Live from your values! It is a common, understandable refrain, from well-intended voices for a better world. Teach your children what good values look like by conversation and example. And become an activist in a call for values-based living. We have done this for so long in the do-good communities, that it seems heresy to contest it as an important path. Doesn’t everyone accept that values are the proper reference?
Satisfycing or False Satisfaction: I do stand here and challenge that premise. I even argue it is dangerous to our planet and society to do that as a prima facia case. Partly because it makes people feel good about themselves, that they are making a difference when they rarely are. It may meet some authority’s or experts’ idea of what is right, but I fear we are not scrutinizing the platitude it comes embedded in. We have been warned about the hazards many times by wisdom keepers but have not heard them when they ask us to examine these ideas and formulate our own understanding. We follow the siren call and can no longer think for ourselves on many subjects, including this one.
This is because we measure the wrong outcomes (e.g., I did something that seems good, and experts say it is right.) Let’s take a different view and see if we can make ourselves question this well-intended advice. In fact, it is important to wrestle with my own ideas presented here and use the same guidelines to do so. Do not trust me or anyone to do your thinking for you.
Attempted Short Cuts: For example, Danny Almagor, Co-founder of one of the well-intended Australian educational organizations called Small Giants, offers a simple and elegant 3 step path to improve our attention and practice of living from values. (Daily Good, How to Become a 100 Percenter). I respect and love Danny, but I am going to use this offered piece to make a point about learning to think for ourselves. Small Giants suggests an initiating step is to identify one’s values based on personal curiosity. (Danny’s are protecting the environment, encouraging hope and good leadership, building businesses that do social good, and working for peace.) This step seems based on the idea that starting somewhere is better than nothing ventured. A commonsense wisdom that has unforeseen hazards we will return to! Then, focus on arenas of action that align with those values (more hazards to do in his second step because it can do more harm than good). And surround yourself with like-minded people, and maybe find a mentor in that domain of action so you think more often about acting on and from your values, every day. I call this an elegant idea because it is based on a doable and meaningful effort. But it is also based on errors in thinking about how effective change and appropriate effort for humans and ecosystems works.
Missing Steps
There is a critical, urgent imperative that is missing from ALL calls for change and is missing in Western culture for sure and increasingly in colonized cultures. That is, humans in their current state of ableness and being cannot discern the values that represent what a Living System needs. Humans cannot understand values from a Living System work-at-work perspective. They use Nature as a stand-in but as a static picture. We see Living Systems as parted out, like a wrecked car, to be put back together by human effort. It is parts to be fixed by adhering fragments in relationship to one another, or getting things in the right categories so we can do the right work: rivers, land or soil, wildlife. We cannot see wholes at work because we are focused on whether entities or actions are in the right box.
Right Mind Before Start: Therefore, we must begin before the first step is— selecting our values. Instead, the first step is developing a mind that can conceive of living systems at work and learn to activate it each time with a look at the dynamic world without the intention of changing it. For example, if we look at a spouse and decide to change their behavior or values without understanding them, how they seek to function, and what they are pursuing, that is called projecting ourselves, our interpretations, and expectations onto the other. When we start with our projected values onto life and society, we are starting with ego and our currently limited understanding of a system at work. It is often a disaster for relationships, and it also is for ecological choices about living systems. We are missing the skills to see what the best-for-the-system answers, are calling for. We don't bother, or know to bother, educating ourselves in the “living systems” way of understanding, just as we do not do so for our families, neighbors, and fellow citizens. We start from a fragmenting and problem-solving worldview and action plan. Step one has to be learning to imagine and thereby understand how a particular specific system works. Not the parts and pieces we are upset about. If our view is of the environment, that is not enough. How does each system work? How does a particular life within the whole work in harmony, and therefore, what is called for from that perspective, not our human-centered, personal desires, work. Humans, when starting with themselves, have a very limited understanding and look at how it affects them or see some fragment as needing attention and what they can do about it to align with their desires (e.g., values). We cannot see how a system is actualizing itself without projecting our values onto it. We miss how it really works when we start with our curiosity and judgment of what we see in fragments.
Restrain Ego and Projection: Second, we leap from our ego and project our ideas onto living systems, because we cannot see our own distractors and mental errors that are veiled to clear seeing. Again, we have to build the capability to observe and interpret, but this time, it is our own inner intellectual and emotional processing that produces these errors. We need to put a living systems framework in mind that helps us examine our thinking and where it goes awry. And course, correct. We don't understand that humans are not ready to be humans when they are born. We know this for size and some skills and education. We are missing the core capacities to be human and carry out our work as humans.
Frameworks for Managing Mechanicalness: For example, we can learn to recognize if we are in a reactive mode, (e.g., feeling protective or defensive of our ideas and ways of seeing), being egoistic (in positioning ourselves or ideas with some hubris); or are we purposeful (e.g., working to understand the working of a whole, not a part, and the effects as well as outcomes the system benefits from as a whole)? Without this self-examination and self-management, we cannot do the work above, much less be wise change agents for the world around us.
Why don't we learn this in our upper or lower education, familying, churches, and work settings?
Ignorant Institutions: The reason for this ignorance throughout our lives, is our institutions do not understand it. This inner capacity is not known, considered, or valued as important for the whole. This capability is not part of any public institutional practice, curriculum, or development program. It is all directed at Doing, forgetting the Being State, and thinking veils that hinder and obscure that Doing.
That is the same case here with the 3 step Approach of Small Giants. Without converting to a Five-phase approach, so much arrogance and self-referencing are introduced before we begin. And society and Earth are left in a further diminished state from our Good Intentions, Best Practices, and Well-intended Expert Opinion (since all are subject to this lack of Living Systems understanding, and our inner veils and susceptibility to Errors in Thinking.
Five Phase Approach:
· Phase 1—Learn to ‘read’ living systems at work and what makes them healthy, viable, and vital, and notice our fragmenting propensity. Before we decide where to jump in.
· Phase 2- Assess your own inner state and veils, as you plan to set direction and pursuits, and do so repeatedly since it is not a permanently attainable state. It has to be regenerated every time we lose focus or experience reactive energies about a trigger subject. E.g., political stance, economic and ecological happening.
· Phase 3—Get curious about how systems work as a whole (e.g., a lifeshed, a community, an ecosystem), not what grabs our attention.
· Phase 4- Find our own work and the best place to contribute that fits with our Essence expression and systems benefit.
· Phase 5- Assess and Evaluate the Outcomes and Effects of our effort with a sincere examination. Beyond Results, we can measure.
We assume humans need some knowledge, and we can learn from experts. We miss how understanding comes about, which is by imagining how a system works. That is, the idea of the development of humans as beings is prior to urging new or better actions. A shift in mindset and perspective. A shift in capability for deciding what actions are appropriate. It is a bit like having a new class of medical students. The instructor reminds them of the desire to make a difference by entering medical school. She suggests that they think about what they feel is important for human health, and they want to make a difference in it. Where they value most, adding some value in the field.