You or The Work

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Individual                       -                      Collective
Part                                 -                       Whole

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The cells work together to form a tissue.
The tissues work together to form an organ.
The organs work together to form an organ system.

Each individual works in service to a higher truth, and contributes towards the ongoing existence of the plant (the whole).

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I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

[Martin Luther King, Jr.]
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967. Found in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., p.344

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When I first took my position against the war in Vietnam, almost every newspaper in the country criticized me. It was a low period in my life. I could hardly open a newspaper.

[...] But then I remember a newsman coming to me one day and saying, "Dr. King, don't you think you're going to have to change your position now because so many people are criticizing you? And people who once had respect for you are going to lose respect for you. And you're going to hurt the budget, I understand, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; people have cut off support. And don't you think that you have to move now more in line with the administration's policy?"

That was a good question, because he was asking me the question of whether I was going to think about what happens to me or what happens to truth and justice in this situation.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

[Martin Luther King, Jr.]
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., p.342

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[...] when I took up the cross I recognized its meaning. It is not something that you merely put your hands on. It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.

The cross may mean the death of your popularity [...] It may mean the death of a foundation grant. It may cut your budget down a little, but take up your cross and just bear it.

[Martin Luther King, Jr.]
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., p.343

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DANIELS: Anything you want to tell me? Been weeks, now. The deputy ops knows what's going on in this unit almost before I do. Except last week, we run the bug up into Barksdale's club office and Burrell... For once, he's a step behind. You see it?

CARVER: Maybe, he...

DANIELS: I see it. I look around the office and I see that one of my people is at the academy for in-service.

CARVER: Lieutenant, I swear, it wasn't my idea. I mean, I'm minding my business, doin' my fuckin' job, when the man calls me upstairs for coffee and a danish, right? I mean, I never even been on the eighth floor of that fucking building. And there's the deputy fucking ops telling me how concerned he is about the case, how he needs to be informed. I mean, he's the deputy fucking ops, man.

DANIELS: Couple weeks from now, you're gonna be in some district somewhere with 11 or 12 uniforms looking to you for everything. And some of them are gonna be good police. Some of them are gonna be young and stupid. A few are gonna be pieces of shit. But all of them will take their cue from you. You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it's about the work, it'll be about the work. You show them some other kinda game, then that's the game they'll play. I came on in the Eastern, and there was a piece-of-shit lieutenant hoping to be a captain, piece-of-shit sergeants hoping to be lieutenants. Pretty soon we had piece-of-shit patrolmen trying to figure the job for themselves. And some of what happens then is hard as hell to live down.

Comes a day you're gonna have to decide whether it's about you or about the work.

Dialogue from The Wire, Episode 13, Season 1

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Pearlman: The point is that Maury Levy is a past officer of the Monumental Bar Association, and unless I want to spend my whole life as a fucking A.S.A. I can't spend my afternoons pissing on people who matter.

McNulty: Another career in the balance.

Pearlman: Fuck You

McNulty: No, fuck you. If only half you motherfuckers in the State's Attorneys Office didn't want to be Judges, didn't want to be partners in some down-town law firm; if half of you had the fucking balls to follow through - you know what would happen? A guy like that would be indicted, tried, and convicted. And the rest of them would back up enough so that we could push a clean case or two through your courthouse. But no - everybody stays friends, everybody gets paid, and everybody's got a fucking future.

Dialogue from The Wire, Episode 11, Season 1

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And, inside the organisation, you challenge that collective view at your peril. In today’s BBC only those whose antennae are fully attuned to the corporation’s cultural mindset — or keep quiet about their true feelings — are going to make progress.

Moreover, making progress these days doesn’t mean just achieving the influence and prestige of a senior job with the world’s greatest broadcaster, once considered reward enough. For those breaking through into the senior ranks, there’s now big, big money and a gold-plated pension to be had.

Which is why, although there has been plenty of grumbling on the shop floor about the escalation of pay for top BBC managers in recent years, it’s muted. No one wants to wreck his or her chances of a well-paid place in the promised land. The newsroom has many talented journalists of middle rank, who know what’s wrong with the organisation, but who don’t rock the boat for fear of blowing their futures.

[...] What the BBC wants you, the public, to believe is that it has ‘independence’ woven into its fabric, running through its veins and concreted into its foundations. The reality, I discovered, was that for the BBC, independence is not a banner it carries ­principally on behalf of the listener or viewer.

Rather, it is the name it gives to its ability to act at all times in its own best interests.

[Peter Sissons]
"Left-wing bias? It's written through the BBC's very DNA, says Peter Sissons", from Daily Mail Online.

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Tell me the truth, Frank.

Remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what's so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is, however long they've lived without it.

No one forgets the truth, Frank. They just get better at lying.

['April']
Dialogue from Revolutionary Road (film)

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[...] I might say that no time can be more unfavourable to philosophy than that in which it is shamefully misused as a political means on the one hand, and as a means of livelihood on the other.

Now, if governments make philosophy the means to their political ends, then scholars see in professorships of philosophy a trade that nourishes the outer man just as does any other. They therefore crowd after them in the assurance of their good way of thinking, in other words, of the purpose or intention to serve those ends.

And they keep their word; not truth, not clarity, not Plato or Aristotle, but the aims and ends they were appointed to serve are their guiding star; and these at once become the criterion both of what is true, valuable, and worthy of consideration, and of its opposite.

Therefore whatever does not comply with these aims, be it even the most important and extraordinary thing in their department, is either condemned, or, where this seems precarious, suppressed by being unanimously ignored.

[...] How could philosophy, degraded to become a means of earning one's bread, generally fail to degenerate into sophistry? Just because this is bound to happen, and the rule "I sing the song of him whose bread I eat" has held good at all times, the making of money by philosophy was among the ancients the characteristic of the sophist.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.xix, xx

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"Mr Plichta, I have been in touch with Mr Mössbauer and told him that the two of us wanted to introduce him to something new, and that there was some need for caution in this regard. He wanted to know whether your discovery would raise doubts about quantum mechanics.

I told him that quantum mechanics would not even exist if what you discovered turned out to be true. Quantum mechanics would then simply turn out to be a figment of the imagination.

My colleague Mössbauer then got very angry and accused me of putting everything we have accomplished at risk. 

Our great achievement, modern physics, was the result of tremendous efforts, and now everything would collapse should any doubts arise.

Such people as yourself should not be given support under any circumstances. He refuses to meet you. He does not even want to hear of any of the new ideas. He gave me a very serious warning indeed"

[Peter Plichta]
God's Secret Formula
 
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I don't care if my house is built on shaky foundations.

I have invested a lot of time and money in building it, and I am very comfortable living within it. I do not even want to hear your thoughts about its foundations.


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Learning For Their World

Superintendent: You're not educating them, you're ... socializing them?

Parenti: They weren't being educated before, there's no point in being obtuse!

Superintendent: Excuse me!

Colvin: Hold on. Hold on. Look, what he's saying is this ... I mean, you put a textbook in front of these kids; put a problem on a blackboard; teach 'em every problem on some State-wide test - it won't matter, none of it. Cos they not learnin' for our world, they learnin' for theirs. And they know exactly what it is they're training for, and what it is everyone expects them to be.

Superintendent: I expect them to be students.

Colvin: But it's not about you or us, or the tests or the system: it's what they expect of themselves. I mean every single one of them know they headed back to the corners, their brothers and sisters - shit, their parents - they came through these same classrooms, didn't they? We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn, and where they end up? Same damn corners. I mean, they not fools, these kids. They don't know our world, but they know their own. I mean, Jesus, they ... they see right through us.

[...] We can't lie ... not to them.

Dialogue from The Wire, Episode 4, Season 4

The Bottom Line

We often judge how effective a structure is by how long it lasts; how it weathers storms and stands the test of time. In this sense, the good structure must maintain its solidity; must remain what it is. If this is the underlying decree of the structure - survival before all else - then it will necessarily abandon anything else it may stand for in order to uphold this imperative.

So whilst a structure like a "newspaper" may claim its primary purpose is the communication of truths, if, in doing so, it risks its own survival, then it will necessarily abandon this purpose - perhaps even directly contradict it - in order to uphold the purpose that lies beneath; its fundamental imperative of "survival above (or beneath) all else."

In assessing how serious a structure is about its purposes we must then ask; what lies at the bottom of this structure? What is the fundamental imperative upon which it is built? What is most important to it?

We can also view people as structures and can ask the same questions about them. Jesus presents us with an interesting example. He represents an archetypal structure, one which does not - unlike most - have "survival ahead of all else" at its roots. Perhaps one of the reasons why Jesus is important to us is for this very reason; that, if we unearth his deepest imperative we will not find it to be "survival" - a fact that is illustrated by his death. He was prepared to disregard "survival" in favour of something deeper. Digging down to his foundations we might find something like "Truth," a cause for which all else is abandoned. His structure came crumbling down in order for Truth to go on living. His example is an outstanding one because few structures will risk their own survival for something deeper.

This is why most structures are inherently compromised; because they are things, and they want to go on being these things. And this is why the ultimate sacrifice for any structure is always death.

Death needn't mean literal death. It could mean the death of a certain way of doing things, or of the current status quo. An example of this is the person who quits their job because they cannot, for a reason of conscience, continue to do it; and especially so in the case of the person who really cannot afford to make such a sacrifice, yet does so anyway, risking a potentially great upheaval - a descent into the unknown. The status quo crumbles so that something greater may live.

Most structures must be willing to shape-shift slightly in order to adapt to changing circumstances; indeed, whilst a sign of the strong structure may be its permanence, to endure in a world of change it must also have a critical amount of malleability. The question then, is how much change can a structure incorporate before it stops being what it is?

For a structure to remain fundamentally what it is, it must stay true to a certain amount of descriptive statements. If it does not then it will shift and slide into something else. So whilst a newspaper and a blog may have many similarities, there are also a critical amount of differences between them; and it is these differences that define each as separate from the other, allowing us to differentiate between the two and apply the relevant labels. If we imagine a structure as consisting of two circles, one contained within the other: the smaller circle represents the critical descriptive statements that the structure must uphold in order to remain what it is. In terms of a "newspaper" these could be things like "must be tangible", "must have pages" and so on. Outside of the smaller circle are contained all of those statements that can be subject to change. These could be things like "size must be broadsheet", "must contain x amount of pages" and so on. All of these latter statements can be abandoned without the structure risking its fundamental integrity, without it becoming something other than what it is (without "newspaper" becoming "blog").

So when we talk about the survival of a structure it is probably this inner circle - the core descriptive statements - to which we are referring. As long as these remain true then "survival" continues; but if any one of these statements is contradicted then "survival" is threatened. Death, in this sense, is always followed by immediate rebirth; the structure stops being one thing and becomes another.

So to place a value like "Truth" beneath "survival" may mean that we are willing to reform our structure - to become liquid, dissolve and reform - if, and when, we need to. We shed our skin - death to the old - so that we may become something else; all in service to this deeper purpose.

What, then, can we say about those structures which have "survival" as their fundamental imperative? When and why might this be a problem?

We've already mentioned newspapers, but charities also provide us with interesting case studies. Let's look at Oxfam. Its purpose - its reason for being - is to "fight global poverty." An organization was formed, a structure built for a purpose, and global poverty is, we can presume, best fought through this structure. "Oxfam" was, then, birthed from this imperative; and it would not be unreasonable of us to assume that to "fight global poverty" remains its foundational decree. We must then ask; what if it was found that, in existing the way it does, as a structure, "Oxfam" is, in the long run, contributing towards the continuance of global poverty? What if we were to find, through wide scale systemic analysis, that "Oxfam" was part of the problem it hoped to eradicate? The true test for Oxfam at this point would be whether, in knowing this, it was willing to sacrifice its own existence in order to serve the "fight against global poverty."

With structures like Oxfam - those that claim to have a specific mission that runs deeper than their own survival - we must always ask what lies down there at the bottom. Is it "fight global poverty"? Or is it "survival"? If Oxfam was to blink out of existence, thousands of people would be without jobs. We must also ask; what runs deeper for these people; "fight global poverty" or "survival (of the current way of things)."

When a structure with the foundational imperative of "survival" claims to be motivated by some other root-purpose then we can rightly describe it as playing games. It is not, in the strictest sense of the word, serious about its stated purposes; and it cannot be until it is willing to unearth "survival" and place these purposes beneath it. This may seem a lot to ask, and indeed for most structures it is far too much; but this is one of the great ethical lessons that archetypes like Jesus offer us. He was serious. Deadly serious. And this is what he, and all others like him, ask of us.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal.

The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?

The most obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

[Jonathan Haidt]
'Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice' 

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.

A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. 

Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

In a sufficiently intense competition, everyone who doesn’t throw all their values under the bus dies out […] This is the infamous Malthusian trap, where everyone is reduced to “subsistence”.

[Scott Alexander]
'Meditations on Moloch'

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The Importance of Rituals

Ritual allows us to deal with change and death - both inner and outer death.

I had the opportunity, recently, to hear a sermon from Rob Bell of Mars Hill Bible Church. He addressed the importance of rituals in our lives and how they serve as a reminder for us as to what is most important.

Rituals should be seen as a "sacred holy task" that focuses you on what is most important. In his example, Rob discussed his morning ritual of making lunches and taking his boys to school. This ritual serves as a reminder of his calling to take care of his boys.

What is it that is most important to you?

Do your "rituals" reflect what is most important to you through your actions?

We need to constantly be checking ourselves and the rituals that we participate in, to make sure we are focused on the most worthy pursuits.

[David Korff]
Found at Thinking about things blog (now dead)

I recently read an article about a paramedic who created a ritual to help him separate from all the things he had seen during the day and create a space for being with his family.

Everyday when he got home, he would imagine hanging all the troubles of the work day on the tree next to his back door. As he entered the house he would touch the tree and walk into the house, leaving the work day behind–a simple ritual to help his subconscious mind to know that it was time to focus on his family.

Rituals of Transition

The paramedic touching the tree and setting the intention of being fully present for his family is an example of a transition ritual. Another example that most of us are familiar with is bedtime rituals which help children settle down for the night. The more consistent the story time and lights out, the more the child becomes to depend on the ritual and can make the transition from busy day to restful night.

Rituals of transition help us move from one area of our lives to another.  

We can make use of this idea of rituals to help us be in the moment and make the transition from one area of focus to another, e.g., work to home, creating space to focus on a project, bedtime, etc. The elements important to creating a ritual is setting an intention, performing the action and making the action a regular occurrence so that it becomes a habit.

Rituals of Relaxation and Focus

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, authors of the book The Power of Full Engagement, maintain that we do not need to manage our time, we need to manage our energy, and that we have to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

Loehr and Schwartz worked for years with top athletes, and noticed that they were able to reset their bodies and minds in little time, with highly practiced, repeated - scheduled - actions (i.e., rituals.)

Watch a basketball player at the free throw line or a tennis player before they serve. Many have a little routine that they do each time before they take a shot or serve. It may be the number of times they bounce the ball or how they touch their body.

You can use this idea to create small rituals of relaxation and focus and repeat them regularly throughout your day. You can tie these rituals to specific events in your day.

[Carol Woodliff]
The Importance of Rituals, found at WMV Group

[...] I attribute a positive value to all religions. In their symbolism I recognize those figures which I have met with in the dreams and fantasies of my patients.

In their moral teaching I see efforts that are the same as or similar to those made by my patients, when, guided by their own insight or inspiration, they seek the right way of dealing with the forces of the inner life.

Ceremonial, ritual, initiation rites and ascetic practices, in all their forms and variations, interest me profoundly as so many techniques for bringing about a proper relation to these [inner] forces.

[C.G. Jung]
Modern Man In Search Of A Soul ('Freud and Jung'), p.121, 122

The game and the creation of the game must be seen as a single phenomenon, and indeed, it is subjectively plausible to say that the sequence is really playable only so long as it retains some elements of the creative and unexpected.

If the sequence is totally known, it is ritual, although perhaps still character forming.

If we define play as the establishment and exploration of relationship, then greeting and ritual are the affirmation of relationship. But obviously mixtures of affirmation and exploration are common.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 150-1

"Ritual is poetry in the world of acts."

In this way of thinking, the performance of ritual has no special power of its own. Its power comes from the effects that it, like poetry, has on the people who take part in and experience it. Just as a well-written poem can reshape the awareness of its reader or hearer, revealing connections that might otherwise go unnoticed and highlighting neglected meanings, a well-performed ritual can do the same for those who take part in it.

Thus, celebrating the stations of the year isn't a mere formality. It focuses the experience of time and the seasons, lifting participants out of the limited consciousness of passing days into a wider awareness of the turning wheel of the year. It reminds them that their lives take place in a larger context, one in which living beings and spiritual powers also have a place. It restores meaning to a world in which meaning often seems in short supply.

The mind also has unrecognized potentials that can be awakened through the redefining power of ritual. Thus ritual has effects that go well beyond the realm of psychology, and into subtler realms little understood by modern ways of approaching the world.

[...] ritual is empty only when it's misused or ineptly performed. Done with skill and a grasp of basic principles, it can be full to bursting with meaning and can communicate that fulness to our everyday lives.

Whatever else can be said about it, ritual is a performing art related to drama, storytelling, and poetry recitation [...] For this reason, the regular practice of ritual is the most important step in walking the Sun Path. By performing and experiencing rituals, novice ritualists learn from personal experience what works and what doesn't, and rehearse the skills required until they can do an effective ritual working at a moments notice.

[John Michael Greer]
The Druidry Handbook,  p. 170-1

To clarify, let us consider those ceremonials which devolve upon personal crises, such as death, marriage, puberty, or illness. These can be considered “existential" situations; that is, people die, marry, sicken, become sexually mature and economically responsible in all societies.

In primitive societies, such ordinary human events are rendered extraordinary, that is, they are made meaningful and valuable, through the medium of the dramatic ceremonies. Here we confront man raising himself above the level of the merely biological, affirming his identity, and defining his obligations to himself and to the group.

The ritual drama, then, focuses on ordinary human events and makes them, in a sense, sacramental.

At the same time, the ceremonials we are speaking of enable the individual to maintain integrity of self while changing life roles. The person is freed to act in new ways without crippling anxiety, or becoming a social automaton. That is, the person discharges the new status but the status does not become the person.

This, I believe, is the central psychological meaning of the theme of death and rebirth, of constant psychic renewal, which is encountered so frequently in primitive ceremonials. It is an organic theme; what one is emerges out of what one was. There is no mechanical separation, only an organic transition, extending, characteristically, over a considerable time, often crowded with events, and never traumatic, but modulated and realistic in its effects.

[Stanley Diamond]
'Plato and the Primitive'

People who are not in close contact with their own unconscious have great difficulty accepting the slow, unhurried, cyclic rhythms of nature, which allow time for birth, maturation, and death.

When some part of us dies, there must be a time of mourning, a period of withdrawal and introspection, a period of allowing the tears to fall. Tears connect us to our hearts, our real values, our own inner Home. Without them, we become brittle, warped, prunes instead of plums.

Born into a society in which rites of passage are not a consciously nor firmly entrenched part of life, we do not understand ritual. We hate death and we do not really believe in resurrection. The rituals which would connect us with these rhythms in ourselves we find "boring."

Thus when the unconscious naturally tries to move us onto a new level of awareness, we feel violated because we are unable to enter the death experience; we experience ourselves as victims, rather than participants. We are half-aware that some life-threatening sacrifice has been made, something dead is inside us, something "crazy" is going on, but we do not take time to find out who the new person is, nor do we have the slightest idea what territory we have crossed into (see Trafford 1982).

The tragedy is that if we do not give ourselves space and time to find out, we attempt to live in the new era despite being inadequately equipped to do so, for we still have only the old concepts of ourselves.

We are like confused butterflies just emerged from our chrysalises, butterflies who still think like caterpillars yet blame everyone else for damaging our wings, when the truth is we are afraid to take responsibility for the transformation that has taken place. Instead of taking time to let our beautiful wings unfold in readiness for new life, we fearfully draw back into non-existent cocoons, our protective coverings gone.

[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.211

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