Has loyalty declined to merely a commercial exercise in customer building, or are some elements of fidelity still worth preserving today? The Free Dictionary offers definitions of loyalty as ‘The state or quality of being loyal. A feeling or attitude of devoted attachment and affection. Often used in the plural: My loyalties lie with my family. A feeling of allegiance’. However, there is little agreement on what one can or cannot be loyal to. Other people, institutions, places of work, belief systems, the personal family, the extended family, the criminal family, sports teams, the government, the country: all engage philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, marketing/media gurus, political theorists in debate. At one end of the scale loyalty is patriotism; it’s antithesis is betrayal/treachery. It encompasses regimes regarded as odious (like Nazism, the wilder … Read entire article »