Читать книгу The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting - Арсен Аветисов - Страница 12

If your working day isn’t perfect, then you work

for someone else, not yourself. ― Anonymous

A person’s life can be viewed as a process of constantly setting goals and achieving them. A person’s daily activity, their thinking, decisions and, accordingly, actions that shape their behaviour, all this is directed and subordinated to the goals that they have. Or the goals that were set before them or that seduced them.

The levels of goals correspond to the forms of people’s associations. The level of goals in this hierarchy determines the category of self-identification of a person in which a person is aware of himself and which contributes to the achievement of his personal goals. The hierarchy is as follows: humanity, state, nation, corporation, group, family, and finally the individual itself. The goals of the upper levels tend to take over the goals of the lower levels. But they do not always succeed.

The highest level of goals is mega goals on a planetary scale, the goals of all mankind and civilisation. The most popular of them are environmental issues. Humanity does not stop trying to somehow solve them, but with varying degrees of success. One well-known example is the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

Or such a hypothetical goal that would become real when aliens with clearly unfriendly intentions appeared. If there really is a threat of intervention on Earth, then there is no doubt that countries and governments will unite, and all current conflicts, wars and disagreements will immediately lose their relevance. The unification in this case will happen within the category of human identity as a species.

The next sublevel of goals in the hierarchy are initially tribal goals, which later became national and state goals. The categories of a person’s identity are language, passport, lifestyle, and borders of residence. Combining goals at this level allows you sometimes to neglect mega goals. For example, this enables actively cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest and justifying why signing the Kyoto Protocol is not worthwhile.

Below the national level are corporate goals. These are the goals of companies and entire industries grouped into categories of employment and workplaces. The implementation of goals of this level becomes a dominant feature, which occasionally allows industries to dump toxic waste into the environment, neglect business norms, and ignore state nature conservation programmes.

The goals of families, groups, clans, and gangs are even lower. Conflicts, wars and confrontations between generations may occur at this level despite corporate culture, traditions and unspoken laws.

And finally, the level of personal goals. These are the most sensitive and most important goals for a person, goals that shape most of a person’s daily behaviour, goals that people are not ready to give up, which they are not ready to neglect, sometimes even in the most extreme circumstances.

The challenge of managing people has always been how to subordinate the goals of the lower levels to the upper ones, whether they are family, corporate or state. The complexity of this task increases with the elevation of the goals. One of the reasons is that at lower levels, a person’s behaviour is formed on deep and stable narratives, and at higher levels the meanings of narratives often become less clear or appear unconvincing.

It is believed that the quality of a person’s life depends on the effectiveness and satisfaction from the process of achieving goals. In pursuit of this desired quality, people are ready to unite and adjust. They are ready to change their place of residence, family, profession, place of work, and sometimes even country and nationality. People are willing to redefine their identity to attain the lowest-level goals. This, as it will be discussed in the next chapter, is a natural function of the human brain and is integral to its operation.

Other cases of interest are rare but popular, when individuals prioritise higher-level goals over more immediate ones. And here, striving to achieve these 'elevated’ (in all senses) goals, a person encounters illusions.

The first of these illusions arises when people think that they are pursuing their own goals. But in reality, the goal may have been subtly replaced with tasks imposed by their surroundings. Why is that? At least because for a long time it was believed that people with goals of their own are dangerous, especially if their goals do not align with those of their leaders. Wouldn’t it be better to give these individuals assignments? Substantial, ambitious, life-long assignments.

For example, some nations have introduced a continuous task – a social credit system for evaluating citizens’ behaviour. Score is calculated based on their compliance with the society’s requirements and rules. Quite a goal, isn’t it? History shows that the desire 'to be right’ within the state or nation is gradually and necessarily transformed into an even more ambiguous one – 'to be always right’.

Smaller-scale goals are reserved for environments such as supermarkets, vanity fairs, multi-currency accounting systems, and similar areas to materialise self-identification. To maintain a comfortable existence within these consumer spaces, people are ready to engage in strenuous work, the effectiveness of which is judged by the authorities and society in goals achieved per unit of time, ultimately leading to a dubious system of evaluating these accomplishments.

However, what motivates a person to willingly prioritise the goals of a company, nation, or country over their own? It is the pursuit of meaning that can peacefully lead the mind to compromise with its goal to survive. This is likely the primary factor distinguishing people from the rest of the living world.

In the long run, at every hierarchical level, individuals employ a similar strategy to subdue those beneath them, which involves selling various concepts of happiness. These concepts are replicated, appealing, and straightforward to the same extent as they are unreachable. Perhaps because they aim to blur the distinction between 'I want’ and 'I need’, rendering it negligible and obscure.

How many unnecessary worries from 'I want’ arise due to the fact that what you really need is not always what you want! Therefore, if you imagine that you want exactly what you need, then this already acquires some commercial and political interest. The only task is to convince yourself of this construction. To show that in addition to goals, actions and plans, your 'desires’ also contain the essence of your life.

By the way, if an individual is not persuaded by this semantic framework, then an undesirable situation for the upper levels may occur – when a person wants what he or she already possesses. And it can be regarded as happiness – to want what you have. Yet, this is a different story and a different concept.