Localism and Care for the World: Thoughts on a New Philosophy of Work

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things, which he can afford to let alone.

-       Henry David Thoreau

To create a philosophy of work that is fit for human beings, we need to remind ourselves of three truths:

1.              You don’t have to be rich or have a lot of money in order to live well.

2.              The world is arranged to make it quite easy to acquire everything you need to live well.

3.              If you’re finding life difficult and not enjoyable then you are doing something wrong.

We have forgotten that money and wealth are not goods in themselves. When we seek to acquire and accumulate more and more wealth, we inevitably cause harm to the environment and exploit the least advantaged among us. In the end, we only end up destroying our own ability to experience happiness and to live well. A poor or modest home, filled with love and healthy relationships, is happier than a mansion filled with isolated individuals and broken relationships. Philosophers have long pointed out that the acquisition of our basic needs should be enjoyable and not too time consuming. As Epicurus said in 300 BCE, it is pleasurable to eat, to have sex, to sleep, even to work if we are doing what we love. The basic necessities of life are good, provide enjoyment, and are abundantly provided when moderately consumed. Yet too often we make it difficult for others and ourselves by seeking not just to satisfy our basic needs, but greedy ambition tempts us to pursue lifestyles that are unnecessary, unenjoyable, and destructive to the environment.

We’ve allowed avarice to flood our lives with unnecessary products forcing us to work and bury our lives in menial servitude to unhealthy status symbols of large homes, expensive cars, and shiny toys. But as Thoreau once said: “In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we live simply and wisely.” His advice was to simplify our lives. We should use our talents and time making some real contribution to humanity and the world. If it does make us wealthy, we must not be seduced by the siren song of greed and conspicuous consumption, but still live simply and use our surplus wealth to help others make their contribution. Yet this goes against many years of cultural conditioning!

At least since the industrial revolution, we’ve been socialized into believing that being a productive member of society means working long hours making money for someone else in return for a paycheck. The proof we are a person of value to society and our family is that we work hard and are a good provider. We are taught that if we don’t waste time engaged in activities that neither produce nor consume economic resources, then we show our good character and earn a favored status before God. A person’s worth and value is determined by his or her ability to make money. So we’ve come to feel guilty when we aren’t working, and it seems wasteful if we’re just enjoying ourselves outside of economically approved activities.

Further, if we’re to be considered good employees today with modern technology, especially our smart phones, we’re expected to be available 24/7 to our employers. So instead of being an expression of our humanity and a joyful exercise of our talents and skills in service to others in community, work has become difficult, tedious, and demeaning. Technology should have brought us more creative ways to secure our basic needs, while serving others, and without harming the planet. It should have freed up more leisure time for cultivating our relationships and developing ourselves. Instead it has been used to produce artificial needs, bringing greater consumption, less time for building relationships, and more harm to the planet. Instead of creative leisure time, which renews our spirits, technology has turned us into insecure narcissists who need others to like our posts and friend us on social media. Only their acceptance will assure us that we are lovable and as great as we think we are. Or seeing the fabricated happiness of others’ Facebook or Instagram posts, we fear we are missing out and become anxious and depressed.

Technology mixed with greed and anxiety has led us to produce far more stuff than we need to satisfy our human needs. We have an economy of waste and artificial needs, which drives the consumer economy but kills the human spirit. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the world today will be annihilated in runway consumption and mindless work. Such consumer capitalism and soulless labor destroys the very things they seek to satisfy. We become like leaky pots, never able to be filled but always needing more. Our lives are consumed in wasteful consumption and dreary jobs. We have jobs, but not work. We pursue careers, but not vocations. We have turned our lives into a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.

We are each responsible for the impact of our work on the world. We must be creative not destructive in our relationship to the world through our work. Work clears a space for ourselves, a clearing in the physical world where we can achieve our basic existential needs for security, respect and meaningful freedom. But not by injuring others, exploiting community or damaging the environment. We must assume responsibility even for the acts that harm the world, but our not our own. As Abraham Joshua Heschel was fond of saying, “All are not guilty but all are responsible.”

Today people and the environment serve the economy. That’s backward! The economy should serve people and the environment. This new philosophy of work can be neither individualistic nor collectivist. Neither held hostage to global capitalism not controlled by planned socialism. It must be grounded on a belief in localism and the principle of simplifying our wants, so that work becomes something that we love to do and not something that we have to do. If we simplify our wants to those needs, which are natural and necessary, and then seek to satisfy those needs locally, we will free ourselves to discover meaningful work. Work can be humanizing and a joyful expression of our talents and our own authentic way of being human. 

Recall the five principles of localism, the five R’s, which will provide the context to simplify our wants and return to a work that is joyful and creative realizing our full human potential. When we live more and consume less, we will experience the joy that is in intrinsic to life itself. The five R’s are:

Responsibility – we should govern our local communities through equal power relationships and peer practices of town hall meetings, citizen councils, rotational stewardship positions, and mentors. We need to return to some sense of real and genuine self-government and public participation.

Reduction – we should reduce our dependence on distant sources, whether governmental or commercial, for the provision of the necessary goods and services we need to live our lives.

Replacement  - we should replace goods and services acquired from remote sources with goods and services produced and provided locally.

Regeneration – we can regenerate the world through the practice of local innovation and creativity in finding new ways, and improving old ways, of meeting our needs.

Reconnecting – This is not a strategy of isolation or secession form either the national or global community, but a return to the only authentic source of political power – the people governing themselves at the local level. Upon the foundation of self-sustaining and self-governing local communities, we can reconnect community-to-community and then to our governments in the exchange of ideas, best practices, and in assisting less fortunate communities.

For more information on the type of communities such a vision suggests and how to manage them see my book, Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership, at https://goo.gl/MpBiWl.

Return to Community

“What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.”  -- Henry David Thoreau

We are only limited by our thinking. This is a self-imposed limitation. Whatever we can conceive, we can eventually achieve. Today’s dreams become tomorrow’s realities. So we must be careful what we dream. We must be cautious of what we conceive and express in words for what we imagine become seeds scattered in the winds of time, which eventually come to fruition in the plans and deeds of future generations. We could list the things, which are commonplace today, but only a few generations ago would have seemed impossible. Air travel, space travel, the Internet, cell phones, 3-D printing, and the list could go on for pages and pages! Among them are a few things that I believe have not been beneficial—the professionalization of management, work viewed as career, the collusion of big business with big government. It struck me just now as I wrote those words that the positive innovations have been in the area of technological products, while the negative innovations have been cultural, or in the realm of ideas and values by which we understand, use, and manage the technology.  

It reminds me of something E. O. Wilson said: The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

It seems we have lost our ability to understand and then love nature and other human beings. Or, at least, we’ve allowed this ability to become withered and starved in our blind pursuit of the external goods of money, power, and status, where we seek to understand nature and other human beings only in order to exploit them more efficiently.

The wealth of nations is found in productive labor in local communities and in work done as vocation. Today global capitalism punishes productive labor and rewards those who trade in speculation and profit off the imbalance in markets and the exploitation of financial markets—all of which feeds off of productive labor without adding any value itself. Our political system will not fix this nor will big business. The only solution lies with ordinary people turning away from big government and big business and engaging in local economics and local self-government.  

We don’t need to work for large corporations. We don’t need to cooperate with a predatory mass consumer culture. We can return to and create authentic local cultures in our local communities. Work done in local communities, with local resources, and with local management becomes a vocation; work becomes healing and even sacred. Of course, work in local communities cannot be managed by professional managers and rank-based leaders. Work as vocation and genuine community require peer-based organization, design, and management, where we all share and participate in the competency of managing ourselves and our labor and in making the decisions, which govern our shared lives together.

I imagine neighborhoods, each having a corner lot with a multistoried vertical farm, where all the food they need year-round is grown. Next to it is a shop with a 3-D printer where all the equipment to maintain the vertical farm is made. I imagine local communities governing themselves through community councils and ensuring the well-being of each and every member of their community. Where education, food, shelter, health care, and even entertainment originate and are managed by the local community. In such authentic community, each person comes to feel irreplaceable in the affection and esteem of others, and everyone enjoys the satisfaction of his or her basic existential needs for security, respect, and meaningful freedom.

I have said and imagined more about this idea in my book: Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations. You may find the book here--http://goo.gl/qOeaue

LOCALISM SEEKING A PEOPLE

Paul Klee, the great Bauhaus artist, said:

Nothing can be rushed. It must grow. It should grow of itself. We must go on seeking it. We have found parts but not the whole! We still lack the ultimate power: for the people are not with us. But we seek a people. We have begun…more we cannot do.

Global capitalism is like a high-powered bullet train speeding towards a cliff of economic unsustainability, carrying all the people of the world, as well as the environment along as passengers. It was moments from the cliff bringing certain destruction to it and all the passengers when it came off the tracks and derailed (2008). A perfect time for the passengers to realize the ultimate destination of the train and get off, to choose a new mode of transportation, or at least to choose a different direction for the train! Sadly, instead of reevaluating the mode and direction of transportation, we are rushing to get the train back on track and race once more towards certain destruction over the cliff.     

We can choose differently. We can choose to refuse to cooperate with global capitalism. We can choose to accept more responsibility at the level of our neighborhoods and local communities to stay and manage resources locally. We can choose to reduce our own consumption of goods and services that come from distant sources. We can choose to replace those goods and services with those produced and sold locally, which support and build local businesses. We can choose to find creative ways to regenerate our local economies and local markets, which will employ and care for our local under and unemployed. We can choose to reconnect with other local communities in sharing best practices.    

The polyphonic voices in the world must be orchestrated into a beautiful symphony of human worth and dignity with a creative and productive diversity harmonized into a global network of local communities, rooted in the geography of place but aware of their interdependence with the global community. We have the technology to return to local communities and to stay globally connected. We only need a people. We seek a people.

The Destructive Consequences of the Professionalization of Management and the Loss of Work as Vocation – Further Negative Effects of the Supermeme of Leadership

To live in community and to work in organizations requires the arrangement, design, and management of human cooperation. The question is: How will we choose to arrange, design, and manage human cooperation? The supermeme of leadership leads us to believe the only way to do so is through the rank-based authority of leadership positions, where some one or some few are placed in charge over others to do the commanding and controlling of their cooperation. The supermeme of leadership is so unquestioned and all-powerful that most people cannot even envision any other way to order human cooperation and manage work than through leadership positions.   

In the twentieth century, with the rise of large and complex business organizations, the supermeme of leadership naturally led to the professionalization of management. This, I believe, has been disastrous for human wellbeing, and the twenty-first century is witnessing the catastrophic failure of this, now global, management system. The professional management taught in our business schools has systemized unsustainable business practices and created economies, which can no longer produce good jobs at livable wages.

With the professionalization of management, we also lost the notion of work as a vocation, where the work itself provided pleasure, meaning, and fulfillment. Today the goal is promotion, to advance up the ranks of management, and the work is secondary to maximizing profit. Work no longer possesses intrinsic value, but is to be manipulated to give the appearance of value, where the only measure of success is profit regardless of the affect on workers, society, or the environment. 

We need to recover the notion of the intrinsic value of work – that the skillful practice of our work is worthy of our commitment and care. We must realize that we can bring this attitude of skillful practice to almost any job to both ennoble the work and ourselves in the process. Work as vocation is to see the worth of work and the nobility of our dedication to produce meaningful goods and services, to improve our talents, and to serve others through the skillful practice of our labor.  

Of course, to recover the notion of work as vocation and to create authentically valuable work will require we reject the professionalization of management. To alienate decision-making from the work itself and locate it in some separate management position turns the skillful practice of work into the empty and meaningless repetition of coerced movements, robbing the worker of joy and the labor of significance. No, the management of decision-making must be both the responsibility and competence of every community member and each worker in our business organizations.

For more insight into these topics, please see my book - Deconstructing the SUPERMEME of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations. Available at amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-SUPERMEME-Leadership-Communities-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00MUGGEJ8/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dp_tMjfub0SPHME5_im

Reimagining How We Live & Work Together

We live in a world of incredible beauty, abundant resources, and much human goodness. Yet, too often life for many people is filled with ugliness, scarcity, and cruelty. There is a joy inherent in the simple fact of our existence and a happiness present in each moment. Yet, too often many people are caught up in anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. It doesn’t have to be this way.

A chief obstacle to living better, more productive, and flourishing lives is how we allow power and authority to be distributed and exercised in our communities and work organizations. We made a mistake when we decided that management should be a profession, instead of the competence of every single person residing in our communities and working in our organizations.

When management becomes a profession, power and authority get distributed through rank-based leadership positions, which distort the productive flow of information and resources through the community or organization. Unwittingly every business school, management curriculum, and leadership program contribute to the further decline of a healthy and robust economic system.

One telltale sign of the dysfunction of our professionalized management system is the continual need to regulate business and large corporations. A healthy system is self-regulating. The fact that we must regulate business and corporations today, otherwise they would destroy themselves and harm everyone else, reveals that they are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Government intervention in the economic system is not the answer.

We must fundamentally reimagine how we design and manage our communities and work organizations. This will be the great challenge of the 21^st century if we ever want to reach the potential present in our human nature and the possibilities found in our common human destiny.

That is exactly what I present in my new book, Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities and Leaderless Organizations. You’re probably asking yourself, “What the heck is a supermeme and what does he mean by deconstructing it?” Well, I invite you to purchase the book where those questions are answered. Join me in this exciting new project of creating communities and work organizations where beauty, abundance, and human goodness are the measures of our success, and each person is able to experience the joy and happiness present in each moment.  

Here is a look at the table of contents: 

Forward: Deconstructing Leadership

Chapter One: Supermemes, Idols, & Myths

Chapter Two: Power

Chapter Three: Power Relationships

Chapter Four: Conceptions of Authority—Rank-based versus Peer-based

Chapter Five: Emergence of Management Theory in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Six: Leaders, the MBA, & Leadership Programs in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Seven: Human Nature & the Nature of Community

Chapter Eight: Creating Peer-based Communities & Leaderless Organizations

Appendix One: Key Questions Regarding Leaderless Organizations

Appendix Two: The Practice of Localism in Peer-based Communities

Afterward: Becoming the Kind of Persons Who Can Flourish in Peer-based Communities and Thrive in Leaderless Organizations

You may find my book here: http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-SUPERMEME-Leadership-Communities-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00MUGGEJ8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409422684&sr=8-1&keywords=jeffrey+nielsen

Love, Localism, & Peer-Based Management Structures

This blog is dedicated to the creation of peer-based-communities, which practice the five stewardship principles of localism. At times I also like to comment on the attitude that would make the achievement of peer-based communities more certain.

Seeing through the eyes of the ego frames all our experience as threats and opportunities to our wellbeing and so fear and desire determine our moment-by-moment choices. We must replace the eyes of the ego with the eyes of universal love or unconditional love. So what we see is framed as opportunities for service and personal growth and then joy and enthusiasm determine our moment-by-moment choices. My last post on Fearless Love speaks to the particulars of coming to see with the eyes of love.

Relating this attitude of love to creating peer-based communities.

Decisions made in our communities and organizations today, which frequently harm the environment and distort economic growth so it benefits only those who already possess wealth, flow from an environment of unequal power relationship, or rank-based management and decision-making structures.

An unequal power relationship is one where there is a high power position and a low power position, where the person in the high power position can decide without input or participation from the low power person, and the person in the low power position can either do what he or she is told or suffer the consequences and penalties from the person in the high power position. Most, if not all, of our communities and organizations are structured around unequal power relationships due to our habit of designing our organizations with leader-based hierarchies.

The peer-based model shows a way to create and maintain a system of equal power relationships when it comes to managing information, decision-making, resources, and human cooperation. In place of leader-based hierarchies and rank-based systems of control, the peer model provides a system of peer councils, rotational stewardship positions, and mentors.

I trust in the intelligence and moral decency of human beings. I believe when people feel empowered to be full participants in the decisions affecting their lives, then they also feel accountable to do the right thing. Peer-based communities and organizations, I think, will quite naturally practice the five stewardship principles of localism.

What does love have to do with it?

Where rank-based communities and organizations of unequal power relationships must be strictly regulated to prevent them from destroying themselves, their people and the planet, peer-based communities and organizations of equal power relationships will be self-regulating due to love. Love is what it will take to move our communities and organizations to the peer-based model. Only love will allow us to overcome fear and let go of control to step into a more authentic and complete human life. Only love will lead us to surrender unequal power relationships over others and engage one another as equals, as peers.

Fearless Love

Imagine you could live your life without fear!

I recently published an e-book on Amazon, which I announced on this blog. I have since slightly changed the title of the book, though the slight change makes a huge difference. It is now, A Literary Suite: Stories on Beauty, Love, & Happiness. I have put a link to the book on Amazon at the end of this post.

Today, I want to provide a little context for the stories, which goes to the heart of living a life without fear. Let me begin with an observation of great importance that we all know, even though we pay little attention to it. It’s the fact that we’re constantly talking to ourselves. Almost non-stop, there is this interior monologue where we, in each moment, interpret to ourself our experience of reality. We are continuously labeling our experience of people, events, and things as either threats or opportunities to achieving what we believe we need to be happy – things like security, respect, and meaningful freedom.

Even as you read this blog, your mind is engaged in this mental chatter, as you tell yourself you agree or disagree with what you’re reading. Maybe your mind is somewhere else entirely as it talks to you about some future or past event, telling you how to perceive it as either helpful or harmful to your wellbeing. Maybe it is something as simple as your inner monologue is going over your plans for lunch and how this will be very enjoyable; or your inner monologue is telling yourself that some afternoon meeting you must attend will be very unpleasant.

 

When our inner self-talk labels something or someone as a threat or unpleasant, we begin to feel fearful and even angry. When our inner self-talk labels something or someone as an opportunity or pleasing, we begin to feel desire and even craving.

So when Buddha, and, in the West, certain stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, say it is our thinking that determines our experience of reality, what they mean is that it is how we talk to ourselves, our inner mind chatter, or how we interpret our experience in each moment as either threats or opportunities to our wellbeing that determines our reality. And whenever we label anything outside ourselves as either a threat or an opportunity we awaken fear from deep within ourselves.

Obviously the perception of a threat awakens fear, but so does the perception of an opportunity. The desire for opportunities reveals a lack that we believe we suffer and the desire to fill that lack awakens a fear that we will be unsuccessful in filling it. It is a fear that many experience repeatedly throughout the day.

Fear distorts our experience of reality; we lose touch with its essential goodness. Fear is the root cause of most of our problems in how we relate to others, community, the world, and ourselves. The fear that arises from our perception of threats and opportunities in our environment, whether people or events, produces in us feelings of self-doubt, a sense of our own inadequacy, and dissatisfaction, which in turn make us angry and unkind to others or merely indifferent to their welfare. Such anger or indifference leads to injustice in our communities and the exploitation of our environment.

We often believe it is what happens to us that causes our mental states of fear, anxiety, and insecurity, but in reality it is our inner voice, which causes us to feel fearful, anxious, and insecure.

We can train our inner voice to speak with the speech of compassion, acceptance, wisdom, courage, moderation, and integrity. When our self-talk speaks with the voice of these virtues, we no longer perceive anything outside ourselves as a threat or an opportunity to our security, respect, or meaningful freedom, because the source, origin, and locus of the satisfaction of these existential needs is within ourselves in the exercise of these virtues.

Guess what? When you no longer perceive what happens to you as either a threat or opportunity, you lose the fear. When the fear is gone, you are open to experience how wonderful, beautiful, good, and joyful each moment is and can be. You lose all desire to criticize, condemn, or judge others as well.

When you no longer see people or events outside yourself as either threats or opportunities you can love others, yourself, and the world, with a fearless love. You love without requirements or expectations, and so each moment of the day is blessed by goodness, beauty, joy, and happiness. It is this experience of fearless love, which I’m hoping to recommend to myself and to my readers in my Literary Suite of short stories.  

It is possible to live your life with a fearless love!  

Link to my book - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JYJ1GHE