Chapter 20 - Viagnostic

We all contain the story of the universe within each of us, from the particles that form our bodies and the programs that manage the continuity of life itself to the biochemical memories that house our own actual and fictional experiences and those of our ancestors. But despite all of our efforts to find our true sense of self and the independence that it denotes, we each represent only a slice of a greater truth because we are in the end merely a piece of existence that operates constantly in an exchange of value. Everything essentially supports everything else to make everything work. This is fundamental to life. And whether we look at the workings of an economy or the interactions of an ecosystem, we see a mutual dependence that is required for the whole system to function and subsist.

Naturally, when we examine these exchanges closely, we also see a competition for resources, where scarcity establishes the boundary for both the expansion and quality of life. However, competition is only evident from the viewpoint of the individual or a group in relation to another. At a holistically collective level, we perceive a much wider amalgamation of activities with both cooperative and competitive strategies that are unsuspectingly working in unison and forever trying to come into balance. In this way, it is entirely cooperative and could be more collaborative if each living creature found its rightful place in the broader system. Nevertheless, the universe is in continual change as it simultaneously expands and tightens without awareness. This means that every entity within it is always subject to change as well, and as we generally know from experience, life rarely runs smoothly. In fact, it demands that we routinely solve problems and adapt to our shifting environmental and cultural conditions in a reality where we are inescapably dependent on the world and on others.

We are fundamentally dependent on our relationships with others and the steady functioning of our overarching socioeconomic system, which includes the defenses we position within and around it. We would never have survived, developed or progressed in the way that we have without the direct and indirect contributions of others as part of some organized social structure that coordinates economic activity. Moreover, this dependency on others extends beyond our present families, friends and those around us. We are also in the here and now due to the suffering and sacrifices of our ancestors as well as their luck and ingenuity, which have been passed on generationally through our overlapping biological coding and diverse cultures. Much of what we are and where we are has been contingent upon both our stable surroundings and our enduring histories, and while our presence in this world is linked to a past outside of our control, it is always faced with a future beyond our anticipation.

Since there is no master choreographer among us to direct all dancers on the galactic stage to perform the celestial waltz in our cosmic ballroom, each one of us is responsible for coordinating our own dances while assessing and selecting agreeable partners. And given the chaotic traffic that ensues from such complexity, it seems miraculous that anything is synchronized at all. But clearly we must have some of those elementary steps built into our design to ensure some measure of orderliness. And this persistent drive to keep the grand recital in motion, which oscillates between an elegant ballet and a mind-altering rave, reveals a fundamental tendency towards sustainability realized by practicing these encoded dance moves and detecting suitable participants with whom to bounce, turn and wiggle.

Working towards utility assumes that we are working towards sustainable value since utility must last and remain reliable to have genuine value in the same way that the authenticity of our words can only be sustained by following through on our actions. Furthermore, genuine value extends beyond ourselves and depends on the net contribution of many agents and factors. Although this may seem like an individual endeavour for each of us to undertake in leading the way to sustainability, it is equally a joint venture among members of our community, local and global, to develop symbiotic relationships and guard against parasitic behaviour that results in overconsumption and extinction. Otherwise, the viagnostic narrative will prematurely conclude with the termination of sentient life itself and the meaning we seek will never be found as our essence is suppressed in perpetuity.

However, despite the undeniable logic of sustainable practices, our deeply concealed fear of insignificance unconsciously infects us with rapacious greed and an insatiable appetite for power while afflicting us with delusions of grandeur and hallucinations of absolute autonomy. The ego is the enemy of sustainability because in its attempt to prolong its illusion, it damages its dependence on the real world either by disregarding the truth of that dependency or by persuading itself of its conquest over an all-encompassing environment that it cannot escape. In addition, the danger of our technologically auspicious advancement is that it gives rise to a flawed belief in our superiority over what we misguidedly refer to as lower order lifeforms. This belief feeds the arrogance of an illusory ego and the ignorance of an inexperienced mind to the point that many of us still interpret the food chain as a pyramid or ladder of hierarchical order rather than a relatively closed cycle of renewal that is kept in balance by microbes that predate all complex organisms. In nature, we find many different kinds of creatures that can all be seen as superior according to any metric we want to apply, but when we view everything through the lens of mortality, every form of life shares a common fate with every other form of life that is founded on an environmentally mutual dependency to exist.

Our independence is relative to our ability to function within a biosphere that supplies us with the resources needed to survive. But being raised in a modernized world, we are further separated from the raw experience of directly meeting our basic needs, and this means that we only bury our fundamental dependency underneath a sophisticated economy and hide our illusory independence behind protections provided to us as a society. It also means our false sense of autonomy inadvertently plays against us as we unwittingly become enslaved to a mechanical god that narrows our utility to the sustainment of the very system that confines our essence and its meaning. So perhaps instead of believing that we are an advanced breed of beings that are slowly increasing our dominion over the known universe, we should pay close attention to how fragile our existence is without the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we are able to produce. Perhaps we could remember how little we had to do with vital resources made available long before we existed and how much we continue to consume beyond what we will ever manage to replenish. And perhaps, instead of treating the world as somehow being created for our own personal enjoyment, we should be extremely grateful for having a life to enjoy.

We neither gain maturity automatically with age nor permanently retain it when achieved. Maturity generally comes with experience, but we can only truly mature personally and communally when we dissolve these illusions of the self and let go of our relative self-importance affiliated with fictitious societal rankings so that we may contribute to something beyond ourselves and outside of our social identities or collectivist purposes. And when we learn to respect our dependencies and recognize our mutual dependence on one another, we naturally change the way we relate to each other and especially to our own selves. This is because we realize that we are nothing without the whole and yet the whole attains its meaning through us individually as interdependent parts of that whole.

THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF LIFE

When we come to acquire a deeper appreciation for the real world and we are gripped by a strong sense of purpose in life, we begin to pass through the fourth phase of our development or the interdependent stage of life. This also coincides with the desire that many of us have to commit to intimate partnerships and enter into parenthood to raise families of our own. Up until this stage, most of us remain quite preoccupied with what we can do to increase our self-reliance and to participate in the socioeconomic systems on which we all depend, whether it is as contributors or competitors or as both. But over the course of our personal evolution through our daily interactions, opportunities present themselves that help us to understand our common origins as well as to develop and defend the things that sustain us all. It is during this most profoundly active stage of our existence that we will inevitably comprehend the significance of others in finding our utility and the meaning we seek in our lives unless we previously had come to grasp this basic principle at an earlier age.

Although we may realize the necessity of interdependence, many of us confine this reality to acts of reciprocity and never see its relevance beyond our individual lives as if this was nothing more than a survival tactic. Furthermore, there is a smaller subset of the population that exploits our goodwill by overgeneralizing the tendency of others to maximize what we can take and minimize what we give back to justify purely self-serving behaviour at the expense of the community and to promote the crude way of the world once an advantage has already been gained. It is the shared hypocrisy and illogic of a narcissistic mindset that seeks out and feeds on the fruits of everyone else’s labour ultimately to the detriment of all if such behaviour increasingly became the norm. While our survival and progress may not depend on our complete cooperation, there is a minimum level necessary to move forward in the face of threats while recovering from abuses and misfortunes and it is successful outcomes of things working well enough together that attract manipulation and corruption. And as long as we have a growing economy that has an immediate abundance of resources to consume, it can easily absorb the neglect and overlooked inefficiency of its unsustainable practices for the foreseeable future. Hence, even though we can anticipate the exploitation of highly productive interdependence, the challenge with very large and complex systems is that it can take a lifetime to detect their eventual collapse and often not until the near end when they approach their consumption limits at accelerating rates faster than they can produce or supply goods and services.

However, regardless of our proclivities, we all intuitively understand interdependence through our desire for social contact or intimate bonding and our mutual reliance in fulfilling common needs. We demonstrated its value through the relationships we establish, which attain a meaning of their own. And given that we as individual living beings cannot exist independently from the world, it is our interactions that truly embody life itself and project this fundamental principle. Without others, we would cease to be or at least live aimlessly until we die. For this reason, the people with whom we form bonds and associations essentially affect the extent to which we learn to manifest our essence. Depending on the general character of those interactions, they can either unleash our potential or mutate our nature to make us unrecognizable even to ourselves. The qualities present in our personal and professional relationships such as trustworthiness and dependability are paramount to transcend our most basic identity. And it is our responsibility to choose wisely so that we may stretch the boundary of the self to be more inclusive of others and return to our obscure sense of separation as we once did as infants.

Making choices in the context of relationships is critical to eliciting the feeling that we are actively committed to participating in life by building and sustaining a sense of community. The interdependence of life among sentient beings is reflected in this familiar experience of community, and a stable and progressive society is founded on its healthy and vibrant relationships. Moreover, the complexion and welfare of each interpersonal link depends on both parties and their mutual capacity to align or achieve harmony with one another. Both are necessary for a bond to form and to produce enduring value, but it only requires one to sever it or to damage its functioning and eventually diminish or erase its worth. Since relationships necessitate trust, the members or partners involved remain vulnerable to the seal of that trust being broken. And while we can put measures in place to mitigate risk and compensate for loss on an event-by-event basis, the whole system will ultimately crumble and suffer unless stronger bonds are regularly replacing weaker ones. Hence, our choices and our maturity in making those choices are crucial to tipping the balance towards growth and sustainment.

Since our childhood, we have been learning and practicing how to establish and maintain trust while avoiding or being cautious of situations that warrant our distrust. The experience of our past relationships plays a vital role in refining our ability to manage the expectations and outcomes of our future relationships. However, many of us also undergo significant trauma during our formative years and this is revealed through our interactions with one another as challenges that we have not yet faced about ourselves and which we mistakenly think we will not pass onto our children whether we choose to procreate or adopt. But the consequence of trauma is that we mistrust the world, especially ourselves, and we become unfaithful. Instead of building on our relationships to discover who and what we are, many of us tend to dilute our anxieties and flaws by hiding among the crowds who share our misgivings as well as by manipulating the image we want to portray of ourselves deliberately or unconsciously through selective comparison among those with whom we socially or competitively interact. Sometimes, this means discarding those who we come to perceive as threats in exposing our secrets regardless of whether they are hostile or affectionate towards us. Too many of us live with the fear of abuse and betrayal, and we choose to judge or attack rather than listen and support because we are afraid of both the outcome of our trust and our inability to discern what is trustworthy. Hence, instead of expressing our vulnerability to those who have entrusted us with theirs, we behave cowardly by belittling them.

It is during this stage of life that we pass through the channel of our narrative to undergo the greatest test of our existence, where we attempt to demonstrate who we really are or what we have become in its place. Although we already carry an arsenal of strategies for dealing with life as well as for evading it, this is where we meet the existential fork in the road to our significance. And the choice we face is between (a) proceeding to fabricate a rather self-absorbed account of a fictitious life embodied by an artificially projected self with an unquestioned belief system and (b) striving to develop a genuine story based on life-changing roles and interdependent relationships that we have played and nurtured respectively to learn the indelible lessons of life. If we choose authenticity, we will experience a life that expands our curiosity, improves our creativity, elevates our awareness of what really matters and rejuvenates our vitality to persevere and pursue the truth which each of us already possesses.

THE PARENTHOOD OF COHESIVE DIVERSITY

Genuineness eventually leads to a personal discovery that each of us holds a fragment of the universal truth equivalent to a piece of an ever-growing jigsaw puzzle waiting to find its exact place where it interweaves our narrative with every other story that we encounter. The meaningful continuity of our cosmic tale hinges on all of us seeing our essence as a distinct truth we need to illuminate our passage through the mysterious journey of life. We may not know who we are before or at the precise moment that we choose our path, but we come to realize that the identities we assume and the roles we play are less important than how we shape them to cultivate our unique potential and the values we naturally champion. As our knowledge of what we really are arises from our actions, our outer form slowly aligns with our inner nature to immortalize the meaning of our existence by giving birth to something of value that contributes to the truth, which we animate through a life that defines us all.

The durability of any value we harness depends on our stewardship, which is the role of every parent or senior member of every society, and it involves guiding and safeguarding those who will hold the torch long after we disappear from our discernible world. However, we only can do this effectively once we have achieved sufficient experience to reach the peak in our maturity where we are ready to let go or pass on what we know. Although we always remain students of life, we must transition from being mere novices to full practitioners and teachers to become the medium through which community is sustained and diversity is spawned. We typically associate the interdependent phase of life with the union of two independent individuals coming together as an intimate partnership to raise a family, but this extends out to our relationship to the whole of our civilization, whether it is within our physical proximity or stretches over long distances as a virtual entity that crosses sovereign borders.

If we are to mature, then the relative autonomy of adulthood must give way to the parenthood of cohesive diversity, where we find balance between the unity of tradition and the growth of variety. This encourages belongingness and allows us to share a core identity while accepting our differences and recognizing the nuances in our personalities and characters that expand the prospects of life. It is paradoxically true that we are all different and yet the same. On one hand, we are all different when we consider our own personal experiences and circumstances. Our lives vary tremendously based on the contextual setting of when we were born and where we lived, and this includes what we were initially afforded in life and how our influences have moulded our view of the world and of ourselves. On the other hand, we are all the same because we share a common origin and we are similarly designed in terms of our primary needs. We are also all subject to the same underlying principles of reality that account for the varying and opposing conditions we encounter. It is clear to most of us that while we may differ in degree in relation to our tendencies and preferences, there are some basic rules that we apply in how we respond to the turbulence of life and how we engage with one another.

We have to recognize our commonality in order to appreciate what differentiates us as individuals and we have to respect our differences in order to be function as a community. While it is normal to associate with those who appear to share or agree to the same values or interests, we are only surrendering to a false feeling of security that arises from the strength of numbers while dismissing the necessity of diversity for our progress and continued survival. We cannot adapt without change and change as an outcome is dependent on the capacity for variation. This is vital to life because history always provides evidence of how our strengths can instantly become our weaknesses, such as when a shared faith brings order to chaos only to eventually see its tenacity guarantee pandemonium by devoting all energy to maintaining its false or fallible coherence. While we mistakenly seek perfection in our future, the past warns us of our faults so that we may prepare in the present for the times when we will inevitably err. And although we cannot anticipate every contingency, we know that our versatility gives us an advantage in finding a way out of annihilation because we never know when something ordinary we possess or novel we do will become critical to moving our path forward.

A strong and cohesive community aligns with the diverse individuality that we foster and the distinct relationships we build. This is because their merger permits the mysterious to expand upon what is known and retains the meaning of long-standing traditions to introduce modern conventions. However, this demands the moral maturity necessary to mediate between being conservative and liberal-minded in the clash between the orthodox and the progressive. We are concerned on one end with losing what is treated as fundamental to preserving the fabric of society while we are alarmed on the opposite end by the degree to which we are out of touch with the realities of the present world trending towards a future we may not endure unless we change some of our ways. Hence, this is about balancing proven wisdom with our inventive adaptation to shifting conditions instead of being caught in a struggle between protecting what is sacred and questioning what is taboo in the face of the unknown.

Not surprisingly, our sociopolitical war zones are not confined to military battlefields. They cover everywhere from the schoolyard to the sports club and from the classroom to the workplace. But their boundaries can extend to wherever our minds are penetrable by any communication media and wherever our lives are altered by decisive moments in parliaments, courts and boardrooms, and even in bedrooms around the world. For many of us, the most important arena is the family home because it is often where our cultural combat begins, and achieving peace there on a personal level can indirectly translate into peace on a global scale. This is because our external conflicts and politics are part of a collectively unconscious agreement among us to evade the deeper questions of our lives and block the invasion of any truth we cannot face or the disillusionment of anything we are afraid may not be true. The function of this secret treaty is to maintain the façade of harmony and freedom in exchange for hiding the moral volatility and malaise of our cultures indefinitely or at least until our mutual denial is overwhelmed by reality. Consequently, anyone who breaks this unwritten contract is instantly attacked if our personal instability is exposed or the pretense of our social order is revealed. However, the actual outcome of this unspoken pact between the individual and the family or society is that the value of our diversity is never fully integrated into developing or restoring a favourably sustainable community.

As individuals and as groups, we invent narratives and formulate defenses to fortify our shared delusions as condescending truths with predictable regularity. Such reflexive tendencies have obscure ties to the trouble we always had accepting our vulnerabilities since our childhood as well as holding onto our virtues as they are desecrated by unavoidably unfortunate interactions with influential others who can and do disfigure who we really are. However, we respond by seeking out true friends and devoted partners who can help us trust the world and appreciate our unique utility that aligns with the value of others as we jointly resume the great story of life. It is during this interdependent stage that our roles switch from being the child to the parent or the caregiver without losing the child we should always be. And hence, it is here where we must struggle to quench our spiritual thirst with the moral meaning that many of us were taught to disregard, and it is by discovering and manifesting our own piece of the truth that we embody in the potential of our essence as a person and as a community.

THE MORAL COMPLEMENTARITY OF SELF AND SOCIETY

It is in the final phase of our maturation that we are all truly tested as moral creatures. Life quickly exposes the fiction that the worst is behind us after enduring our childhood growing pains and carving out a place for ourselves in the socioeconomic wilderness that is encircled by a geopolitical sphere, which we deceivingly refer to as civilization. However, once we get past the cynicism that we live in a world that has no direct concern for our well-being and that many of our relationships purely emerge out of convenience, we are left with the most difficult task of defining or perhaps redefining our own morality. At some point, we must each make profound decisions to elicit the meaning we chase through life that is unfettered by all philosophies and religions that fall short of the answers we seek.

While there are some among us who live our lives by feeding on the energy of others, most of us know that our meaning can only reside in our relationships with one another as self-conscious beings or as elements of life that enable us all to subsist. In this sense, we instinctively know that others are an extension of ourselves as we are an extension of them, and the responsibility we learn to take for ourselves eventually encompasses others and more broadly extends to all life. And as we contribute back to the world, our utility materializes in form and in meaning, and it is in such moments that we see the moral complementarity of self and society as the recognition that each is necessary for the existence of the other. This means that they must coexist with neither one having greater importance, although it generally makes little sense to sacrifice a whole community for one individual unless that one individual is all who will survive or ensure the continuity of value. We must remember that the community only remains significant if it embraces its individual members and their diversity, and it is by nurturing each of us that we can incubate the possibilities we imagine and transform them into genuine value. In addition, we find an optimal model for sustainability through interdependence, whether it is interpersonal, organizational or environmental in nature.

Sustainability suggests there is something of significance that warrants our attempts to maintain or prolong its value, and ultimately long enough to enhance or renew it. This includes what physically sustains us such as food and shelter or energy and defense, but also many other important elements of life we may take for granted such as love and friendship or knowledge and experience. Some of these values seem to be at odds with one another. We see this with tradition and modernity, where we celebrate our roots to remember who we are while attempting to expand or surpass what we are. Although many of us think that material progress is all that matters, a notable number among us believe that the technological advancement that liberates the body often comes at a great cost to our sense of spirit as the source of our meaning that drives our story. The question is not really about which path is right, but rather how we best facilitate the coalescence of our integral parts to express the whole of what we are or how we strengthen our foundation to ensure that we grow outwardly in accordance with our inner nature. In order to stay on track or to return to our rightful path, we learn to question what it is that we are trying to achieve, and more importantly, what value we are trying to sustain and reveal through what we naturally do or did since we were children.

In the film Regarding Henry [20], a successful yet callous lawyer, who depicts the cutthroat nature of a career-driven urban jungle, is the victim of a violent act that renders him physically and mentally disabled. Having lost much of his cognitive and motor functions with no memory of his past identity or close relationships, he is essentially regressed to a young child having to relearn the things that most of us take for granted such as talking and walking. But with the committed support of his family and health care professionals through his taxing recuperation, he begins to see the world again through fresh eyes and unassumingly questions things in conflict with his basic moral sense that he once coldly overlooked. Although he does not fully regain his adult functioning, he does come to appreciate the deeper value of life in family, friendship and human decency. And despite the implausible tone of this story, it does touch upon the essence of what each of us must struggle to understand, especially when our cultures shift towards ruthless competitiveness, interpersonally and geopolitically.

Moral or spiritual rehabilitation is what many if not most of us need to undergo, unfortunately when we least desire it. This is because our indoctrination demands that we remain fundamentally in denial, and while some of us feel that we have already struggled too much, we fear the opportunities we will lose by starting all over again. Yet we ignore or neglect how much of what we have gained has added little to no genuine value to our lives. Much of our time has been engaged in wasteful efforts either by overcommitting ourselves to our jobs and societal functions or by overindulging in activities that have likely separated us further from the people and things that matter most to us. Neither the self nor society truly benefits from our unquestioned livelihoods and lifestyles, while the seemingly inconsequential nature of our work serves only to sustain itself and interests outside of our own.

The individual and the community are not separable as entities from one another since a person arises from its society and associated culture, and a community is essentially comprised of individuals. Moreover, they do not represent opposing moral systems, but rather complementary views of an interdependently functioning existence. Our subsistence depends on our fusion of both perspectives because while we may value the individual, it is clear that we need each other as a group to survive. And while the basis of our consciousness lies within each of us, we need one another to fully develop into sentient beings. It is through our interpersonal experience and social interactivity that our awareness of self emerges since our cognitive development assumes forthcoming sensory and social triggers to exhibit our inherent design and entertain the possibilities of what we are as part of the construct of a society. Hence, it is not surprising that we naturally try to balance the needs of the individual with those of the community because we know their duality is what sustains the whole, just as we know from history what happens when we cater excessively or tyrannically to one over the other.

Although we continue to believe in our culturally progressive evolution, our modernized ways of life merely produce an artificial environment that overlays and coats the natural one from which we originate. Our mechanized world persuades us to believe in our false autonomy as individuals and as collectives by hiding our direct dependency on each other. This inadvertently and sometimes purposely promotes our personal division in the form of exclusivity or alienation, and consequently, reduces the likelihood of experiencing meaningful interactions while amplifying our active social monitoring of one another to compete for our relative self-importance or to enforce our societal duty. This ensures the impending divorce between the community and the individual where the self neglects its sociocultural roots and the illusory ego takes residence in a parasitic system that elicits from each of us an expression of evil by playing on our fears as we sell our souls for a comfortably pretentious and empty existence.

The ego is what we leave behind when we pass through the channel. But it is always pulling us back into the crevice in its attempts to return us to the current. The ego is an inescapable condition of our self-awareness and a necessary step in our moral and spiritual enlightenment. Without it, we do not know what it is that we must transcend. However, left unchecked, it develops despotic tendencies that impose delusional interpretations of reality to make sense of the world at the expense of veracity. The truth must always be sacrificed to protect the ego. Ultimately, it must destroy life to preserve itself as a self-important entity whether it is as a persona or as a regime, which inevitably collapses the entrance of our subterranean passage to our genuinely meaningful utility. Many of us succumb to our insecurities and associated temptations such as seeking power when feeling powerless or helpless and elevating our social status in response to jealousy or chronic humiliation. We become disrespectful because we feel disrespected and think we want fame or authority when we simply needed love or a sense of belonging.

However, by the fourth phase of life, we hope that we have learned to sublimate our negative energy tied to abuse, rejection or loss into the positive contributions of nurture, friendship and creation. But when the world seems to abandon us, we must morally act to reinstate our value within society as its theatre and through the self as its conduit. Whether we are endeavoring to direct our own lives or trying as parents to decide on what is best for our children, we are all confronted with a central force or state dictating a standard for all of us. We are divided between the veneer of freedom that the system provides through amenities that seem to increasingly ease our biological burden and the loss of control we have over how we live our lives or define the meaning we seek. It is an unending moral dilemma between self and society, which many of us unfortunately choose to ignore, but we are all eventually forced to face. For this reason, each of us must independently learn how to lead our unique lives and stories through an interdependent system that sustains us by becoming leaders of our own utility.

LEADERSHIP IN OUR CHOSEN PATH

Although utility has universal significance, we express it in its many unique forms because each of us must find our own place in the greater narrative of life and the differences in our stories lie in the choices we make in the diverse conditions we face. And although making those choices and accepting their consequences reflect our sense of responsibility, responsibility itself means very little unless utility ascends from our actions. We derive value from what we do, and this depends heavily not only on our circumstances, but also on how well we know and retain who we really are. We find meaning in our authenticity, and this requires us to dig deep down to the bedrock of existence to unleash our essence and understand what matters regardless of the situations we encounter. In this context, leadership is taking ownership of our choices and circumstances to manifest what we truly are and epitomize what we genuinely value. When we say that we lead by example, it means that we live by example, and our meaning follows from the values we share and express that keep us all faithful to those values. In our interdependent relationships, we remind one another of the things that are important by exemplifying our utility in our actions and sometimes in our inaction or passive participation.

There is a tendency to think of leadership as a special characteristic that only a select number of us possess, and consequently, we treat it as one of our most privileged roles in society that separates us in terms of our importance and warranted attention. However, this is a misconstrued view because we confuse this with the predefined roles of our hierarchical social structures, even though our proclaimed leaders are all subservient to a system that is susceptible to corruption and implosion. Moreover, very few possess the qualities or goals of morally moving civilization forward because they publicly or privately reflect the avaricious nature of our materialistic values that block the expression of our more humanistic or spiritual principles. But while many of us may wish to believe that leadership is an inborn trait, we generally agree that it is an attribute we associate with social influence, which makes it something each of us can have if we act on some decisive truth about life, regardless of our motives.

In addition, true leadership exhibits the experience and flexibility needed to enable adaptation and progress, where intelligence and good intentions do not suffice. Leadership is not only about taking initiative when the moment calls for it; it is about knowing when to lead and when to follow because to truly demonstrate leadership is to accommodate whatever needs to be done just as a good manager lets members of the team lead in what they do best when and where conditions demand it. The role of the leader is to remind group members of their common purpose and guide them towards success as well as ensure inclusivity and recognition of the individuals of a team, family or community to secure their core feeling of belongingness and prevent outside forces from dramatically disrupting their harmony.

Leadership begins with our own sense of independence and expands that relative autonomy to the group by facilitating interdependence. We discover that we can best serve our needs in unison, and over time, we are more likely to produce mutually beneficial outcomes. However, there are some fundamental challenges to this principle that manifest themselves on two levels. Firstly, in the context of interpersonal interactions, we are always negotiating our roles in each of our relationships with others who are also undergoing their own struggles with identity and worth. Finding the right relationships with the right individuals requires an element of luck and a leap of faith even after we have explored the endless permutations of compatible traits and shared values. This is because trust is vital to achieving greater benefits, and hence, any betrayal or failure to commit can result in substantial loss or damage for all parties involved. We also face obstacles within our broader sociocultural space that influences our beliefs and expectations about how we interact with others and the extent to which we are able to perform our roles in the relationships we are encouraged to develop or dissuaded from supporting. This not only deeply affects our ability to be who we really are, but it can manipulate our behaviour to allow a select few to benefit from our resourced system at the expense of the many. This is not surprising in the evolution of civilization given the historical pull towards the consolidation of power and wealth.

The economic and political collapse of systems is inevitable when and where they become pathological and insatiable. This occurs because they stop being truly self-regulating and their extremes invite imbalance to run its natural course back into balance. The universe does not permit endless proliferation without sustainability, and this reality should guide our sense of morality and implore us to appreciate and practice our nurturing roles in advancing ourselves as well as our communities. Sustainability is one of the most important principles that we can defend because its purpose is to sustain value, whatever that value may be or perceived to be. And for those of us who are cognizant of where we are in life and how our environment perpetuates our existence, we are particularly sensitive to the unfavourable conditions of a world we leave to our children and future generations.

Unfortunately, many of us lose sight of this principle. It is as if we have suppressed or delayed this phase of our maturity. This is perhaps because we are overcome by too much responsibility while being neutered by forces beyond our control. We could also argue it is because we are so seduced by the idea that science and technology will solve all of our problems that we delegate such responsibility to the gods of our abundance who can recruit economic magicians to turn scarcity into a disappearing act and resurface prosperity at will. But regardless of the reasons, we all intuitively grasp the relevance of sustainability. Hence, our challenge is recognizing the breadth of what should be sustained, and this is why we need experienced leadership to help determine where and when we need to be concerned.

Leadership remains narrowly confined in our societies to heads of governments, organizations and teams and supposedly situated in the war rooms and boardrooms of the world. However, this role can reside within any social institution, including the family, and it applies to all of us individually leading our own lives. Genuine leadership is acting on the recognition of what is valuable and being exemplary in demonstrating what is true. It is to serve as an instrument of an ultimate purpose or a founding principle and expand its expression, and if we all did this, we would almost certainly converge on the greater meaning of life while enriching a more diverse sense of community. Contrastingly, any leader who promotes consolidation or instigates divisiveness can only ever have a purely self-serving agenda of amassing power and instilling beliefs that rip away the very fabric needed for a healthy society. This is why we must all individually be leaders within our own domains. And while we may choose to either lead our own stories or follow those of others, we can only everreveal leadership in our chosen path and we can only faithfully maintain a sufficient degree of balance in our chaotic world by sharing that role among us jointly and adaptively as an interdependent alliance of sentient beings.

A SUSTAINABLE PROGRESSION OF EXISTENCE

Demonstrating full maturity means more than simply being members of a society. We also have to be passionately motivated contributors who can positively influence a system that sustains us all. To achieve this, we can and should behave like a team of leaders where each one of us assumes a special, situation-dependent leadership role and where everyone represents the community. Sustainment depends collectively on our individual responsibility for what we fundamentally and mutually value, but this is challenged constantly by elementary conflicts that divide us. The most obvious and rudimentary kind is based on resource scarcity because we know that if every single one of us could have whatever we wanted, we would never have anything compelling us to compete. Consequently, this would leave us solely with a desire to measure ourselves against others in terms of our ability and/or popularity, which tend to bleed into one another due to our illusory ego eliciting a concealed obsession with power.

Another common type of conflict is related to procedural divergence or differences in approach. For instance, we may all want to be happy and live meaningful lives, but we have differing views on how we achieve these desired states. We disagree on the how more than on the what, and this is where our way of life can diverge from or interfere with the practices of others. If we experience this along with perceived scarcity, this can create an extremely hostile setting, especially when we believe others have chosen lifestyles that are benefiting from the fruits of our labour without contributing back to our common goals. Since we assume each of us focuses on our own personal concerns, we perceive this as a battle between our longer-term subsistence and the immediate enjoyment of others. But this is mainly a reflection of our own circumstantial dissatisfaction. For instance, we may be unperturbed at the sight of animals feeding at a distant park, but we would be troubled if we caught them feasting on our garden. We are generally less concerned with the behaviour of others when we are already content with our own lives. On the other hand, discontent often exacerbates inadvertent misunderstandings due to miscommunication and the imprecision of our language and logic while it sometimes triggers intentional misconstructions aimed at justifying the need for conflict as a distraction from other problems we do not wish to resolve.

Although we inevitably witness the disregard for our collective continuity and life overall, we can all comprehend the concept of investment in a future. We can also appreciate that we must put in as much as we take out and that the meaning of investment is not seen entirely as a financial gain but as planting the seeds for carrying forward the narrative of life. It is like an insurance policy for the perseverance of greatness that survives across countless generations, and securing this depends on an optimal system that progresses while sustaining itself through its relationship with its environment. Such a system could be both fair and adaptive if we organized ourselves within a distributed network of resources and responsibilities where power could not be concentrated absolutely in one place or in few hands. Such a model would also benefit from being resilient because it would be nimble and flexible enough to rebalance itself while able to neutralize any cancer before it spreads from within. And finally, by being fully integrated, it would always be more than the sum of its individual parts while being sufficiently independent in that every unit of the network could sustain itself by branching out if needed.

The concept of a team provides an ideal illustration of a unified structure with interdependent parts that are able to face one another like the sides of a tetrahedron. Every member of the team has an essential role to play with each having the versatility to compensate for one another as required when unanticipated events occur. And by persisting as a single entity, members of the team can constantly generate optimal configurations of genuine utility through their synergistic interactions. Moreover, replicating this on a larger scale across multiple teams that fuse together to emerge as an unconscious super intelligence and serve as a self-sustaining model for sentient coexistence, where individual needs are placed in the context of the community and the community is seen through the lens of the individual. This includes carrying forward the lessons of all ancestral struggles to apply and refine best practices for realizing quality. And among the many methods accumulated through history, they are four generally recognized modes of functioning that define and support a sustainable system of value.

The first is the corrective mode. It is a basic facet of life to take corrective action when something no longer works properly or becomes problematic. A self-correcting nature is fundamental to our learning and development, and this may include fixing, replacing or circumventing whatever may trouble us since these actions are all forms of correction. A second approach is to be preventive. While corrective action is a response to a pre-existing problem, a preventive approach foresees something that will need to be corrected if we do not take any action. Taking preemptive steps reduces risk and avoids unnecessary corrective measures. However, when events are infrequent with low severity of outcomes, corrective action may be preferable if it expends fewer resources to correct. Hence, investment must always be balanced with risk, and this applies to the perfective mode as well, which is proactive correction that focuses on refining the way we already do things. It is essentially the practice of continuous improvement, and it tends to lessen the need for both corrective and preventive actions. Although what we enhance can be incorporated into the first two modes, we quickly reach an impasse when refining our methods consistently results in diminishing returns. This is where the transformative mode becomes necessary to transcend boundaries. This typically requires a paradigm shift in the way we conduct business or view the world, including ourselves, by fundamentally rethinking or broadening our grasp of the possible, which can be inspired by desperate need or pure serendipity.

These modes of functioning are critical to a sustainable progression of existence. Sustainability is not limited to maintaining our current living standards. It is about supporting our interest in advancing our lives while extending our reliance on our environment. However, growth can often seem invisible or imperceptible to us because it needs time to build a deep foundation before it can ascend to remarkable heights, which can also make our aspiring progress appear as failure or regression before we encounter unprecedented change. Nevertheless, this necessitates that we sustain value that enables us to produce value. Sustainability is essential to our quest for utility and to derive meaning from the stories of our lives, where there are no absolute rules for living life except to live it. While many of us might say it is better to be safe than sorry, there are others among us who would argue that it is preferable to live well briefly than to prolong life in a diminishing state. Both principles on living life have validity, but we also know that continuing to live in the present requires us to safeguard a future in which to continue.

It is natural to want an easier life when we bear disheartening degrees of hardship. But we would never gain very much from an effortless life, and it is often when morality seems to be discarded and we are afraid to live by what we know is universal that the opportunity arises to manifest who we really are and discover what we love. Evil may cause us to struggle, but love is the reason we persevere. When we fight for what we adore in the world, we instantly become who we truly are and genuinely come to love ourselves. Something has to be endured in order for it to be passionately attained, and passion packaged with some expression of love offers us a story to live and to lead. Without love, life would not mean very much at all. And without meaning, life would have no function other than to solely sustain itself, and many of us would be left with a single-minded obsession to find one absolute truth to our reality. The answer lies in connection or interconnectedness in the same way that we know that without others, life becomes insignificant and lacks purpose outside of our instinctive response to peril. We need one another through our utility to realize our essence.