People - people can absolutely deserve loyalty, and those people can be managers, coworkers, spouses, family, etc.

But don't mix the two up in your mind.

A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism". A sports-team or TV show or band is a thing, loyalty to it is called "fandom". Loyalty to an idea or philosophy is called "being principled" or "idealism". Do you believe that things don't deserve loyalty, such that all of these are errors? Or do these examples not capture the sense of your statement?

Of course this naive view quickly falls apart when interpretation comes into play, as it always must. In the extreme, one may assert that "philosophy" is encoded in the behavior of it's adherents, and these behaviors may have little or nothing to do with the "canonical" representation of the philosophy as immutable text. Or more precisely the behavior and words can be profoundly decoupled. Many examples of this decoupling occurs to your thought (and mine). So when you say that a philosophy can "turn away" from values, in this sense that is true.

I prefer to think of philosophies as a kind of Platonic ideal, which are then subject to all the foibles of the humans who associate themselves to them. There are some subtle problems with this view, which I'd rather not confront.

So the idea as it was might be a value, but what the word means may decay into something frankenstein wouldn't recognise as his handy work .

We have the state; we have the ruling regime; we have the society in question. Who is this "country" that is right or wrong exactly?

If the state, then in the abstract, it is authority without particular directive. So it can't be that.

If the ruling regime, then it can undermine its own authority by demanding people commit evil deeds. But it is not betrayal to refuse to commit the evil deeds it demands. It is the ruling regime who betrays the society it rules by demanding evil. Remember: lex iniusta non est lex.

If society, then we're talking about an aggregate and therefore mob "rule". But who cares what the mob thinks? The mob has no authority.

Betrayal and loyalty can only be measured in relation to the objective good. I agree with you that "my country, right or wrong" might suggest something very evil, but to reject the suggested relativistic understanding of loyalty is not betrayal. You could interpret it differently: I am loyal to the good of my country, regardless of whether my country is in the right or in the wrong. And the good of my country might involve opposing an evil regime or standing up to the mob. That's true loyalty. Obedience to evil is false obedience and true betrayal.

Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.

A less cynical take: there seems to be some research that following sports fosters greater social connectivity and well-being. It may just be that we're hardwired to be tribal. From that context, sports seems to be a relatively benign way to tap into that.

However, you should acquaint yourself with the principle of subsidiarity. Loyalty, duty, and love radiate outward from those who are owed the most diminishing to those who are owed the least (spouses, then children, then parents, etc., all the way through extended family and then community and nation and finally the human race). The loyalty is to the objective good. How that is expressed will be modified by contingent factors particular to a given person's situation.

--EM Forster, "What I Believe"

I am not betraying my country by refusing to follow laws or decrees that require that I engage in intrinsically evil deeds. I am not loyal to my friend if I do evil things he asks me to do.

Our loyalty is to the objective good of our country and our friend. Otherwise, there is no such thing as loyalty.

For example, if your country is a multiethnic empire that is unsustainable as a single entity without compulsion and forced assimilation, and your friend happens to be an ethnic minority in it.

What does it mean to betray someone? If a friend intends to murder someone and asks you to keep that secret, would telling the police be a betrayal? Would keeping it secret be an expression of loyalty?

Loyalty and betrayal cannot be understood in purely subjective terms. It must always be grounded in the objective good.

In your example, you haven't provided enough information to judge how exactly you would are betraying your country. However, if your country is doing evil things and you defend a friend from those evil things, then you aren't betraying your country. The government in question is betraying your country.

That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself. People often see their “external tribes” as an extension of their self much likely they do family/friends, rather than them being part of it like a company. I am a Spillett. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English, I am UKian, I am European, I work for TL. Notice the difference in language in that last one.

This is part of why some get so offended when you poke fun at their town/county/country: if they see it as an extension of their identity more than just somewhere they live then your disrespect is a personal attack. They would not likely defend their employer nearly as passionately.

I would argue that this is a tit-for-tat, and as such, not really an example of loyalty per se. Loyalty would be protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you and yours in any tangible way. And it has all the same problems as corporate loyalty, really.

Perhaps this needs some nuance. It seems like duty has some relevance here. Military service may not actually benefit someone directly, and it could easily be a detriment at the individual level. But societies struggle to operate effectively for very long when everyone takes an individualistic transactional mindset. At some point, it becomes a collective action problem that needs to find a balance between serving a sense of duty to society as a whole and society not taking advantage of such sentiments.

Where I come from in Europe - they say we have proud history going back some 1500 years. Well before that, there were other tribes, we are same type of immigrants as current waves. We either mingled with them, killed them or drove them away. I am pretty sure genetic tracing would favor the mingling for the most part.

What makes more sense is really what all others say - pick up a specific set of people, philosophy, moral imperative etc. and be loyal to them. Higher concepts muddy the waters with slippery slopes and are unnecessary, just opening surfaces to manipulation.

I guess you could argue the same for a church.

On the other side, certainly a fluid labor market such as tech was a couple of years ago would foster a lack of loyalty, as employees hop from employer to employer for rapid career growth.

None of this necessarily contradicts with your point. It's just labor relations don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes a lot needs to be done to earn trust in a low-trust cultural environment.

I think another shift around Welch was that companies used to focus more on long term value, which would result in stock price increases in the long term, even if not in any given short term. That if a company was healthy and valuable, one of the many benefits would be rising stocks. The shift to focus on short term stock increases as almost the only goal, means companies will pull the copper piping out the walls and destroy the house if it means a juicy bump in the Q3 earnings call.

It's 100% an emergence scam behavior of corporate entities to trick their employees into developing loyalty and tricking managers / founders etc into thinking its not just a way of scamming lower-end employees imo... I never got the feeling that managers were consciously trying to trick us into developing loyalty, felt more like they were then ones drinking the most coolaid on it...

Also agree with the base human need to feel at least some loyalty in any relationship to feel like it's healthy.

I think my hack has been to develop loyalty to people on my team laterally. Seems to work but sometimes leadership / management still seems like they catch a whiff that I dont have a deep emotional need to respond to their frantic 8pm or Sunday afternoon Teams messages...

But if they fire me for not being loyal who cares, the economies doing great right?

I think it's good to have admiration for the company (or any organization) you work for. If you can't find anything you admire, it might be better to find another place to work where you can.

This implies having the privilege of having options. For me, it's probably the primary reason I try to direct my career toward having skills or connections that give me options.

But your mega corp doesn't have loyalty to you. They have loyalty to their shareholders, and you are a means to that end. The shareholders are the spouse, and you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present. If a little flattery gets them a better price, then they flatter. If their spouse's interests change, you'll never see them again.

Equally, if you presenting yourself well and negotiating well gets you a better wage to make that birthday present, then you should do those things. It's a two-way street.

> loyalty for a company is concept to make you work harder without asking anything in return. And the moment the company shifts focus and you are out of it, then suddenly you understand that this loyalty wasn't kind of a credits account which you've been saving all this time. It's simply nothing.

This is what you were responding to, which is not transactional. You are loyal to your spouse (to a point) because you trust her to have your best interests in mind and be aligned in the common goal of improving life for you both. A corporation’s spouse is the shareholder and has their best interests in mind, not the employee.

Loyalty is a commitment to the objective good of the other, of skin in the game. Loyalty is hierarchical and the particular variety and its entailed commitments depends on the particular nature of the relationship.

In a hyperindividualist liberal society, the presumption is basically Hobbesian; life is taken to be intrinsically and thoroughly adversarial and exploitative, and relationships are taken to be basically instrumental and transactional. (This even informs scientific interpretation, as science is downstream of culture.) Society is taken to be intrinsically a matter of "contract" or a kind of Mexican standoff. Loyalty is a quaint and anachronistic notion, a passing emotion that expires the moment the landscape of opportunities shifts. Provisional and temporary.

There's no point in asking first, whether employers should be loyal to their employers or vice versa. The important question is whether they are good to one another. If they are, you might also find loyalty among them, but that's not where the focus should be.

Someone who gets obsessed with loyalty too much, I think, is likely to have sinister intentions. They probably want you to be loyal to them but don't plan on being good to you.

If we narrow the scope to employment, there is a variety of loyalty to the common good of the company at work, in due proportion and priority, when you join the company. Each employee is bound in this manner, including the guy deciding your salary or your termination. Otherwise, what are you doing there?

Now, loyalty isn't stupidity. Perhaps this is what people associate with the word when they hear it. They perhaps imagine some poor, gullible, childish pushover. It should be obvious that this is stupid. No, loyalty to a company is a commitment to the common good of the company within the scope of your responsibilities. That's it.

Now, given the nature of at-will employment, that commitment is contingent on actual employment. When you leave the company, your commitment ends. But while you work at that company, you must be committed to the common good of that company. Again, why else are you there? The nature of employment makes this a kind of elective loyalty of utility.

The fact that employers might try to manipulate employees emotionally by misusing and abusing words like "loyalty" in order to exploit them is a different matter. In that case, the employer is being disloyal to the company and its employees. How you should respond to that kind of disloyalty is contingent on the particulars of that disloyalty and the particulars of your personal circumstances.

We have got to get away from this relativist, subjectivist battle of wills. What matters is the objective good.

> Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.

I'm not sure what to make of this. The scope is also too broad to say anything useful here. In friendship, loyalty is a prerequisite for it being a good relationship. Loyalty to a friend is commitment to their objective good. A disloyal friend harms the friendship. How can there be friendship without loyalty?

I suppose a good question to ask is: what does it mean to be disloyal? It is every okay to be disloyal? Disloyalty presumes loyalty is normative and owed. But loyalty is not always normative, because it would be a category mistake. If I work for Boeing, I am not being disloyal toward Airbus, because I have no commitments toward Airbus. But I would be disloyal to Boeing if I were to illicitly funnel work done at Boeing to Airbus, harming Boeing. In the context of friendship, loyalty may grow with the friendship, but being more loyal to friend A than to friend B doesn't mean I am disloyal to B. A smaller glass full of water simply holds less water, but it is no less full than a larger glass full of water. It is simply that there is an order and priority of loyalty in due proportion with the nature of the friendship. I owe more loyalty to my family than I do to my community, but it's not an either/or proposition. It simply means that my commitment to and prioritization of the good of my family is higher (this relates to the ordo amoris that made a splash in the news recently).

Employer employee relationships are completely financial. Almost legally required to be that way on the employer’s side.

With hypercapitalist corporations loyalty is a one-way street. The employee is expected to be loyal, while corporations drop them casually if it benefits them. Loyalty is realized when one of the sides endure some downsides in thr expectations that these will be resolved in the long term. So if you dump someone the minute that downside appears, you aren't and never have been loyal.