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February 15, 2010

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Kia

But the best way would be to teach discernment through the liberal arts.

I thought that's what they were for. Why does it now seem like a fantasy?

Phil Cubeta

Because we work under, subordinated to, those trained to be MBAs and managers, and supervisors. Louts rule and hold the liberally educated accountable. PR, Human Resources, Advertising, and Employee Counseling (where the liberal arts majors find themselves), all report on up to Top Management with MBAs. Those trained in the liberal arts who operate outside the corporate hieararchy, seeing the functions just listed as simony, are mostly marginal. "Truth is a bitch who must to kennel," remarks Lear's Fool. The world has indeed turned upside down.

Phil Cubeta

Discernment: "Momma, the Emperor is naked."

Kia

You know how when you go to chain bookstores or airport newsstands there are all these books on management and schools of management? I never used to look at them, imagining that management was some kind of dull, arcane science for specialists (the places where they were for sale should have told me something but I'm dim sometimes). Then when I finally did start flipping through the odd one here or there it struck me that they were moving rather commonplace ideas at about 1/100th of the speed, and at considerably less of the volume, at which literature moves ideas--and they were written badly and wrapped in cheap, shiny packaging.

Instead of all those cheesy gimmicky books, which you could read from here till the end of time and never get any wiser, a person could just read something like Benjamin Constant's essay "Of Usurpation." I'm reading it now, and I have to stop every couple of pages because I get such a charge out of it.

As I read it I realize also that a liberal arts education in the "discernment" sense can't be taught in one course on business ethics, and you can't make MBAs human by requiring them to read William Blake or Tolstoy. Sustaining that kind of habit of reflection, as an activity, takes up time, time over the spread of a life, in which our relationship to experience goes through all kinds of ebbs and flows, accelerations, decelerations, and shifts in light and shadow. You have to feel that that movement, like the unspooling of a ribbon, is your life. I do, that's my whole problem.

I certainly don't remember signing any agreement to hand over my mental real estate to the louts who rule. I recognize their power, but do not grant them any authority over my experience or my understanding, even if it means that I sometimes feel very isolated with my thoughts.

Phil Cubeta

Kia, what a moving and invigorating comment. You didn't sign an agreement, any more than with a shrink wrap agreement or a social contract. You simply behave in character. And as the winners say, "How's that working for ya'?"

I love what you wrote here,

As I read it I realize also that a liberal arts education in the "discernment" sense can't be taught in one course on business ethics, and you can't make MBAs human by requiring them to read William Blake or Tolstoy. Sustaining that kind of habit of reflection, as an activity, takes up time, time over the spread of a life, in which our relationship to experience goes through all kinds of ebbs and flows, accelerations, decelerations, and shifts in light and shadow. You have to feel that that movement, like the unspooling of a ribbon, is your life. I do, that's my whole problem.

We are agreed then that discernment as taught by moi and others to successful louts is a con? I fool them at best, but not myself and not the discerning? And the rhetorical form best suited to planting seeds of something better - perhaps the wasp who buries her eggs deep in her host?

If you have not delved yet in to Appreciative Inquiry, Kia, you might sample it, against the chance that someday you will work for a corporate consulting firm or a sub rosa branch of the CIA.

It works well in instilling hope, and change we can believe in at all levels of society. Socratic discourse turned to the purpose of spreading contagion. "When in Wealth Bondage have you felt most free?"

tm

My money's on AI. I just googled around for the Constant essay and received bupkis. Then AI: lotsa stuff, including cool images that put it all in a much appreciated nutshell, gave me a good hearty slap on the back and added a massive dollop of discernment of my positive core to my dream empowerment component.

I'd just like to add that once I've brought my strengths up to Kryptontic levels, I'm going to find that Constant essay and maybe even read this JSTOR article about it if I can bust open the JSTOR larder. They've got a great racket and I can't tell you how many louts want in, so they can share Ben Con and JJ Rousseau and 99 more just like them with you for a mere $39 + tax and shipping. This is the next big thing! You guyz roark!

JJ Commoner

AI, Seligsman, Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, etc. HR stuff for the MBA's. People are an irritant to be swiffered away ... and discernment doesn't pay, so it's not on the curriculum.

Kia's ...

Then when I finally did start flipping through the odd one here or there it struck me that they were moving rather commonplace ideas at about 1/100th of the speed, and at considerably less of the volume, at which literature moves ideas--and they were written badly and wrapped in cheap, shiny packaging.

I was gonna try to comment something smart, add value, etc., but all I am left with is ... what Kia said.

I feel pretty lonely most of the time, too, and I'm not even learned in the liberal arts.

Kia

We are agreed then that discernment as taught by moi and others to successful louts is a con? I fool them at best, but not myself and not the discerning?

Nah, you go on, like good teachers. You do it in the hope someone is awake and listening, and, on the chance that that person is one of the holy angels or the God Apollo in mufti, you do it as well as you can.

Kia

I only meant that you can begin with Blake/Tolstoy/Marvell or even Benjamin Constant, but it's just a beginning on the subject. Someone has to begin. You, then.

tm

Every business book guru has a cult following his or her every discernment -- milliards attuned to his tweets, several fashionable FB fansites, and innumerable connections on Linked In, as well as who knows how many large dumpsters filled with his or her remaindered "Make Your Minions Produce, Maim and Slaughter @ the Speed of Light" etc.

It's just business.

Phil Cubeta

Yes, it is just bidnis. But every bidnis needs a Vision, Mission, and Core Values, as well as a value proposition and a second bottomline. So also every dynastic family, and each indidividual wealth holder should have these values-based items. Creating the Family Mission Statement is a good start on Discernment. We do that by getting, for example, a deck of cards, each with a value printed on it. Family members sort the deck in priority order. Then from that we do the Mission Statement suitable from framing. This is discernment, state of.

Or, for the true leading edge, we take a Gospel of Wealth, from the Patriarch, his story of genesis and telesis. His story of the epic of which he has been the protagonist. We make a video of self-narrative so that so it can be shared with generations to come. This too is discernment.

But in this is an opportunity for you, Kia, and you, TM. We can also make a custom autobigraphy, hand crafted and published, that embodies the client's moral autobiography. See storyzon.com. We need hacks. We pay $12 an hour, though we are thinking of outsourcing to a lower cost labor market. We prefer doctorates in literature, but will consider masters, in any of the humanities. Prior experience with alienated intellectual labor in a corporate setting is preferred.

tm

There is no task more noble or worthy of discerning dedication than that of giving the Mover & Shaker, the Titan of Bubble, the Twitterato Extraordinaire, the Bestower of Negative Cash Flow to Mankind, his due. If selected for the honor, I would do all I could to bring each uniquely human story into the temple of corporate sheen - nay, make that template, you know, like those books they make for newborn babies, where it tells the baby's story, and all you have to do is on each page write in Baby's name:

Page 1: Baby X Arrived today! /Month-day-year/. It was sunny/raining/snowy!

Page 2: Mommy and Daddy are so happy to see little /blue/grey/brown/other-eyed/ X!

Page 3: X now weighs _____ lbs!

But this, all this glory, was foreseen, as I have learned, by Tocqueville, as I lately discovered by seeking to learn more about Benjamin Constant, who until Kia mentioned him was pretty much just to this 'umble scrivener an empty name. But here, building on the insights of Montesquieu and Constant, is Tocqueville:

This was Tocqueville’s chilling description of the new features of despotism. ‘I
see’, he wrote, ‘an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves
without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.
Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others…..
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring
their enjoyments and watching their fates… It willingly works for their happiness; but it
wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security,
foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal
affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances’.
link

Pas dehors de Wealth Bondage.

Phil Cubeta

What a wonderful quotation. I was thinking of Plato's Cave and how the cave dwellers react when the Guardians escort them into the light. The cave-raised populace is blinded by the light, sees nothing, and begs to return to the shadow-land. Discernment, could we achieve it, would blind us.

jean russell

Oh dear... some stereotypes you have here: where never an MBA did love her literature and only went to the theater to be seen. It makes for fun reading, but the truth requires more....discerning views.

You must be getting into some consulting to be giving us a nice square matrix where louts and saints might be football teams, clearly on on side or the other.

with love and tenderness.

Phil Cubeta

Thank you, Jean, for your tender tutelage. I stand corrected. http://www.bible.ca/marriage/spanking-norman-rockwell.jpg

Yes, an MBA can love literature, as can a Professor of Philanthropy at a College for Financial People. The MBA with a deep background in literature, philosophy, psychology reports to a SVP with none. Her boss calls the tune and she dances. So literature dance to the tune of authority. The lesser reports to the greater, the solution reports to the problem. Seeing this is not so hard. "Doing well while doing good" within that context is the stuff of story, including Plutarch's life of Alexander in which the discerning advisors are speared or crucified for their temerity. A smarter advisor would have reframed the whole game so as to have taken smaller risks. I take appreciative inquiry to be such an effort in service to the powers that be, with no doubt an honorable exception or two.

Phil Cubeta

The dialetic of insight, discernment, sightedness, vision and blindness and the cure of blindness goes back a long way. Jesus did raise the dead and give sight to the blind. We know that by reading the Gospels, and finding how blind we were as the scales fall from our own eyes. The moralist in Athens was considered a healer. "Know thyself" is a moral maxim. See thyself. Hence, "Physician! Heal thyself." We are blind guides curing the blind; physicians dying of plague curing the plague. When I reframe this to make myself more self-contented to feel less remorse, am I getting better or getting sicker? Dr Drew says that "Addiction is the one disease that denies that it is sick." In reality, most moral deformities have that aspect. The sinner glories in it, as the fool does in his wisdom. I am much in need, I guess, of a Life Coach to set my feet on the path of righteousness.

twitter.com/ddenizen

My money is still on the slow and steady. The tortoise is making a comeback. This MBA fad has run its course and has little more to add of significance.

After all, it's Turtles all the way down.

Duprene Gebs

This bourgeois infighting is the turtle's pajamas!

Phil Cubeta

Mr Debs, your legacy continues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs

See interfaith worker justice.
http://www.iwj.org/template/index.cfm

Their Executive Director, Kim Bobo, I, and a Rabbi who is a former Board Member of IWJ are doing a video next week on social justice fundraising in the light of the Torah. Discernment?

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