What Holds When Everything Is Under Threat

Living under an authoritarian regime teaches you things early.
It teaches you how quickly the ground can shift beneath your feet. How truth can be bent until it breaks. How corruption spreads not only through cruelty, but through fatigue, through silence, through people deciding that looking away is easier than looking straight on.

It teaches you what it feels like to live in a constant state of rawness, grieving one injustice while bracing for the next, angry but exhausted, alert but worn thin. In such conditions, shutting down can feel like self-preservation. Going along can masquerade as pragmatism. Apathy can begin to look like peace.

But it isn’t.

What I learned, then, and again now, is that when institutions fail, when laws are hollowed out, when cruelty is normalized, values become our internal compass. Not slogans, not affiliations, values. Quiet, steady, non-negotiable.

Values are what help you speak up when your employer chooses policies that harm coworkers, compromise safety, or erode the quality of what you offer customers and clients. They steady your voice when silence is easier, and safer. They help you choose bravery when the alternative is comfort, approval, or advancement.

They also help you walk away.

Values clarify when it is time to distance yourself from associates who cheat, who abuse trust, who demean their partners, or whose behavior corrodes the kind of community you want to belong to. These decisions are rarely dramatic. They are often lonely. And they almost always cost something.

Yes, you pay a price for living by your values. You may lose opportunities. You may strain relationships. You may be labeled “difficult,” “naïve,” or “too much.” History is honest about that. I know this because I come from people who paid that price.

My grandfather lived by his faith in a time when faith itself carried risk. He did not bend it or brandish it. He simply walked it, day after day, aware of what it had already cost others, aware of what it might yet cost his own family. And when that cost came, he bore it. Still, he walked.

My father valued truth with a ferocity that never softened. He believed truth mattered even when it made you unpopular, even when it closed doors, even when it strained relationships or stalled advancement. And it did all of those things. He paid a price for refusing to bend reality to fit convenience. But he never doubted the trade.

My mother valued kindness, not as sentiment, but as action. Kindness that required sacrifice. Kindness that meant giving time, energy, food, attention, patience. Kindness extended even when it was not returned. She paid for that too. But she never confused kindness with weakness.

These were not abstract principles. They were lived values. Anchors.

And yet, you will pay a price either way.

The price of abandoning your values is quieter, but heavier: the slow loss of self-respect. The dull ache of shame. The knowledge that you failed yourself, and perhaps your neighbors, your community, your country. The price of looking back and knowing you went along when you should have stood.

There is also a broader cost. When enough people choose convenience over conscience, we begin to pay with our freedoms, with free speech, with civic trust, with the fragile fabric of a civil society. These things do not disappear all at once. They erode. Silently. Incrementally. Until one day we realize what has been lost.

For everything in life has a price.

Today, I deliberately return to my values. When I navigate leadership in a new organization, I ask: Am I acting from alignment or from fear? When I write, I ask: Am I telling the truth as clearly as I can, or softening it to avoid discomfort? When I protest, volunteer, or show up in community spaces, I ask: Is this consistent with what I say I believe?

And just as importantly, when I step back, into nature, into a book, into time with my family, my animals, my friends, I remind myself that rest is not withdrawal; it is repair. Values do not demand self-destruction.

Authoritarian systems thrive on disorientation. They want you tired, reactive, fragmented. They want outrage without direction, grief without grounding, courage without community. Values interrupt that. They help us channel anger into action, grief into care, fear into clarity.

They help us draw boundaries about where we engage and where we don’t. About what we tolerate and what we refuse. About when to speak and when to listen. About when to push forward and when to pause so we can endure. The tougher times get, the more essential this becomes.

Not knowing our values leaves us vulnerable, to manipulation, to despair, to the slow erosion of our moral footing. But knowing them, naming them, honoring them, returning to them, keeps us upright even when the ground shakes.

Values don’t guarantee safety. My family’s history makes that clear. But they offer something just as vital: orientation. They tell us who we are when everything else is uncertain.

And sometimes, in dark times, that is how bravery perseveres, not loudly, not dramatically, but with a quiet refusal to abandon what we know to be right. For a society endures only as long as its people are willing to live by what they say they believe.