Go into any situation contrived by human beings and you’re immediately bombarded with value. The decor, the design, the layout, the people themselves, the language they use, the clothes they wear, all of these are laden with value. It is value that forms the spiritual heart of any organisation. If you looked closer you’d probably find it has come about from a fairly complex process, sometimes handed down, sometimes a recent idea. Whichever way, you could trace the kernel of the value back to an individual or a small group at some point in the organisation’s past.

Most places I go I find the base values repellent. I usually don’t like their assumptions about how things are or how things should be. When I enter these environments the ethos hits me with all the force of a brute fact, un-shiftable like it can’t be any other way. It is this apparent force that allows value to become fact, something you can’t argue with or change. But of course value is by definition something you can argue with and can change. That doesn’t mean it is easy to do. Where any established set of values are in play, whether in a pub, a shop, a hospital, a school, in the street, in almost any given human scenario, the pull is for you to go along with the ethos, to embrace it, to quickly absorb its imperatives.

It soon feels like it couldn’t be any other way, that the values system is fixed as an absolute, probably always has been, probably always will be. This is a mistake. Values are nearly always prejudicial and in service to a particular mindset and should be open to challenge. This is the job of intellectuals and creatives: to analyse and criticise and point to alternative possibilities, hopefully improvements. Over the longer term progress ensues. The alternative to this is stagnation and atrophy.