Where Do Our Values Come From?

A question from Joe Rogan’s interview with Matthew McConaughey sent me down my own path of reflection.

1. The Question That Sparked It

I was watching Joe Rogan’s interview with Matthew McConaughey and about 54 minutes in Matthew asks Joe, “where do you get your ethics, your values?” Watch the whole podcast here.

Joe is a great interviewer and conversationalist. But not necessarily a contemplative thinker. Joe thought for a quick second and said that he had good parents, and he has been blessed with good friends.

This was not the first time the question of where we get our values had come up in my life recently. That made it a cue for me to write about it. To research the topic, look at myself and wonder a little.

Add “interviewing” Glenn (my husband) to my research and I came to something curious also.

2. What Research Says

The top six answers I found as to where our morals or ethics come from were these:

• Innate – We are born with a basic moral compass.
• Family – Parents and caregivers shape early values.
• Culture – Society and norms define what is moral.
• Reason – Reflection lets us form personal ethics.
• Experience – Life events refine our moral sense.
• Spiritual – Many of us ground morality in something greater.

3. Turning the Lens on Myself

I consider myself someone with good morals. I know right from wrong. If I consider doing something questionable this sense or feeling rises in my body to guide me. To remind me of the consequences and help me ask if this is an action I want to take. So, to examine myself further I thought I would make a list of the bad things that I have done.

I have stolen from an employer.
Taken a freshly stolen car for a joy ride on a lunch break.
Dated a drug dealer.
Cheated on a boyfriend.

Sitting and making a list of these “bad” things or decisions made me wonder, where does my morality or ethics come from.

I knew that what I was doing was wrong but when I reflect on these events it feels like I was strangely disconnected from the fact that there were consequences or could have been consequences to these actions at the time. Yet I did them with little to no hesitation.

What would make someone who is very much afraid of “getting in trouble” do bad things?

Then things got a little uncomfortable. When I looked at my list of bad things an unease arose and then I found myself crying on the couch. What flooded back was how chaotic my life was during the four year period in which I did all of these things.

Like who was I? How could I have done those things? And I could have been in some deep trouble at any moment.

As I write this over a few days, there is a sick feeling in my stomach, a queasiness, a deep sadness and even a little shaky. Revisiting those years through this lens brings them back in a horribly uncomfortable way. Our bodies hold memories and emotions. The only way to release them is to move through them — to let them rise, let them live in the body, and then allow them to pass.

This feels like a stage of my evolution. I don’t blame the people who “put me through the pain.” Instead, I honor the experience, let my body process it, and hope that one day I can completely let it go. Tears help with that.

Today I know I am not done with these feelings, but maybe I have moved forward a little by writing about them.

4. Four Years of Chaos

When I look at why, I realized that these things were all done in about a four year timeframe in my life.

What happened during this time of my life? The tears were about how unmoored I was during those years.

Up until I was about 14 my life had been pretty stable. My parents had been married, financially things were fine and my life was pretty normal living in Stamford, Connecticut.

Then all of the sudden things got very chaotic. Divorce (and it was messy, complicated and confusing, I was living in a strange reality). A few years later I ended up living on my own. The people my parents chose to date and marry made things so much worse and were at opposite extremes. One was prissy and proper (and man did they love manners and proper behavior) the other was a maniac who brought chaos and confusion into my life.

Living a weird life and then living on my own was stressful.

Research shows that our amygdala, the survival and emotion center of the brain, lights up under stress, fear, or chaos. The prefrontal cortex is the thinking part. It handles long-term planning, weighing risks, and self-control. Under stress, that part shuts down.

The madness in my life left me open to making bad decisions and seeking immediate relief from the confusing emotions and total uncertainty. The things that had kept me moored were gone or blown up.

And I guess that was what I was seeking, to escape the chaos.

5. Glenn’s Path

When I spoke with Glenn, his reality growing up was very different. His parents divorced when he was young. His mom was off with boyfriends and building a business in another city, leaving him and his sister to fend for themselves much of the time.

Glenn had no rules growing up. He stole things to survive. As he recollects, his mom was off drinking and dating. There were no consequences for his actions. He never got caught or in trouble.

Then one day he had a moment of divine intervention. He says he found Jesus (or Jesus found him). He stopped doing all of the bad things and calmed down. This was in his late 20s.

Today we are similar in knowing what is right and wrong. I love rules and Glenn not so much.

When I look at how Glenn and I live today, I see our differences as much as our overlap. For Glenn, Jesus and the Bible are the guide. Having grown up without rules, he leans on scripture like a framework, something steady that holds him.

For me, I don’t believe in building my whole life around the Bible. Sometimes I wonder if many of the rules written there were always inside us as humans, passed down in different ways across cultures, and then later put on paper and given to us as the words of God or Jesus. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, but as an honest question. Maybe morality has always been part of us, and religion simply gave it form.

What I do see clearly is that some people need that outside structure to feel grounded, and others carry it more quietly inside. Glenn and I come at it differently, but we still land in the same place: choosing what is good, right, and fair.

6. Even Monkeys Know What’s Fair

There is a study where two monkeys are rewarded for doing a task. One is given cucumber, the other a grape. When the cucumber monkey realizes what is going on, he throws down the cucumber and refuses to participate.

This makes me laugh. And realize that our sense of fairness is innate.

Are we born good and nice, then shaped by our life experiences? When we look at monkeys they have a sense of fairness. When someone disrespects the tribe they can be kicked out. They did not read a book or talk to their pastor about their morality. It is lived and passed down but it is mostly innate, in my view.

7. Living With the Question

My research and interviewing my husband has left me believing that we are innately or intrinsically born with a sense of good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair.

Like so many other aspects of our lives, we do what we need to in order to survive and sometimes just to feel good. Throw some chaos or undue stress into our lives and we are apt to take the wrong path.

So when Matthew asked Joe Rogan where his ethics and values came from, and Joe quickly said “my parents and my friends,” I paused. That might be true for him, but my answer is more complicated.

I think some of our morality is innate — like the monkeys who know when something isn’t fair. Some of it is shaped by family, friends, and culture. And sometimes, like in Glenn’s case, it comes from finding an anchor in faith.

What I know for sure is that stress and chaos can drown it out, as it did for me during those four years when I stopped caring about consequences. But even then, the compass was still inside me. It always was.

Maybe the point of being asked questions like this isn’t to find a final answer, but to sit with them, reflect, and let the feelings move through. Each time I do, I see things with a little more ease.