“Production has to serve the fulfilment of the true needs of man and not the requirements of the economy.”
Erich Fromm – German social psychologist of the 20th century
What is becoming more apparent than ever is the absurdity of a culture that is only focused on material growth. More and more people are becoming aware that the hype about the new iPhone, the 53rd pair of shoes or the 12th autumn jumper, the new Audi or even more sophisticated electronics will not really improve our quality of life and inner satisfaction. The number of options in the range of goods on offer may still be capable of increase, and advertising tries in more sophisticated ways to make us like the brand new products of the cosmopolitan paradise, but the nonsense of this game becomes more transparent the more conscious someone becomes and misses its mark.
“I am workaholic and love stress. I collapsed in the swimwear department of a Munich department stores’ because it was so quiet there.” Elke Heidenreich German author and presenter
Food scandals, the Euro crisis, climate change, fears of globalisation and a growing awareness that global resources are finite are making people increasingly doubt the future viability of this way of living and doing business. Moreover, many of the activities within this wear-and-tear system no longer really make sense. We still do them to ensure our survival, but fewer and fewer are still convinced of what they are doing every day. Increasing turnover, increasing growth, increasing market share, exceeding last year’s results, increasing targets, everything has to be increased all the time, for what and for whom? Keeping the machine running is like driving around aimlessly and disoriented. Increasing profits and targets has long since become an end in itself, rarely questioned except by those who experience this increase as daily pressure to perform. The data on a steadily growing number of people with symptoms of stress or burnout speak a clear language. If you look behind the scenes of this culture of increase and ask yourself how we actually want to live, it becomes clear that we have somehow lost the alternatives. On the one hand, most of us don’t really want to give up the comforts of this system; on the other hand, we suffer from having to pursue a meaningless activity that propagates and often relentlessly demands the dogma of permanent growth.
“No one can survive in perpetual restlessness.” John O`Donohue – Irish poet
If we stand outside history for a moment and try to grasp the long-term processes that influence thought, it seems like the birth pangs of a culture turning to new values. Erich Fromm, one of the great social psychologists of the 20th century, had presented a possible development in his three-stage model. The first stage is mainly about having. We see this first stage clearly when we look at China or Russia. The new, super-rich elite and how to belong to it as quickly as possible dominates the thinking of the masses. The growth euphoria we experienced here in the 1960s and 1970s was a similar phase. After “having”, “doing” came to the fore in the 1980s. “Having” was still very important, but in the last 25 years individuals have increasingly distinguished themselves through their activities and not so much through having. The professional position, the development and decision-making spectrum of the activity, is becoming more important. Having alone is not enough, except for the tabloid press. But the image of being super-efficient is also increasingly crumbling. This becomes clear in the loss of image of such figures as Ackermann, former board member of the German bank, or the suicide of the CEO of the Swiss Swisscom group. What is becoming visible as the tip of the iceberg is the transition to a culture of being, in which it is increasingly about arriving and pausing instead of the next spiral of having or doing.
The problem with being, however, is that most people don’t take well to arriving or just being, except as a temporary break from constant doing. We then call it “holidays” or “free time”. The reason for this is that we have no societal models or role models for what life might look like if it were done from being. We find in society and in the media almost exclusively advocates of constant actionism. Those who stay in being seem to be anti-social, a lazy dog. It is assumed that living out of being is fundamentally passive. Yet arriving in being is a necessary prerequisite for important human abilities to unfold at all. Only when we are relieved of the inner drive do our best qualities reveal themselves: sensitivity, compassion, openness, helpfulness or friendliness. Joachim Bauer, the Frankfurt neurologist, explains in his book “Menschlichkeit” (Humanity) how our neuronal mirror cells, which are so important for social behaviour, are switched off under stress; i.e. under pressure we usually behave antisocially to the point of self-destruction. That is, impulses to act that come from being seem to have a different quality than those that come from being driven.
But only when we have “settled down” in being, when we have arrived at the “inner centre”, do we learn to distinguish between such impulses that arise from “inner pressure” and those that arise from the “inner centre”. The latter bear a different signature and radiate harmoniously onto our surroundings. Doing now arises from being, the impulse to act comes from a deeper layer of the human being. Whether we call this layer being, soul, essence, higher self, intuition or otherwise is irrelevant. Every culture has its own term for this quality. Due to the fact that we are collectively connected in being, the action that springs from it strengthens our connectedness so that we automatically behave in a more harmonious and social way.
Pay more attention to how you feel and what the quality of the impulse to act is that pushes into your consciousness. If it comes from being driven, let it go and pay no further attention to it. If it comes from inner peace, from the depths of your being, you can follow it confidently. It will automatically lead you to the best solution.