Beyond Lifehacks, Toward Living
July 11th, 2008 — Flourishing, Productivity
Summary: The rules for getting rid of too much stuff apply equally as well to trimming down your todo and commitment lists. Set a limit of what you can do, and don’t take anything else on until you finish or drop something you’ve already started.
If you’d like to hear more tips on how to stop carrying around your overfilled boxes of commitments, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email.
July 9th, 2008 — Flourishing
If you work from your home or would like to work from home and have a family (your partner counts as family if you don’t have kids!), stop skimming, sit up, and pay attention. This may be the most important thing you have read in a while.
A friend of mine recently quit her stay at home consulting job due to her work-life balance getting out of whack. I’ll let her out herself in due time, but let’s just say she’s no small fry and she’s very good at what she does.
The problem was that her work became the only thing that she was doing - but she’s a wife and mother, too. Her words:
“I spent so much time and effort trying to be physically present at home that I forgot about being mentally and psychologically present.”
If you work from home, ask yourself whether you’re fully present or just physically present. If you’re planning on working from home, ask yourself whether you’ll be able to separate work from life.
July 3rd, 2008 — Flourishing, Philosophy
Summary: Life choices are so hard to make because there’s a Gap between important questions and their answers are filled with things that can’t be quantified. To answer important life questions, you have to start asking different questions.
It’s a long one, folks (almost 17 minutes!) - but I think it’s worth a listen.
As I was uploading this screencast to YouTube (last week), I checked Twitter and saw that Duff released the second part of his interview with Clay in which they touch on learning to ask the right questions. Great job, guys!
@Duff: Great job with the podcasts. Thanks for allowing me a spot with the PowerUp! tip - I can’t believe the cheesy one made the cut! I really enjoyed the conversation last week.
@Clay: I feel like we’re swirling around the same ideas from different perspectives. You provide some really good insights in the series. Keep it up, my inspiring friend!
I would’ve commented there, and I may yet, but I did such a good job of screwing that up last time that I decided to make somewhat intelligible comments here.
June 27th, 2008 — Flourishing
Summary: Are you struggling to keep your desk clean because having a clean desk makes you happy or because you think you should have a clean desk? Is the simplicity of having a clean desk a need you have, or are you making someone else’s need your own? True wisdom is knowing what you need, and finding a way to solve that need - not fabricating a need to solve or finding a solution for a need you don’t have.
I hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to hear or see the future podcasts and screencasts, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email.
June 20th, 2008 — Flourishing
That’s right, folks - the Internet is making us stupid. It’s actually changing the way we think, and not for the better.
Sure, anecdotal evidence is somewhat sketchy, but I’m sure many of you have felt the feeling that the many hours you’ve spent online has subjected you to more content but has made you all the dumber for reading it.
You can wait until science proves what you already know to be true, or you can accept the fact that there’s an inverse ratio between hours spent reading online and intellectual capabilities - er, that reading content online changes the way you think and not for the better - and start fighting for your mind now.
Here’s how:
Remember when you could actually read Shakespeare without getting frustrated. I can, too. I was reading Macbeth a few weeks ago and found myself getting irritated, not with myself, but with ole’ Willy. “Why can’t you just come out and say what you mean, man?!”
Before Flash, list items, and hyperlinks, authors wrote to work your brain. Embedded between the lines and pages where clues to different levels of stories and insight, so that each successive reading became deeper and deeper. You weren’t supposed to get it in five minutes.
Today, online writers must contend with the ever-looming threat of a click to another site. Rather than writing under the premise that they have have your attention, they must write with the understanding that you must be quickly entertained or informed, and if not, you’ll find another source of infotainment - if they make you work in the slightest, you’re gone.
The result is that online writing and reading has become an over-technologized form of bread and circus, and even smart people become too lazy to take the time to actually digest what they’re reading.
The great literature that we have has passed the test of time and provides insights into the eternal human condition. There have always been hack writers, but the cost and effort required to print made it such that most of them found their way back to the fields and factories.
Today, the ease and relative inexpensiveness of putting content online makes it such that any monkey with a computer and internet access can unleash his mental flatulence upon untold millions before he gets bored and goes back to watching television.
Rather than read another Flash-animated, listed post about cat poo, visit your local library (best option) or sign up for DailyLit (better than nothing). Read the great works from people who weren’t born last century and learn to understand the human condition before HTML. Your brain will thank you (eventually).
Rather than being a mere consumer of ideas, start being a producer. Creative processes ignite different parts of the brain than those required to chew gum and click on the StumbleUpon button.
Everyone can create something. Buy Legos and build a car. Draw a picture. Make a cabinet. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you flip the switch and start altering reality rather than consuming the alterations of others.
It doesn’t even matter if the idea that you’re manifesting makes any sense to anyone else. The real reason you’re creating something has nothing to do with what you’ve created, but rather has everything to do with exercising your brain by performing creative processes. Speaking of exercising your mind…
There’s a lot of scientific research that points to the fact that people who exercise their brains on a daily basis live longer, are happier, and have a tendency to be wealthier than those who don’t. Those are all nice things, but it’s also nice to know that people who train their brain delay the gradual descent into stupidity.
There are a slew of pen and paper games and exercises available - I’ve tried a lot of them. There’s even one on the Xbox360 Arcade called Brain Challenge (I own it, too). By far the most entertaining and effective brain exercises I’ve tried have come from the good folks over at Lumosity. Give Lumosity a free try for TWO weeks and you’ll be sharpening your mind and having fun in no time.
It has also been shown that physical exercise improves cognition and memory. So, while running may make you generally hate life, your brain loves it.
Creating music does more for you than giving you a reason to be emo or becoming popular on YouTube.
Creating music taps into processes that are rarely jointly used by other types of creative processes due to how much the senses are involved. Combine sight and feel with the standard visual and cognitive centers and you get a very powerful workout for your brain.
Music soothes the savage beast, but it also makes her smarter.
Believe it or not, there are intelligent, insightful people who don’t have part of their psyches encoded into zeroes and ones and saved on servers in Connecticut. Stop trying to convince them into plugging in and instead unplug and interact with them on their terms - i.e. outside of a chat room, email, or IRC channel.
Doing this will make your brain turn as you try to uphold a conversation that doesn’t have 140-character limits and you try to talk about things that you haven’t in a while. It also causes a lot of exercise as you blindly try to draw pictures in the air and use your hands to express ideas through gestures rather than by typing.
Different linguistic centers will activate, different visual parts of your brain will go off as you try to understand people’s facial expressions, and you might actually enjoy it more than poking friends on Facebook if you give it a chance.
Going outside excites the mind due to the novelty of the experience. Ever notice how when you’re going someplace new, it seems to take a lot longer going there than coming back? This is because you’re keenly aware of the novelty of the situation and it’s far more taxing on your brain.
Walk down a different street. Go down a different bike trail. Drive through a new part of town. Hell, go into a different liquor store.
Your brain will go into overdrive trying to sort together the new bits of information and you’ll be all the smarter for it, not accounting for how much alcohol you get.
As more and more of our lives go online, we will become more and more stupid if we don’t make active efforts to keep our wits. The Internet is a tool, but if we don’t watch it, it’ll make tools of us all.
If you’d like to learn more ways to lead a mentally-awake life, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.
Photo Credit: ahajokes
May 25th, 2008 — Flourishing, Food For Thought, Life, Philosophy
This week’s Food for Thought:
What’s the difference between offline friends and online “friends”?
(If you answered that online friends are ones you made online, you get 10 Smartass points. Proceed directly to the university nearest you and sign up as a philosophy major with said points.)
Sure, it’s a Web1.0 type of question, but I think in the digital world we live in, it’s become an even more pressing question. We now have so many ways to connect with people we’ve never physically met, and our connectedness gets tighter and tighter every day.
Yet many people think there’s still some qualitative difference between the types of friendships such that offline friends get the status of true friends and online ones are “friends,” with the quotation signifying something like people we’ve met online, talked to, and like - but not to be confused with friends sans quotations.
Here’s the deal, though: through blogging, I’ve met more people that I actually like than I generally do in the real world. It’s also much easier for me to get to know people online than off - you don’t have to worry with sometimes-inhibiting social factors like gender, status, and race.
But there’s also the weird feature with online “friends” that I know more about them and less about them at the same time. I can tell you how old their kids are, what their kids like, what their favorite type of music is, what they’re most scared of, and all sorts of very personal facts - yet I don’t know what they’re kids’ names are or whether the name they use is actually their real one.
It’s strange, really - we expose more of our inner selves through online relationships at the same time that we hide more of outer selves.
I find this interesting because it’s the exact opposite of what we do in offline relationships.
I was reading an offline friend’s Facebook page the other day and he mentioned some things that he liked and disliked. I’ve known this guy for thirteen years and I didn’t know some of the stuff - and it was pretty basic stuff that should’ve come up in the course of our friendship. That happens to me quite often, and I don’t spend much time crawling around on Facebook and Myspace.
Something else to consider for those with blogging “friends”: consider how much time per week we spend reading each other’s writing. Sure, a lot of the stuff can be very impersonal - my blog being no different - but in some ways those are conversations that we are a part of sometimes on a daily basis. I don’t talk to my offline friends on a daily, or sometimes weekly, basis - yet I leave comments and shoot emails to my online friends everyday.
I should note that one of the things that makes blogging “friends” so nice is that they are dealing with the same issues and you don’t have to introduce them to the blogosphere at the same time you’re talking about something you’re thinking about. They get it because they’re doing it - so you can get down to the meat of the conversation without trying to explain what RSS is so that they understand why RSS subscribers matter.
My point: many of us are spending more time and attention on our online “friends” than our offline friends. From one perspective, that would seem to make their friendship more important to us than offline friendships.
Yet, at the same time, most of us place more weight on the offline friendships, and they still remain friends sans quotations.
For many of us, this issue is not merely an academic point any more. The online world is a critical part of our reality - and part of that reality has a very social component. Our lives are enriched by people we have never, and likely will never, physically meet - yet they still get second-class status as far as the type of relationship we have with them goes.
Is it time to drop the quotations? Is it time to stop the favoring of physical friendships over the non-physical ones?
(The worry here, of course, is that the people reading this blog have a much higher likelihood of saying “Yes” because they are already on the blogosphere. But consider what the answer would be if you were answering someone who wasn’t already part of the choir.)
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!
Photo Credit: Rainfalls
May 22nd, 2008 — Flourishing
There’s an interesting trend going on in the productivity niche. For the longest time, the focus of productivity has been on how we can get more done. Here recently, the trend is on quitting.
That we’re at this stage in the dialect is fairly predictable. After years of being led by acolytes of the corporate masters into thinking that we need to get more done, we’re tired. We recognize that we can’t get it all done - so now we’re quitting.
Another reason we’re at the quitting stage in the discussion is due to the overwhelming popularity and influence of Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek
But I think we need to think about something here. While I completely agree with Tim and the Quitting Cult that quitting is a logical option and, in some cases, the most reasonable course of action, let’s be real here - not too many of us are in the position to quit.
Take a second to consider that many of the disciples of the Quitting Cult share an important feature: they’re single.
Before I get tons of comments (okay, my readership is not that big) that cite many cases of married people with kids quitting and becoming happier or accusing me of blatant ad hominem, let me just submit that quitting and facing the prospect of not making ends meet for a few months is fine when you’re making that choice for yourself. When you’re making that choice for others, though, the consequences take on a completely different weight.
So, I think the Cult is right that many people are afraid to quit, but I also think that many people choose not to quit because they have obligations to others that they feel they need to see through reasonably, and quitting, often times, is not conducive to filling obligations to others.
But the Quitting Cult is also right that something has to give. We can’t continue to live the lives we live the way we live them, and something has got to give.
Rather than being taught how to get more done (being more productive), we are in serious need of being taught how to do fewer things that are more valuable. What the rest of us need to be taught is the art of the strategic withdrawal.
What’s the difference between strategically withdrawing and quitting? The former is a program that allows us to fulfill the obligations that are value-added or important while not taking on any more that aren’t. It recognizes that there are some obligations that we have that we really don’t want, but that it’s nonetheless important to see them through. The starting point for strategic withdrawal begins with internal conditions, i.e. it starts with the type of life you want to live, rather than external conditions, i.e. being in a job you don’t like.
To be fair, Tim does a great job of designing a program that allows us to strategically withdraw without simply quitting. Those following in his footsteps may be stressing quitting more for the rhetorical point, and, if that’s the case, we may be advocating the same course of action.
At some undetermined point in the future I’d like talk more about the steps for strategic withdrawal in detail. But since I hate critiquing without supplementing it with an alternative, I’ll make some preparatory suggestions.
You’ve already made commitments in the past. Whether or not you’ll be able to see them through is not quite the point yet. The point is to stop taking them on. Learn the art of saying “No.” Your default answer for all future externally-motivated commitments should be “No.”
So few of us have know how to live our lives from the inside out, meaning that we let our talents, desires, and goals rather than societal standards dictate how we live our lives. Until you figure that out, you’ll continue to do the wrong things unless you get lucky through experimentation.
I stress in your context because being homeless while starting a new business may not be for you and your family. So it may turn out that you can’t live from the inside out right now - but you’re making a plan for what it looks like so that you can start acting on it.
You may find that it’s important for you to finish something you’ve started even though you don’t like that task or don’t want to do it. The important thing is to do this on a case-by-case basis and not to decide that, holistically, you are going to be the type of person that fulfills obligations. Commitments are not all on par - some really do need to be let go.
Okay, you’ve figured out what needs to go. If it’s something that you can quit - do so NOW and don’t lose any sleep for doing so. If you can’t, figure out which of those obligations you can get out as soon as possible with as little work as possible. What’s most important here is that people know that you are downscaling and you want to see things through, but you’re not taking any more additional work than you need to.
Not what you were expecting, eh? It’s better to clear the plate of unwanted crap rather than leaving it on there to irritate you as you start your new lifestyle. The sooner you can get rid of the unwanted, the sooner you can start living your life commitment-debt free.
The key thing throughout the program is to quit making commitments in the areas you’re trying to get out of. The reason people are recommending quitting is because it immediately gets you out of the tug of the future from those things you quit. The truth is, continually withdrawing is hard because so few of us know how to say no and we’re all too likely to keep committing to things we don’t want to do.
Quitting may be the route to go for some people. But strategic withdrawal is the way to go for the rest of us.
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!
May 19th, 2008 — Flourishing, Life, Philosophy
This last week has been a bit strange on the writing front - I’ve mentally written a lot of posts, but I haven’t actually written them. Now we’ll just have to see whether they actually materialize into something worth reading.
The reason for the strangeness of the week has been due to me being on military orders for Annual Training. I had a huge list of things that I needed to have my company and myself do - so that took some time, but the real reason was mostly psychological. It’s always that switch for me when I start working to time and not to task.
Needless to say, I’m back.
Since this weekend was really busy, I didn’t get to put a Food For Thought post out. The pondering this week is a result of the conversation between me and Bill in the comments of 12 Ways to Practice Courage. What’s bothered me for a long time is what makes a particular act courageous. (It didn’t help that Kelly had a post some while ago about the most daring thing she’s ever done - that started me thinking about it all over again and I declined to comment.)
Before we start, this is not purely an academic point that I’m presenting. It’s prompted by situations I’ve been in.
I’ve been in mortal danger no less than five times throughout my life. I could talk about all of them, but it’d be a really long post that may or may not be interesting. The one that really pops into my mind, though, is from a convoy gone…weird…in Iraq. I’ll keep it as short as possible.
On said weird convoy, we ended up going through a largish town during Market Day. Going through towns during Market Day is very much akin to driving 30 tractor-trailers through the middle of a fair - people and animals are everywhere, meandering with their wares, and really, really pissed that this huge trucks are coming through the middle of it. It doesn’t help that those trucks have people with guns, and some of those people are quick to point them at you.
My convoy also had the fortune of escorting Third Country National drivers - so for every one military truck, we had two or three TCN trucks. These guys were usually scared shitless because they had no idea where they were going, couldn’t speak English, and they knew they were in danger.
What would inevitably happen in these types of situations is that a TCN truck would not follow the truck in front of it closely enough and people and goats would start running between that truck and the one in front of it. The natural thing to do is to stop, because running over people is not something people naturally do. Once that one vehicle stops, it becomes a crosswalk from one side of the market to the other. The end result is that you end up with your convoy cut in half - and that’s bad.
Once our guntruck had ended the crosswalk situation, the second half of the convoy rushed to catch up with the first. In the excitement, another of our TCN drivers hit a curb really hard and the generator he had poorly secured on his trailer fell off…in the middle of Market Day. He stopped - and he was the third to last truck of the convoy. Still left in the convoy was my mechanic’s truck, my truck, and the trailing guntruck.
The crowd, out of curiosity, immediately swarmed that truck and the generator. There was no moving of any of the vehicles. My mechanic radioed up, but I still couldn’t see what was going on, so I got out of my truck to go see.
The crowd parted around me with a buffer of about 3 feet and then would close up behind me. For about 75 meters this happened - and I was completely isolated from my truck and my driver.
(I doubt many of you are transporters, so I have to make clear two major points: being unable to move your truck is terrifying, and being isolated from your truck with a crowd of neutral to hostile people is bone-chilling terrifying.)
As I approached the mechanic’s truck, it began to dawn on me that we were in a bad situation - for he had that “deer-in-the-headlights, what-do-we-do, I’m-scared” look on his face. The only two things that went through my mind were 1) please, Specialist, don’t start shooting, and 2) we have to get the fuck out of here. If he started shooting, dozens of people would have died, because everybody would have started shooting. And if we didn’t get out of there, something bad was going to happen.
There was no way to recover the generator, and we had to get out there, so I went against standing orders, placed an incendiary grenade on the generator, and we left (the crowd parted enough due to the intimidation of our guntruck.)
(I’ve left out a lot of detail to make the story shorter.)
Only when we meet up with the rest of our convoy outside of town did I realize what how bad that situation was. It would have been really easy for someone to jump from the crowd with a knife, or shovel, or any of the other tools they were carrying and overwhelm me. There were people walking on the rooftops with AK-47s.
But at the time, I didn’t think about any of that. I didn’t worry about my personal safety and I didn’t think about the danger I was in. My overriding thoughts were: 1) please, Troops, don’t start shooting, and 2) we have to get the fuck out of here.
I didn’t sit in the truck to deliberate what was the courageous thing to do. I didn’t fight the urge to sit in the truck because it didn’t really dawn on me that I had the option of sitting in the truck.
None of this is meant to be bragging or boasting, but rather, I’m just making it clear that I wasn’t thinking about the actions I was taking. I was just acting.
But is “just acting” worthy of moral praise? For it seems to me that a lot of people “just act,” but they act badly. The married man who can’t control his sexual urges comes to mind here - for, presented with certain situations, he can reasonably say he was just acting. He didn’t mean to hurt his wife - he didn’t think about it. But the fact that he didn’t think about it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the nature of his actions - although if he did it knowing it would hurt his wife or so that he would hurt his wife, that seems worse.
Of course, if the analysis for courage works, then it should work for truthfulness, friendliness, and the other virtues. If it’s the act itself that counts, why do we stress intentions?
What do you think?
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!
May 15th, 2008 — Flourishing, Life
We live in a world where tragedy befalls millions on a daily basis. The world may be better than it once was, but that doesn’t mean that it’s were it could be. It’s not hard to imagine how the world could be better.
But it’s hard to make the world we imagine a reality. What can we do about all of the problems when our hands are only so big? Imagine, then act!
I teach applied ethics, and the most common reason students give for not becoming active about social and political change is that they reason that their efforts will be fruitless since they, individually, can have very little effect on such large problems of international conflict, world poverty, genocide, AIDs, global warming, etc. Since they can’t have a marked impact on the problems, they conclude that they’re efforts won’t help.
What they fail to see, though, is that the small efforts of large groups of people make a huge impact on the problems. Or, conversely: we don’t remember the faceless hordes of Nazis that slew millions of people during the Holocaust - we remember Hitler. One man.
Why should we think that one man can be the cause of so much suffering and yet conclude that one person can’t be the cause of the same amount of progress?
I didn’t really explain any of this when I wrote about the Problem of Dirty Hands, so the tone of that post perhaps make me sound as if I take myself, and my efforts, way too seriously. Quite the contrary: I take myself, and my efforts, seriously enough.
By that, I mean that I know that my small efforts can have an impact and I feel responsible for those actions that I don’t do that would make the world better. We each have an obligation to help with the talents that we have - and that help is through action.
Here are some easy actions you can do to help:
We can’t solve everything at once, but we can make one thing better. This is the “Imagine” part.
While wanting to help is admirable, it’s critical that you become educated about the issues. It’ll increase your confidence that what you’re doing helps, and it will better help you…
An easy way to “own” an issue is to get T-shirts for the issue and actually wear them. It markets the issue, but it also places you in the position to be an advocate for the issue. Warning: this requires some courage.
Draft a well-written, but personal, letter to your politicians letting them know that you care about the issue and that you expect them to do so, as well. If you have a small coalition forming, cite that coalition so that they know they’re not dealing with just one person but a block of voters.
Evangelizing is great. Donating money to organizations that champion your issue is even better. The best thing you can donate, though, is your time and elbow grease - for that’s what most groups don’t get.
The point here is to start small. Don’t become the regional president of Amnesty International without attending a few meetings. But attend a meeting. Volunteer (for one day) to hand out fliers or mail newsletters.
While I’m not necessarily encouraging you to become a full-time activist, I am encouraging you to become active.
I’ll refer to Martin Luther King, Jr. again: it’s not the small majority of evil people that make the world as bad as it is - it’s the silence of the majority that stands by while the evil occurs. Don’t be a part of the silent majority.
My pet human rights issue: World Poverty. Because the right to free speech, for example, is useless if one doesn’t have the energy to speak.
My favorite non-government organization for World Poverty: The Heifer Project International. Because they not only help people in ways that make sense for their culture, but they also promote the “Pay it Forward” ethos through their program.
(Pick up the album, Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!
May 4th, 2008 — Flourishing, Life, Philosophy
Even though I was unable to post this or last Friday’s meditation, it’s still a goal of mine to write something that steps away from the standard topics on Productive Flourishing and instead just gives something to think about. For this week, it’s not a meditation, but instead an applied philosophical problem.
Before you run away thinking “Oh No! Charlie’s hitting us over the head with philosophy again!,” rest assured that we’ll not be talking about whether color exists in the universe or some such thing. The problem we’ll be talking about is the Problem of Dirty Hands and how it relates to personal development.
In short, the Problem of Dirty Hands is a recognition that sometimes, to do something good, you have to get your hands (morally) dirty. It’s often applied to the political spectrum, because the part of the art of politics is promoting positions you don’t agree with so that your other agendas can be pushed forward.
But we’re not talking about politics. What I’m talking about is our involvement in social organizations. What has prompted this for me personally is that the Boy Scouts of America have contacted me several times wanting me to take part in their national Eagle Scout registry.
I’ll not get into all of the details of Scouting, but needless to say, being an Eagle Scout is a great honor and is the highest rank that a Scout can achieve. I used to be proud of the fact that I’m an Eagle Scout - that is, until I found out that the Boy Scouts of America have an exclusive policy towards people of alternative sexual orientations, agnostics, and atheists. There are four categories of people that can be denied registration from the Boy Scouts of America, and the fourth type (the other three are previously listed) are felons. Felons, agnostics, atheists, and the GLBTQ community - what a motley crew!
(For more information, visit Scouting For All’s webpage. Also keep in mind that my main contention is not whether the BSA should have the right to exclude whoever they wish, but whether I should take part in such an organization.)
The problem is that I am the person that I am due in large part to the wonderful men and women of the Boy Scouts and the experiences that I’ve had through that community. I also think that I could and should give back and help mold the next generation of Scouts. If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit, you also know that groups can be very effective agents for personal development. Being involved in groups of people committed to excellence helps you excel.
But I’m very uncomfortable being part of an organization that I feel is bigoted and shameful. Sure, individual and regional organizations may have defied the National Council and produced their own inclusive policies, at risk of being banned and censured, but the root point for me is that, officially, the organization has a bigoted and shameful policy that I don’t want to be a part of.
I’ve hitherto decided that it’s not worth getting my hands dirty - my moral cleanliness is more important to me than the potential good I might do. But some of the stuff I’ve been working on for my dissertation is starting to make me feel less secure in that position. To make the point clearer, I’ll give some perspectives for thought:
What’s important is that you choose your conduct based off of what you think is right or wrong. It may be unfortunate that there could more good advanced in the world by you choosing an alternative action, but choosing a bad means for a good end is never justified.
What’s important is that you choose your conduct based off of what produces the most good. If you can make the world better, and don’t do it, you are at least minimally morally responsible for the world being less well off than it otherwise could have been. Whether you get your hands dirty to pursue a good end or not do something that would create a better situation, your hands are still dirty.
nother option is to stay within the organization whilst trying to change it. This perspective acknowledges the obligation to help while not accepting the undesirable features, but I still have to wonder whether, by promoting the organization (via participation in the organization’s projects, etc.), I am also promoting the organization’s policies.
Of course, there are other alternatives, such as finding other organizations that pursue similar ends without having the undesired exclusivity, but the question is whether those organizations are as effective as the Boy Scouts of America due to its cultural entrenchment.
That’s my specific problem, but it’s obviously just a species of a general problem. People from certain religious communities have a similar problem: is it worth remaining part of a church that begins to take on exclusivist and bigoted policies, even though those organizations at the same time promote otherwise noble social ends? Is it better to remain clean or to promote the social good, when they are mutually exclusive?
People in activist organizations are also in the same boat. I personally don’t agree with all of the policies of the NAACP, NOW, or the Sierra Club - but, then again, I think there’s a qualitative difference between not agreeing with the NAACP’s stance on affirmative action and disagreeing with the BSA’s policies that categorically devalue certain types of people on indefensible grounds.
Helping others and promoting social goods in the world is both intrinsically good and good for personal development since we become better people by actively doing things that make us better. And the best way, often times, to help other people and promote social goods is through collective activity, but sometimes being involved in those collectives make us dirty.
No answers here…just food for thought. What do you think?
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!
Photo Credit: Photos By Rose
