Trust, Love and Organizations

Speaker A Now, I think Elliot would argue that his structure permits certainly trustful relationships us, but what I think it does on the whole is actually prevent distrustful relationships, which is a different thing, and that the mechanisms of loving, caring relationships are not dealt with at all. The mechanisms are I'm not going to screw you over relationships. It's in fact a little bit I mean, I'm off the point here. A bit off your question a bit. But it's like democracy. Democracy has created institutions that ensure a minimum level of coercion on the individual, but they have no processes, as religion has, of creating loving environments. So democracy is terrific at reducing coercion, but it is completely silent on love, basically, whereas religion isn't silent on love. Religion gives you institutions of praying together, of dancing together, of reading together, of singing together, of holding hands together, of sharing food together and symbolically sharing the body of Christ or whatever together. That is actually about processes of love generation between each other. Both Elliot and democracy is great on reducing coercion, which is a huge step forward because I think we're naturally coercive potentially, but it's silent on love. I see the world actually divided up into a metaphysical set of problems and a physical set of problems, and that science and commerce and so forth and so forth, which is an extension of science, has wonderful insights about the physical world. And the truth is, for instance, that we have conquered the physical world. We can produce everything we very well want. And in spite of the fact that a billion people go to bed every night starving, that in fact is completely unnecessary. That then brings me to the metaphysical world and says that the development that we've achieved in the physical world, which may be level six or level seven or even level eight in terms of solving physical problems, we have really lost ground in the metaphysical world. And that probably we were more advanced in the metaphysical world a century ago than we are today. And why? Because the physical world of competitive, rational, economics, stroke, democracy or whatever has absorbed all our time in creating specialty knowledge around the physical world and how to manipulate the physical world and the concepts of the physical world. And we spend virtually zero time on the spiritual, metaphysical world in the straightforward what is it to live a good life both individually and as member of a community. What is that right now? Religion spent hundreds of years working on that question. 18th century philosophers spent their whole lives working on that question. I don't know hardly anybody among the three of us in this room. I'm beginning to. Are we spending very much time on that? Are we going to learn about that from specialists? Are we talking to people who have better understanding of this than we do? No, we aren't. And I suppose I'm coming back to your question. That where we stop, whether it's six, seven or eight or nine or whatever. If it isn't complementary if it isn't complementary, it's flawed. It's fundamentally flawed. The fact that we have a billion people going to bed every single night starving. The fact that in the Western world, we are being driven by misallocated survival behaviors into materialism, we're allocating survival necessities into materialism which is destroying the planet, and that we're not solving these problems at all. The fact that the United States of America spends $400 billion a year apparently defending itself, which is the whole gross national product of Australia. You go, a the alpha chimp has to actually defend itself to the tune of $400 billion is saying that we've lost the plot in how to think about how to live a good life and a balanced life. And we're way, way out of balance. So until it's almost an irrelevant question whether on the physical scale and our commercial scale, whether we can get to six, seven or eight, if we don't get to a complementary scale on the metaphysical questions, and only when we join the two together will it actually be meaningful. Because things like commerce and economics are completely silent on it. What it is to lead a good life. They're silent.