On Loyalty

Nov 25th, 2023

I'm not sure if it's the Italian side of my family, my father's side, the mostly Sicilians, or those stories of Mafia connections running through my blood, but fierce loyalty has always been a cornerstone in my personal life. For better or for worse. But when I was growing up being loyal and devoted at any cost was my definition of love. So it took a long time for me to look more deeply into it.

My process toward a clearer understanding of loyalty really accelerated in the middle of 2020. At the time, I had begun to notice the shift in our media - what I thought of as a 'bait and switch' - which allowed me to veer away from the trusted political opinions of my mother and other well-meaning voices warning me never to listen to conservative perspectives and of course definitely steer far away from that hate-filled rhetoric coming from so-called extremists. But the more I learned about all political viewpoints, the more understanding and compassion I gained for all my brothers and sisters. There was not one group that I could be angry with. So right away I recognized that it brought me to a higher frequency of Love.

When I think back, mostly it seems that my loyalty was based on a sort of nostalgia, a nostalgic loyalty, a dedication to a select feeling from the past, a selective memory, or selective amnesia. People can get so vehemently loyal to the past that they don't really see the present which has shifted before their very eyes. And interestingly, when the word nostalgia was coined by Dr. Johannes Hofer in the 1600's it was a mental illness, even a deadly mental illness. He basically described his patients' deep and debilitating feelings of longing for the past, symptoms similar to PTSD, which would cause them to be so overcome with mental imbalance it would drive them mad, leading to complete self-neglect, losing all sense of self-care and autonomy. Nostalgic loyalty and absolute thinking don't seem to be expansive or elevating anyone spiritually. It seems more stagnant.

It's so interesting that the Greek and Roman mythological stories are so much about lower level reactions from their characters. Yet the Greek and Roman philosophers of Stoicism seem to present a remedy for it - a higher vibrational perspective. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who practiced Stoicism during his reign, had been deeply betrayed by his longtime friend, but his response was not like the old Roman myths. He did not take revenge like the Mafia. He knew his friend needed to be punished, but he knew the greatest power was to set an example of compassion and love. So perhaps Marcus Aurelius is showing us the higher perspective of loyalty.

This is my full Time Capsule film on loyalty -

(free episode)