About 20 years ago, a Ph.d. psychologist working for an executive placement firm told me that, out of all the people he’d ever tested or interviewed, I was the one least suited for life in a corporation. Some might say that to be good news in terms of the potential for good moral character, but it’s certainly bad news in terms of job prospects, especially for someone not really having entrepreneurial talents. By the way, the major reason he had for saying I’m ill-suited to corporate life was my living mind which he said was not desirable in American corporations and not common there. This doesn’t mean there aren’t smart or clever corporate creatures, only that their intelligence isn’t the sort to be described as “living mind”. I’m not so sure there are many living minds to be found nowadays in any of the realms within the West, not in academia, not in religious institutions, not in the offices of publishers, not in the news media. Of course, most of these human and mostly bureaucratic organizations are organized in ways similar to General Motors.
In any case, I found it a little bit surprising that: Conformity Does Not Necessarily Mean Good Team Work, Study Finds. Then I realized I could write a book about this subject, but this is only a rough sketch of an introduction to that book.
I like putting in some of my volunteer time on projects where I’m one of ten or twenty or even fifty volunteers. I dislike attending meetings and — partly because of my time constraints — I also dislike being one of the organizers. Otherwise, I have too good a reputation of being a good team-worker, helping to cook at some projects or wash pots and dishes at others or organize supplies or whatever. I get asked to work at too many affairs at my parish, though I’m not currently active as a volunteer at other communities. Others like to organize or shop or visit merchants to solicit donations. Fine. I prefer to wash dishes and then quietly return to my books and computer when it’s done.
It all works out. To a remarkable extent, these sorts of volunteer projects are self-organizing not because everyone shows up as generic human creatures ready to be told what to do. Nor do they enter those projects as free-willed human creatures ready to do whatever seems to be most profitable.
In general, we enter public spaces as particular creatures with particular intentions (growth paths as organism), constrained by our own human natures, soma and genome and mind formed by our responses to our environments. Of course, the formation of our minds take place in peculiar environments and much in the way of our responses is made possible by our specific cultures. What is not made possible is excluded, for the most part. New possibilities can be raised by non-conformists, by those who experience unusual mental or spiritual states, by those who learn or experience something unusual from another culture or from some recently explored region of God’s Creation.
Freedom itself, of the sort which concerns us modern human beings, is something which arose in the empirical world as an apish creature became a different sort of apish creature, one living in communities in which new possibilities have arisen because of the relationships which develop as large-scale and complex human communities develop.
Let me summarize, at the risk of over-simplification, and I’ll warn any new or casual readers that I’ll be pulling in ideas from my worldview, the entire narrative which combines my metaphysical system and my Christian beliefs with a variety of realms of empirical knowledge to give my approximation of the story which God is telling — His Creation.
Human beings have behaviors, attitudes, and minds which exist at the interfaces of various human communities, nuclear families and extended families and local polities and churches and so forth, and those complex human beings are not under any sort of direct control of a free-will or any other agency, immaterial soul or whatever, which exists at a point or less so that it’s not subject to the laws of our physical universe. Human beings are physical organisms, as St. Thomas Aquinas and modern biologists teach us. We human beings are also the behaviors we exhibit as we live at those interfaces with so many parts of Creation.
An individual human being, a human physical organism, is only the foundation for a more complex creature which is organism plus a lot more where the “lot more” is mostly relationships. At the same time, we have to realize that — consistent with the so-called ‘radical’ interpretations of quantum mechanics — relationships create stuff, even living stuff. There is a very complex, recursive and iterative, process going on. Relationships create stuff, beginning with God’s love from which He created all that is not Him. And stuff formed by increasingly complex relationships will allow the formation of more complex relationships. We are physical organisms which are our behaviors (including thoughts) at the interfaces with those various realms of Creation and we are also the rapidly evolving technologies and skills we make part of our lives, assuming we make them part of our lives in a way that enriches us rather than just making us slaves to central powers or to the herd which lazy and compliant and fearful human beings form.
Relationships, at least serious relationships, are created by those who have some real stuff, in a manner of speaking. Those who are merely moving along with the herd aren’t in the process of forming the sorts of relationships which lead to rich and meaning-laden communities of any sort — economic or spiritual or intellectual. There is a give-and-take to forming a successful social club just as there is to forming a successful multi-partner consulting operation. There is also give-and-take when a social club successfully forms relationships with the local hospital and little league and give-and-take when a consulting firm of engineers form successful relationships with local manufacturers and departments of public works.
There’s a lot to explore in the general area of human social and moral order. I’m currently busy scoping out what I might contribute to an enrichment and complexification of our ability to discuss and analyze these aspects of human life in a world grown much more complicated and complex and rich than the most creative thinkers could have imagined even during the early decades of the 20th century when the ideas of Planck and Einstein and Bohr, Cantor and Russell, Nietzsche and Bergson, Joyce and Picasso, were starting to form a new human environment to which only those creative few could respond. A rapidly changing human realm of Creation leaves many of us ever more disoriented and incapable of dealing with the changes by anything better than surrender to the central powers of our age or to the herd.
Those conformists who would fit fully into roles assigned them by others won’t have any chance to develop the stuff to participate in the projects needed during a time of change, a time of opportunities and problems. More of us need to learn how to form teams of those sorts of feisty individuals who don’t willingly follow orders from above unless they understand the reason for those orders and agree with them at least somewhat. In other words, we need to learn how to form teams in a radically different way from those which generally are formed, by directive, in our increasingly hierarchical societies with their secrecy at the top and with information and orders which come down on a need-to-know basis.