Is does not imply ought

"It is what it is." (Donald John Trump) / "Es gibt" (Martin Heidegger)

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"Is does not imply ought" is a radical thought, if you think it through seriously. No thing that exists has any value: it's all "just there". Value is in the living act of valuing, e.g.: thinking that "nothing has any value", which is to live the value of thinking that nothing has any value. But as soon as you think that thought (or any other thought, such as "Allah is great", it just becomes more of the past which, as Robert Frost wrote: is a bucket of ashes.

So I valued [X] a moment ago. Now it's just one more thing that happens to be there. What is its claim to be worth anything? Go back farther enough and you will just get to your childrearing, your schooling, or something you previously thought which might just be wrong or who knows what? Valuing is Sisyphean.

"The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing." (Heraclitus)

Of course, if you try to catch the act of valuing, it's worse than a cat chasing its own tail because you can never catch it. It's too short. One ultimate implication of all this is that anything a parent or teacher tells a child or that a religious or political leader or a boss tells an adult should be accompanied with the proviso that the target person needs to think about what to make of it (and, consequently, what to do with it), not to just believe it, because it's just more more ashes in the bucket or stuff pending disposition into time's crematorium.

Another implication is that value, i.e., valuing, cannot really be understood because one can only understand what one can grasp (in two senses of that word: (1) grab onto, and (2) comprehend discursively). Dogmatism is always fraudulant and people who push beliefs are all false prophets and they shouldall shape up or ship out (or just kindly "shut up"). All the Reverend Martin Luther Kings of this world should tell the sheep that would follow them as if they were Judas goats:

Follow my example, not what I say: Self-accountably shape your own life in the light of your own faculty of reason. Don't believe anything anybody, including me, says. Study it all and see what use you want to make use of it or not. Don't follow me, or anybody or anything else: Guide yourself. You've got work to do. Get on with it! Shoo!

On the other hand, the more one knows about wht persons have believed, the better one can presently judge. That is obvious. No persona can want what they cannot imagine is possible.

"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to." (Arnold Hauser)

That is one of the tragedies of bad parenting and schooling: the young person is even deprived of appreciating how bad it is / how bad they've got it.