Honour, stress and bullying

In the Art of Manliness blog, an interesting article series gives a good description of Honour, its function and in part 2, its decline. Of particular interest is the traditional immediate response to injuries to one's honour. While my first thoughts on honour practices is that this may increase stress, my latest studies of stress makes me now think otherwise.

Maintaining a strategy of immediate response allows the body to complete the full adrenalin-fight-rest-cycle. When the response is completed, the entire thing is over. This, however, is difficult to achieve in an honourless society. It is particularly difficult in situations where you have to battle a boss, who launches the insult friday night, and you can not respond until monday morning. Further, when you do make a response, it is not necessarily the end of the story, because it now has to go through lengths of red tape. The entire thing may last for months before it is resolved, which means that you're likely to generate adrenalin in your body continually for the entire period, wrecking your health.

Further, groups of people with horizontal honour increases social skills, which in turn also reduces stress and increases your support network. Honour is a guideline for personal integrity, which means you have to look inward to strengthen your inner core. It is this perspective that seems to be missing today. As I pointed out in an earlier article, looking outwards to support a fragile inner core is exactly what generates bullies and bully victims.

Which means that honour is another piece of the puzzle.