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Responsibility, what is that?
In STIR we speak of “taking responsibility” for sustainable human progress, but what does that word mean? How do we differentiate between what we take responsibility for individually and what we expect from our surrounding society? And how does responsibility relate to the current crises?
Responsibility is a learning process of Awareness
Within the framework of the evolutionary development of human complexities we see that responsibility belongs to the learning process of our “To Be”. That means that it has different levels of awareness which get people to see reality in different ways as they step up their level of consciousness.
I identify 4 important levels:
1. No consciousness: a stone has no awareness and does not take any responsibility at all.
2. Awareness: Every living species has a basic degree of awareness. A tree looses its leaves in autumn to be able to survive the winter. A dog is loyal to someone who feeds it and provides protection. At this level of awareness the responsibility concentrates on survival without a second thought.
3. Self awareness: Certain species, like the human being, have the ability to be aware of themselves. This means that we can observe our own selves and reflect about our actions, making decisions as a consequence. We intent then to influence our environment for our own benefit and we reflect about the consequences or results of our own behavior and choices. We tend to take responsibility for our self interest, learning from them as we go along. We try to create security for ourselves (and our loved ones) for the short and long term. Our world evolves dynamically and interactively between our “doing things” en evolutionary “being someone”.
We also realize that we create better options when working together in communities that eventually formed societies. We see then also a level of collective awareness appear that may different from the individual. The “collective consciousness” may be seen as a business entity, a regional community like a village or city, a family, etc.
4. The higher awareness: When we reach this point of awareness we let go of the self interest and become aware of existential and universal queries that affect our daily decisions and responsibilities. We now “are” before we “do”. We see ourselves in an evolutionary process and value our interactiona within the complexity of our natural surroundings. Our reality converts itself into a personal mission of contributing something eternal to the infinite universal development of the conscience. This is a relatively unknown are of science and hence a totally new field of investigation.
More higher awareness in the world
At individual level we observe a growing amount of individuals that pass from lever 3 to level 4 awareness. This however does not mean that they can take responsibility accordingly at the same time. At individual level they can but they still need to interact with a society that is structured at a collectiev level of conciousness. The social environment of our societies does not generally surpass yet level 2, the simplest form of awareness. This is often kept this way by the self-interests of dominant people in power positions, maling people slaves to certain securities in exchange for their (democratic) loyality.
After world war II there was a temporary boost of collective awareness. This disappeared again in the 70s when fragmented self interests of greed and economic growth started to develop again individually and collectively. Still, thanks to the short boost, peace in Europe was in historic averages lengthened by decades.
Now, due to the crises, the level of collective self-awareness in certain regions is rising again, thanks often to people with a level 4 consciousness. But most people in the world live in urban concentration points of cities where self sufficiency is nearly impossible. They have a dominant dependency on the level 2 structure of the reigning society, that is insensitive to the health, safety and vulnerability of the human being. If people with a higher awareness wish to take responsibility they either have to move out of the city or enter into a confrontation with the dominant system of control and financial greed and power.
Such confrontation does not have to be aggressive at all. It can perfectly well be executed in a peaceful way through common sense and (sustainocratic) co-creation. There are always people who would block such processes out of self protection of their position of power. But there are also plenty of people in positions of power and authority that do wish to make a difference. The latter are true leaders of change.
STIR, using Sustainocracy, takes responsibility for co-creating society from a higher awareness point of view, inviting everyone to join and contribute. Professionals at a higher level of awareness may now take responsibility to transform society by transforming their institutions at the same time.
A crisis only exists for those that resist change by not taking responsibility for it from their own level of awareness and using the authroity that every individual has.
If you wish to know how it works for yourself you can attend the international seminar in Eindhoven in September 2013.
Europeans are not Euros – visualized
With reference to my previous blog I decided to visualize the situation of Europe by using my model of the human complexities (first published in 2008) expressed by two lines (to be + to do) crossing. These lines symbolize at their intersection the eternal conflict between our actions (to Do) and our moral ethics (to Be). This happens at individual but also at cultural and institutional levels, creating societies in cyclic situations of greed, chaos, awareness development or around wellness. In each country individual people and institutions can be in the different phases themselves yet what I show here is the dominant situation of the majority, not the minority.
Low level of ethical morality reigns throughout money driven Europe
The “saving” of countries in the chaos zone is nothing more than an attempt to pull them back into the area of institutionalized greed at the bottom right hand side. This is necessary to avoid the collapse of others in that area. It is just a matter of time for all to go down in a violent confrontation with ourselves by ending up in chaos all together. Still it is not necessary! There is another route, not by pulling back into greed but taking responsibility for wellness and sustainable human progress.
This desired European situation represents a jump along the line of ethics, responsibility and awareness. This line (To Be) consists of various levels of awareness. At the conflict crossing at the center we situate the area of self-awareness, a point where the pain of consequences are converted into knowledge and conscious understanding. We have gone through this point very often already, as individuals when we grow older and wiser through personal experiences, and as communities throughout time and the same. Chaos is often represented in society by depressions and even wars. Chaos represents a violent letting go period, painfully creating room again for renewal through awareness. Awareness often comes when the blindfold of greed and control is taken away. There is a sincere possibility that this is going to happen again, in Europe and anywhere else in the world. Enough signs are showing and can affect us at any time.
The big difference today with our past is that we can now pinpoint where we need to place society within the human complexities and act accordingly. In the past societies only knew that they collapsed or were surprised by the collapse of something else causing their own. Knowing the 4 areas in the model as a logical sequence we can also position ourselves where stability and sustainable progress occurs. This is a simple ethical choice of educated awareness. The only excuse that people can have in our current Europe is that they have not yet seen this blog. When they do, then they have no excuse anymore to make the choice and take responsibility, as an individual and as a professional. Each of us can take personal responsibility now, get educated to deal with it or we can be asked by their surroundings to do it. At first it takes guts to decide. If you do not you can be blamed in the future. What is worse? Guts now or having to give painful explanations afterwards?
A stable Europe is an educated choice of ethics and responsibility
The choice of ethics of all people involved is to let go of the Euro as the sole dominant goal and adopt European wellness as something to take responsibility for, not by creating it but by allowing it to be created by everyone together. This can only be achieved by working in purpose driven processes in which money is a means, just like anything else needed for this process. It is a choice but once the choice is made the complex process starts to make it happen, based on the new ruling of such wellness based self sufficient European society. This is where the need for a new European constitution comes in. Our current constitutions are based on managing greed and avoiding chaos. We need to work on new constitutions that develop and protect ethical awareness and co-create wellness, avoiding greed.
This cannot be done in the fragmented jobs and self interests of politicians, civil servants, business people, bankers, individual consumers, scientists, educators, etc. In our current society they interact through money based systems and dependencies. None of these institutionalized individuals can take the initiative, if they are aware at all at professional level. Professional blindness tends to rule making people incompetent to ethics and responsibilities beyond their professional position. The only one that can take responsibility is the human being itself, liberated from all previous dogmas, professional limitations and dependencies. This person, any person, on the verge of absolute material poverty in the old world, but totally free from burdens, can invite all the powerful fragmented authorities to come over to the new world together and become instrumental to it.
That is what I did when I created Sustainocracy. I invited all people whom I had made aware through my personal interaction and explanation. They were invited to take that personal choice to position themselves in the new wellness based society and come join me in purpose driven human co-creation processes. In these sustainocratic processes all fragmented responsibilities of the old world are represented together, in equality, without dependence of each other but through the authority they represent (entrepreneurial creativity, regional government, knowledge based science and education, and behavioral cultural populations). They come from a fragmented structure of self interest into a holistic environment of common purpose.
Only people who can actually take responsibility are invited to Sustainocracy, the rest follows through leadership
The city of Eindhoven and province of Noord Brabant is the first place where Sustainocracy is applied in the world of complex societies. The combination of the right people with the right ethical attitude and awareness, on the right levels of authority, were found to make it happen in AiREAS (health & environmental quality), VE2RS (self sufficiency) and other initiatives. It is first step and still far from getting the entire nation or Europe to adopt the process. But with the precedent in Eindhoven en Noord Brabant I expect that more and more will follow.
Of course, the same counts for America and China and any other area in the world.
Now that you have read this, you can choose too and take responsibility accordingly.
Get fired to reach your utmost level of competence
Peter Principle
Today I was drawn again to the facinating theory of the Peter Principle that was published in 1969 by Laurence J. Peter to show “why things always go wrong”.
The main argument of the book is that in a hierarchy people who do an excellent job get promoted. This goes on and on until on reaches a level of hierarchical authority that one cannot handle anymore. In reality one has reached a personal level of incompetence. This is where people stick to a position because no one tends to get demoted back down into the hierarchy as a recognition of this incompetence. One can be trained or get promoted even further away from one’s competence by getting a yet higher or different position of questionable talent.
The logical and curious conclusion is that the higher up you climb the career ladder, the more incompetent you get until you get fixated at your maximum level of incompetence.
This is interesting because a career climb is always accompanied with an extra bag of money and benefits. This suggests that anyone who is money driven searches his or her utmost level of incompetence to make most of it. This would explain why bankers, government leaders and heads of strategic analyst buros would not see a credit crisis coming even if it knocked on their doors and stood right in front of their noses. It also explains that all the crises right now will simply not be solved by all those people who are in the current hierarchical positions of power. Their only possible outcome would be to install a yet higher level of incompetence above them as a career step further up showing the world the best of all incompetent.
Even though Laurence J. Peter makes his point in 1969 it was the Greek philosopher Plato who already stated in about 400BC “Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”
Power corrupts?
This is another of such public wisdom that finds its roots in the proof of our published reality. If by the principles of Peter and Plato incompetence and stupidity has a tendency of floating upwards in any hierarchy the negative aspects of humankind, such as greed, sex orgies, power abuse, corruption, etc will surely become exaggerated along the same line. Lust is related to the emotional disorder that matches the rational disorder of incompetence. The human personal imbalance (of any IQ, EQ, SQ, FQ, AQ) grows and people become less and less aware of their incompetence and more and more convinced of their own reality of power. They start living in their own dream world, a virtual reality that often makes them disappear into the history books as a public villain or lunatic. Always in hindsight though because we had no social media in the past. On TV and internet today we observe this all the time now. So it is curious that entire political, financial and business hierarchies are still receiving a level of authority when we know now that the utmost level of wisdom is somewhere in the crowd and certainly not with those people in the hall of operational fame.
“Get fired”
My own law of opposites then confirms that anyone who is fired from a high up hierarchical position automatically reinstates his or her utmost level of competence. Just observe the change in personality of American presidents during office and afterwards. They invariably become missionaries of human and planetary rights providing speeches around the world on how things should be done that they did not do when in office. When in power they were humanly incompetent and when out of power they compensate. No sex scandals after the oval office either.
This has its logic too. When people do not carry the burden of a hierarchical position anymore they become human beings again. In the hierarchy they are puppets of that system in which they climb by becoming the head puppet of a puppet theater. Without all the strings attached one is totally free. One finds out all the real competences that one really has, and had to begin with, instead of the ones that one is supposed or expected to have within the system. When one “leads” the system one is in reality led by the system itself, making a person institutional leader to uphold the system not the person itself or the human world or planet. The higher up in the hierarchy the lack of freedom combines with the lack of competence making a human being into a clumsy and potentially dangerous robot.
A person who was very high up in a hierarchy shows that he or she had a lot of competences to lay off to reach that top level. When fired we then find a very powerful personality that becomes human being again with the discovery of all the original competences in tact and with total freedom to use them.
Conclusion
This brings us to the conclusion that people who are in hierarchical power should never be taken seriously. And by no means they should be left alone and in charge of a country, a business or any institution.
Only those people who reached their maximum level of incompetence in a hierarchy by becoming president or close thereof are fully and impressively competent again once fired or removed otherwise totally from the pyramid.
This makes the community of old hierarchical leaders the most interesting basis for the creation of my new sustainocratic multinationals without personnel and many thousands of collaborators. Interestingly I find that, despite the fact that people think the above is exaggerated and even funny, there is a component of significant truth in it. True leadership is not hierarchical yet needs maybe the step upwards towards incompetence and back down towards individual freedom to become fully aware of a complex reality and start acting accordingly.
So it is not the crowd that is wise, nor the incompetent that lead large structures. It are the ex-top-incompetent back in the crowd that make the progressive difference.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 