ABSTRACT
Is loyalty really a virtue? What then are we to make of the fact that the very same steadfastness of honoring a commitment to family, friends, nation, or God that we consider to be a measure of our integrity is also intrinsic to the robot-like loyalty that fuels the “Heil Hitler” salute to the Fuhrer? In this chapter, the author argues that the mechanical obligation to follow rules governing blind loyalty preempt an organic commitment that emerges from love and the freedom of choice on which love is based. Rather than view loyalty as an automatic obedience to an unchanging oath, the author uses Kierkegaard’s ideas to describe a passion-fueled process, in which one freely chooses to make repetitive “leaps of faith” through the transitions of self-dying toward a continually renewed commitment to a relationship with an Other. In the aftermath of trauma, shame inverts this passionate forward movement toward the Other into the enclosed passivity of narcissistic self-preoccupation. Now determined to cover up our exposed vulnerability to the otherness of change, we project the monstrous visage of our own shames on to our own unpredictable future, as well as the unknown stranger, and retreat to the comforting blind loyalties to the familiar.
