Quote from BabyShark on February 8, 2019, 4:00 pm

Loyalty is an admirable trait.

What does it mean? And what are its bounds?

When two people spend time together, do something together, connect with each other, and enjoy it, they may well become friends. Over time, as the bond strengthens with regular interaction and exchange of enjoyment, information, or assistance, a sort of loyalty naturally develops, where you want to protect and maintain that good thing you enjoy, essentially, that other person.

Deeper loyalties often form towards brothers, sisters, parents, teachers, and long-time friends that can withstand troubles and hardships and endure for many years.

Loyalty wants to protect the other person, do right by them, support them, and essentially be the kind of friend for someone else that you'd hope to find and have in your time of need.

It all sounds lovely, until a wrench is thrown into the gears.

Say your friend does something wrong, something immoral, something that would damage another person if you don't speak up or already has.

Now someone must pay. Some innocent, or you and your friend you wish to remain loyal to. Calling out your friend may cause them to get into trouble or may embarrass them, may cost them reputation, job, money, or friends, even your friendship with that friend, but not calling out your friend's wrong action and letting them slip out of accountability and letting some innocent victim suffer because of it, you indeed betray your friend anyway, by allowing them to wander down the path of moral depravity without trying to step in the way. You allow an innocent to suffer wrong because of your unwillingness to do something uncomfortable.

You can't really be truly loyal to a human friend if you're not first supremely loyal to a standard of behavior that doesn't change with changing times or changing human opinions or feelings.

True loyalty doesn't watch innocents suffer to protect oneself from discomfort.

True loyalty doesn't ignore your friend's personal crisis or the trouble they are getting into that could harm them or others.

Blind loyalty that cares more about preserving the friendship at any cost than collateral damage or innocents getting run over is no true loyalty at all, but rather a cowardly desperation for approval and a feeling of belonging that is ultimately selfish and neither motivated by care for the friend or care for humanity in general.

Loyalty is an admirable trait, but can't truly exist without loyalty to goodness first and foremost, above loyalty to any human person with no concern for the type of character and behavior that person is representing.