tiberry

I had a crappy day at work today, and since there's not really a "crappy day at work forum" and I love the philosophy forum I decided to merge the two into a philosophical rant.

/rant on

Nothing is so frustrating as seeing and understanding the “big picture” but not having the words to describe it to others.


Ramblings of an uneducated professor –

It happens every day. Someone at work poses a problem or a question to me which I consider for some time and then formulate an answer. After all, that’s what contractors are paid to do right? Solve problems. Yet it never fails that regardless of my answer or how painstakingly I try to describe the rationale I seem to miss the mark on selling my answer as the “right answer”.

Now if someone, anyone were to pose a better solution or even demonstrate logically how my answer is flawed in the context of existing (generally accepted) factors I could understand that. Obviously. But invariably I am met with a barrage of counter rationale such as: “I agree with you but…”, “Well, yes and no….”, or here’s the best one – “You’ve perfectly described point Z, but I have no clue how to get there from where I am here at point A.”

So then, it boils down to this. I must not only supply the correct answer, but I must also provide a practical step-by-step methodology for implementing what we all agree is right. Therein lies the rub.

Its simply not enough to do what’s right because its right – we have to be supplied with a roadmap to do what’s right. In this way, we can absolve ourselves of all responsibility for the decision (to do what’s right) in the unlikely event that it turns out that it wasn’t the right thing to do. What a conundrum.

Let’s take this up a notch or two (jump to Z if you will) and pose that this is the fundamental approach, as well as the apparent need for religion – which also mirrors the same conundrum albeit with a twist called “faith”. Because humans have a tendency to need someone to blame or stated another way, someone to absolve them of all responsibility, they’ve created the notion of a “higher being”. Someone who has all the answers, someone who can never be wrong, is all powerful, etc.

But wait! What’s this? Our higher being hasn’t provided a detailed enough roadmap! How do we implement these higher truths? How will we know the “right answer” when confronted with a problem not explicitly covered in our ‘bible’? Oh, what’s that? We must have faith. That is – we must trust that our “higher being” knows what he’s doing. He’s left out the explicit roadmap for a reason. A test! It must be a test! And if we pass the “test” we’ll be given a reward! Ahhh…I knew our “higher being” wouldn’t let us down.


Can you see the comparison between the “corporate” and the “theological” aspects of human nature? Those in power (those charged with responsibility) are paid to absolve others of responsible thinking. Further, we've removed the problem of those pesky roadmaps by imposing the illusion of authority. "Do what I said or your fired!". Or, "Do what I said or you'll burn in hell!" Never mind the details.

Those that can effectively provide a roadmap to implementing solutions are successful, those who can’t are not. I pose that Jesus was an unsuccessful CEO. Your thoughts?

/rant off

asaris

I'll probably chime in later, but why do you say that Jesus was an unsucessful CEO? His 'company' is, if we want to consider so, one of the largest and oldest companies in the world, with scads of customers.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

roachboy

a snappy one sentence response written on the way on to other activities for the day:

corporate and theological definitions of the subject are linked directly insofar as they are ideological.

and a question: i read through the opening post a couple times and am still not sure i see exactly what is being asked about, because the post is as much about questions of social rules and their transparency as it is about the question of subjectivity imputed to corporations or the theological notion of the subject or any of constructs related to/deriving from the latter in particular (corporate personhood is a legal invention of the 1880s i think).....so since i have no time and might be interested, could you clarify what exactly you are asking about here a little?

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

chickentribs

Yes but He accomplished it through monopolistic business practices to unfairly eliminate the competion. That's the problem - how can you measure his level of ethics when he made the rules to start with? But, I hear he can be philanthropic, so...

The thing that jumped at me in the rant (nice - hoped it helped a bit) is that my experience has been that while God and priests are more than ready to accept responsibility for your life and salvation if they can just lay down the rules, the CEO's and VP's are just as eager to shirk off responsibility (for the poor results) as the rest of us. I've seen too many unsuspecting people take the fall before they knew what hit them. I hope others have had better experiences with this.

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Oft expectation fails...
and most oft there Where most it promises
- Shakespeare, W.

ARTelevision

Given human nature, in order to "sell" a solution, it must be posed as a win/win situation for all concerned parties. That's the effective strategy. "Winning" includes such things as pecking order viability, saving face, looking good, and other human needs as well as profitability and efficiency.

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martinguerre

i couldn't agree less.

jesus taught in parables, sayings meant to have open ended solutions. scripture is meant to be a place to turn your brain on...not have neat little solutions handed to you.

tiberry

And they (we) killed him - hence my point.

martinguerre

and God raised him. thus my point.

tecoyah

And all of the above is nothing but myth (in my opinion), as he did not likely exist as the creature defined in scripture. Those that have re-written these texts over the centuries have certainly done an excellent job of creating a commodity. And the marketing firm (Church) was great at social manipulation, until it was caught with its pants down*pun intended*.

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martinguerre

what i mean to say the first time around...but lacked the time for.

tiberry is right in that Jesus did not suceed in conventional terms. the church that has found sucess often betrays his teachings.

but. i believe, by faith, that God made a revelation through Jesus. In keeping with revelations made to the prophets and people of Isreal, the message was one of self-critical reflection, engagement, service and faith in God's promise of life. for trying to open the eyes of the world, and preach that message, the religious and political leaders of the day had him killed as a traitor. it is God's victory that such a man be the first fruits of the dead, the one chosen to be shown as God's Christ. Salvation is shown not in the means of the world, but irregardless of them. to have a convicted, executed felon be proclaimed God's Son is an act of defiance of the standards of the world.

despite the systems, political, corprate, theological, etc... that try to absolve us of the responsibility of thinking...i belive Jesus and the scriptures continually point away from that. the parables are not easy to figure out. the teachings are not easy to live. the prophets and their judgement are hard to listen to. this is a God that above all desires relationship...and one cannot be in relationship with out thought.

Matthew 27:22 sums it up for me. The author has Pilate ask the crowd: "What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?"

This is the question that i always come back to. What is it that i will do with my life if i belive that this man was God's Christ? any christianity that tries to avoid thinking is going to have a hard time staying christian for long. that question is not easy to answer...and it won't absolve you of the responsibility to think on your own.

tiberry

I understand how you got lost roachboy - I do that to people a lot...

Stated simply: Human beings have an innate desire to avoid responsibility. I'm attempting to make my case using to vastly disparate examples - corporate society and theology. My underlying hypothesis is that religion was created as a means to absolve mankind of the responsibility to do what's "right".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an atheist (or maybe I am ) - I do believe Jesus was a man...a man that truly "got it". I do not believe he was the son of some God that exists as a separate entity, who is all powerful, infallable, all knowing, all judging [CERTAINLY NOT!] - or more specifically: someone we can blame for things that go wrong, someone to ask for things we want - and further justfiy our irrational concept by some corny excuse like "He works in mysterious ways..." when neither seems to work. Give me a break!! Accept the things that happen to you, there's nothing you can do to change them. Take responsibility for yourself and your actions!

To me, God exists in all of us. Its just that to most of us, that's too scary a proposition - that we are in total control.

- EDIT -

Just an afterthought to further drive discussion: When Jesus said (implied) "I am one with God"...did that necessarily mean that he was one with some separate being (the Lord)? Couldn't this just as easily have meant that "I accept that we are all one, and together we are God."?

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My life's work is to bridge the gap between that which is perceived by the mind and that which is quantifiable by words and numbers.

roachboy

hmm.
i do not think human beings have very much in the way of innate tendencies...aversion to pain, very basic biofunctions--everything else develops in/through interaction with the social context (family, bigger world) that one is thrown into. more like piaget outlines than traditional philosophy.

i would think the tendency to avoid responsibility it situational. earlier in the summer, i read zygmunt bauman's book "the holocaust and modernity" which has alot to say about the interaction between bureaucratic organization, the avoidance of responsibility through categories like "duty" and the holocaust as one outcome. it is interesting. it is also too complex a book to cram into a bulletin board sized blurb/summary. check it out, if you've some time.

when you wrote in the opening post about corporate subjectivity, i thought you meant something about the legal definition of a corporation as person. which i have always thought deeply bizarre...and that you wre trying to link corporate personhood to notions of the individual subject as defined either by bourgeois law or by traditional western philosophy. but i coucldnt figure out what this question--which i find kinda interesting--had to do with the rest of the post. whence my confusion.

as for questions involving jesus, they are not high on my personal hit parade.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

tiberry

I can't agree with you there...and I think you might have inadvertanly proven my point.

Would you agree that human beings are innately social animals? It seems to me that this implies a heiarchy of leadership, maybe not in theory but certainly in practice. Why is that? I'm saying that its because humans (in general) do not want to be responsible for themselves. They'd much rather follow the direction of another. Further, I'd say that if you removed another human trait, greed, from the equation - then you'd probably have a hard time finding leaders!

I realize that this is getting (or has the potential) to get WAY out of hand. If I had the time (and the talent) to put this in a logical coherent form, I'd publish a book. Its the dialog that keeps me on track, but I'm willing to follow this out as long as anyone else is.

__________________
My life's work is to bridge the gap between that which is perceived by the mind and that which is quantifiable by words and numbers.

zen_tom

I'd agree with you tiberry, though - I wouldn't go as far as saying that religion was created,
I don't believe anyone (except perhaps LRH) would ever be as cynical, foresighted, megalomaniacal and self delusional to be able to create a religion from scratch. However, it seems perfectly reasonable for existing religions to be shaped and remade if it allows for those in charge to gain some influence over others.

It *is* a two-sided coin, people really do want opium for the more difficult of life's questions, and religion provides neat, tidy, warm and snuggly answers - just as long as you do what the man (the priest) tells you what the Man (the Holy whoever) wants you to do...who can blame the priest if there happens to be some 'interpretation' along the way? Just like any other service industry, you need a salesperson to represent you and your wishes. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just the way it is.

roachboy

tiberry: i do not see the linkages in your post. maybe i'll paste it and pull it apart a little.

in the abstract yes, but it becomes quickly obvious, once you start to think about it, that the matter is not so simple. piaget's general position (very general) is that the "hardwiring" which forms the infrastructure for cognition unfolds as a function of and in ways shaped by the social environment. if that is true, then the seperation from a particular mode of subvjectivity and the social becomes a problem--in other words, if you start from here, it is impossible to later pretend that anything can be understood by reverting to a notion of an isolated individual which gazes out from a discrete position over the social world as if that world was a spectacle. from this follow all kinds of difficulties.

this is a jump, logically. how exactly do you get from the general claim in the previous sentence to these equally general characterizations of what i assume is "the social"?
things get murky right away if you are not careful (same goes for me, naturlich)

do you imagine that there is but a single type of hierarchy?

are you imagining, like aristotle in "the politics" for example, that there is a hierarchical distribution of competences in any given population, but that this distribution is not obvious from superficial indices--so a "good city" would be that which would allow generational distributions to play themselves out in the world (a way of looking at aristotle that brings him into line with nietzsche, or vice versa)

i would argue that the question of hierarchy is basic for any political thought, tht there are a number of ways to consider the matter, and that you short circuit the whole problem of politics if you imagine social hierarchy to reflect anything close of a nautral hierarchy.

well, one implication of the piaget-type position (there are many other possible ways to frame this, but i'll stick with piaget because he is kinda well-known, but not usually as someone mustered in a political philosophy type context) is that the kind of person/subject a given formation produces is the mirror image of itself, of its norms, of its general conceptions (refracted through the politics of the family, the politics built into education, etc etc etc)....which would then mean that the assumptions concerning hierarchy you might find operating in folk who come up at a given period in a given space are internalized versions of the dominant ideology of the period.

i could make this more explicit if you like--but the conclusion is that there would be no tendency on the part of human beings in general to understand questions of hierarchy in any particular way. that this, along with almost eveyr other cognitive faculty, would have to be functional in a given social space should on its own be enough to make you think about your position.

second, since you never looked at the question of what hierarchy might entail (as a function of more general political visions of the world) you assume a single meaning for it and derive a series of conclusions from that---it is not obvious that the fact of hierarchy necessarily entails an evasion of responsability. for example, if you had a direct democratic situation, there would be hierarchy (a certain kind of division of labour) but there would also be the permanent potential that the people who occupy positions as a function of that division of labour could be recalled by the collective. would this entail a dissolution of responsibility?

[QUOTE] Further, I'd say that if you removed another human trait, greed, from the equation - then you'd probably have a hard time finding leaders![/QUOTE}

i dont follow you here at all. the premise seems to me arbitrary, so the conclusion makes no sense to me.

i hope this is clear enough to continue a conversation. compression is always a problem. i suspect it really is one here.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

tiberry

Well then. I'll first say that I'm thoroughly impressed with your "Philosophical Law" approach, in that you cite several "precedents" and authors to describe and reinforce your points. Not trying to demean or discredit you, but rather say that you're not (in my opinion) seeing the forest for the trees -

I'm saying simply that: Human society is founded on the principals of leadership; that is - someone has to be in charge. Take a small group of people...by group I mean more than 1. Give the 'group' a problem. More likely than not, there will be a difference of opinion as to how to solve that problem. In fact, as the group gets larger I'd say it reasonable to expect that the number of potential opinions will increase as well. Without a means to decide for the group what the best course of action is, it is impossible for the group to remain intact as an organization. The methodology of how the ultimate decision is arrived at is irrelavent...democracy (voting) totalitarian, whatever. Even in the case of a democratic decision, someone has to preside over the process as a leader to decide that this in-fact the right way to decide, and if nothing else, to count the votes.

Once we go through this exercise once, the expectation of every member of the group is that we'll use it again- thereby absolving each individual of their "individual" responsiblity, and placing it in the hands of their leader.

Follow me?

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My life's work is to bridge the gap between that which is perceived by the mind and that which is quantifiable by words and numbers.