the perceptions of those living it; they are little islands of consciousness, floating in a vast and tangled sea of confusion and pain. Even Orthodox Judaism, bastion of the ironclad conservatist safety net of being set in the stone of twenty years ago, has begun cracking at the seams from an internal pressure created by its teenagers and the external pressure of the society described.

Today’s feel good stories have one amazing quality to them worth noticing – a brilliant summation in one moment where everything comes together. We are inspired by these stories, taking solace in that perfect moment and its unspoken comfort that perhaps one day we will reach ours...and never think about where it may take us. We watch the poor family get their new house on Extreme Makeover, see their tearful reactions, and never see what happens when they can’t make the tax payments on the house, or simply get conceited and entitled with their newfound wealth/status symbol.

Listening to mental health professionals and community workers (as well as other opinionated blowhards) the fast paced life of the twenty first century has robbed us of our family values, and our lost and confused children are acting out because they need to feel valued and validated, as the family is intended to do.

The need to be validated, to be valued, is nothing new. Self-help books and parenting manuals (and other such tomes of fiction) all stress the need for validation. This, in and of itself, is harmless at worst. It might carry the strange threat of turning people into hollow shells of themselves because they objectify everything about their own self, but that doesn’t really affect people too badly, right?

Living in the age of scientific reason, in which something being “unscientific” means it cannot possibly be true, we seek validation from what is outside of ourselves; this is perfectly acceptable for investigating worldly phenomena, but comes up woefully inadequate for validating our own existence, and its experiences.

The root that “value” and “validation” share comes from the old French valoir, meaning "be worthy," which itself is originally "be strong," from the Latin valere "be strong, be well, be worth, have power, be able". Notice the difference in the shades of the meaning, though. It went from something within you, an enabling force of Selfhood, to something outside of you that you need in order to be that very Self in the first place.

            Anyone who is a student of the Western zeitgeist’s evolution, or was simply alive at the right time, has seen this shift in meaning accelerate in the last fifty years. We live in a society in which people see this need for validation as a fact of life. But....Should it be?