REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 4

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

We will resume mining gems from Hugh Mackay’s book, The Good Life, to complement our Scripture-based reflections during Lent.

For this week’s column, let me just dwell on the core idea that the Good Life is a life lived for others, something also taught by many religious leaders and philosophers through the ages.

First, to support this idea, the author reiterates a fact we all know:

 “The starting point is the recognition that we are all inseparably part of each other and that our human destiny is to accept and nurture our connections. We are each part of a larger whole: a family, a friendship circle, a neighborhood, a community, an organization, a world. Each of us is a player in the same big human drama.”

He says that we should not lose our sense of who we are nor our individuality in affirming these connections. What it means is that our context, not our essence, defines our identity . The question to ask, he says, is “Who needs me?” rather than “Who am I?”

According to the author: “Friendship, connectedness, engagement, community: these are the great life-savers, the great sources of human fulfillment. We are by nature social creatures – herd animals – and we cut ourselves off from the herd at our peril.”

Living for others does not mean living like a doormat or “being servile, subservient, or subjugated.”  It means to live life as an “open doorway, not as a doormat.” It is to live with love and all its manifestations – kindness, care, compassion, generosity, tolerance, encouragement, support.”  

Then he asks rhetorically: “If love is the ultimate source of goodness in our lives, it follows that the good life is primarily about others. What else could it be about?”

But we need to recognize this dualism in human nature: “We are members of a species that relies on cooperation, tolerance, altruism, harmony and acts of grace for its very survival. “  Unfortunately, there is another side to us:

“We humans are capable of behaving in ways that contradict each of those admirable qualities. We go to war over territorial disputes or, even more bizarrely, over conflicting religious beliefs; we lie, cheat, and compete ruthlessly with each other; we lose our temper; commit acts of violence and abuse, even against children; we take advantage of our fellows; we fail to keep our promises; and often fall short of the ideals we claim to espouse. In other words, we’re selfish by nature, as well as selfless; we’re competitive as well as cooperative; we’re flawed.”

There is contradiction in human nature:

“We want to maintain loving relationships, but we often let our desire for control interfere with them. We want to cling to our deeply held values and beliefs, but we sometimes jettison them in response to our aspiration to belong to a particular group or tribe with a different set of beliefs and values.”

He adds: “We sometimes want to be good, and we sometimes want to be bad. As a species we have shown ourselves capable of murder, rape and pillage as well as startlingly selfless acts of charity. Our racial, religious and cultural prejudices can overwhelm … and lead us into hideous expressions of intolerance, injustice, and hatred, spiraling all the way down to war and genocide. Yet we can t those prejudices and learn to love and care for those who have utterly different religious or cultural perspectives from our own.”

History tells us that “communities survive when the cooperative aspects of our nature prevail.”  Indeed human beings are born “to relate to each other and to foster communities by acknowledging and responding to each other’s needs.”

The author notes there are varied ways to describe a life which may be worthy of praise or admiration but may not contribute to the common good:

A full life : “Sounds attractive. Sounds worthwhile. No wasted time here. No meandering. No loose ends. These are the people who, in addition to holding down a job and raising a family, belong to so many organizations, sit on so many committees and seem to achieve so much …”

His comment: “Painful as it can be to admit, an overly busy life … can be a highly effective insulation from engagement with the very people who may need you to stop rushing, listen to them and take them seriously enough to spend time with them.”

A charmed life: It is life “largely dependent on accidental factors – genetics, inheritance, lucky timing.” But such a life is “not the most sympathetic environment for virtue to blossom.”

A productive life: “Plenty of creative people, including artists, scientists and philosophers, as well as high-flyers in business and the professions, have lived like that: wonderfully productive output, huge personal rewards and generous public recognition, but intensely frustrating, infuriating or destructive to those close to them, their personal relationships sacrificed at the altar of productivity.”

An authentic life: “Obviously, being inauthentic – insincere, artificial, deceitful – is usually undesirable: no one likes a phoney. .. If you’re interested in the common good and in promoting the wellbeing of others, it’s not always appropriate to match your behavior to your mood… Are courtesy and good manners inauthentic? Yes, sometimes, but are also the oil that lubricates our social machinery.”

A blameless life: “It sounds like a life with no risk, no edge, no real purpose beyond obedience to the dictates of the law and conscience …  Who among us can say we could never be blamed for anything? Never a cross or hurtful word?  Never a vengeful thought?  Never a selfish act? Never a failure to recognize and respond to someone’s need for help? Never a refusal to listen attentively and sympathetically to someone who’s taking too long to say something? No, ‘blameless’ sounds rather suspect to me.”

A passionate life: “Some people channel their passion into righting society’s wrongs, campaigning for peace and justice in responding to the needs of the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged or the marginalized. Some devote their passion in the raising of children, as parents, teachers or carers. Some pour their passion into charitable work in their local community. Some create beautiful works of art or performance that inspire, entertain, amuse or unsettle us. All are clearly tontributors to the common good. .. How they relate to those around them, especially to those who need their love and support, is, as always, the acid test of goodness.”

A creative life: “Lives that are passionate and productive are often associated with creativity … It is sometimes clearly intended to imply permission to live recklessly, behave badly or be outrageous, impatient, rude or arrogant, as though all will be forgiven in the name of Art. While it’s true that many painters, composers, writers, poets and creative people in fields other than the arts have acquired a reputation for treating people shabbily, others have  managed to maintain stable and loving relationships and to treat people with respect while still producing remarkable work.”

As we do the stations of the Cross, do penance and aspire for redemption during this Lenten season, may we also remember what the author, Hugh Mackay, says on p. 157 of his book, The Good Life :

“Once we focus on the idea of a good life as being a valuable life, a life that contributes to others’ wellbeing, worries about our personal level of contentment or our material prosperity will fade into the  background. The good life is not about being smart, rich, famous or sure of yourself. You don’t have to

be the life of the party to prove you’re having a good life. You don’t even have to be at the party.”

For comments, email npestelos@gmail.com.

NMP/12 March 2016/12.23 a.m.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 3

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

For this week’s column, we continue with our reflections on the Good Life, using as reference the book by Australian psychologist, Hugh Mackay, as part of our personal observance of the Lenten season. This is to complement those enduring lessons taught us through the Scriptures.

I find highly interesting and relevant his discussion on the other false leads towards a good life, aside from the pursuit of happiness, which I talked about in the previous column. Four of these false leads are as follows: yearning for certainty; an unhealthy curiosity about the future; too much preoccupation with the task of “finding yourself” and the meaning of life.

He says that while there is nothing inherently wrong with each of these pursuits, “but they can … easily distract us from the goals of the good life.” Each of these pursuits has “the potential to be an obsession, almost like an idol we worship, because each has an undeniable appeal.”

None of these pursuits however is about goodness. In pursuing them as an obsession, according to the author, we run the risk of diminishing ourselves as a person and our value to others.

For this week’s column, let me focus on just one of these “false leads” to the Good Life:

On yearning for certainty

Some of the interesting questions we ask ourselves are actually unknowable at this time. He lists some of them as follows:

-What will become of us, as a species?

-What happens when we die?

-How big is the universe, and how many other planets out there support species like ours?

-How can there be an edge of space?

-Before the Big Bang, there was … what? And what before that?

-Does it make more sense to believe in a god or not to believe in a god? And even it makes no sense, what do we lose by believing?

-Can all religions be right, or all wrong, or only one right, or is believing not about being right or wrong?

-Are religion and science incompatible or simply two different ways of looking at the world?

-Is one system of governing ourselves better than all others?

-Are the rise and fall of civilizations inevitable?

-Must so many people suffer?

-Will science one day have all the answers, sweeping aside the theories of theology, philosophy and psychology and even determining our moral code?

As human beings, we ask questions and seek certainty in our answers: “We want answers, and so, drawing on our intuition and imagination, we create our own belief systems, fed sometimes by experience and sometimes hope.”

Then we place our faith in the answers. We come to believe as true everything that we have put our faith in. We forget that even objective truths established by scientific methods are based on assumptions that are subject to uncertainty.

We tend to forget what Einstein said that the mysterious is the most beautiful experience that we can have in life. “It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead …”, says the author.

He adds: “Einstein was no religious believer, yet he was certainly prepared to marvel at life’s mysteries and look for answers to everything. He was interested in far more than the scientific, material and quantifiable world.”

Albert Einstein is best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² , dubbed "the world's most famous equation", or his theory of relativity which underlies modern physics. But he is also known for saying this: “Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.”

Faith becomes a necessity to lead the good life: “Faith is the work of the imagination; a creative act; a leap; a tentative, hopeful encounter with the numinous; a reaching-out for certainties that keep eluding us. Faith is also about trust, about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask and whose answers we simply can’t know for sure.

“Faith is also about trust, about deciding to settle for answers to questions we scarcely dare ask and whose answers we simply can’t know for sure. Faith – at its best a noble, humble and often luminous quality in humans – can never be rooted in certainty. It evaporates under the pressure of rigid dogma, which is why there seems such a gulf between religion as expressed in the simple faith of a believer and religion as expressed in the panoply and power of an institution.” [Paragraphing ours.]

Then Mackay asserts:

“This is the great paradox of faith: we yearn to know but cannot know, so we construct or accept ready-made from an established institution, a set of beliefs to satisfy our need o make sense of what’s going on. If it’s not religious belief, it might be astrology, the free market, feng shui, superstition, science, a particular psychological or philosophical orientation – Buddhist, Freudian, Jungian, humanist –or a moral code we believe will make for a good life and, by extension, a better world.”

He drives home this point: “ But if we knew as objective facts the answers that faith supplies, there would be no need for faith. And if faith – that mystical , clouded, elusive yearning – is corrupted by the arrogance of certainty, it ceases to be faith and becomes mere elusion.

The fundamentalist is a person “who wants to transform faith into certainty.” He alone is correct, the others wrong. “Such arrogance relies on absolute certainty, which is why it is so infuriating to those who don’t happen to share that particular set of beliefs. It is also a caricature of faith.

Mackay explains:  “If you adopt a rigid word view – religious, anti-religious, political, economic, academic, aesthetic or otherwise – you tend to see everything through the filter of your convictions, and, not surprisingly, you see what you are looking for… It’s why they eschew the mystical; they don’t want to marvel as Einstein did or to rest with mysteries, they want to wrestle them into submission. It’s also why puzzled that their beliefs are not more widely accepted, they feel entitled to try to impose them on others- believers with different beliefs and non-believers alike.”

He notes fundamentalism is on the rise in all three of the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Why so? “Fundamentalism (whether religious, political, economic or cultural) thrives at times of social upheaval and insecurity. When we are most perplexed and baffled by ambiguity, that’s when we are also most vulnerable to promises of black-and-white simplicity that offer us certainty.

“Given our current anxieties over global warming, international terrorism, the world’s growing refugee population and the threat of economic meltdown, it’s not hard to see the appeal in any set of beliefs that offers stable reference points in a shifting geopolitical landscape. A period marked by rapid and unpredictable change is therefore bound to be a breeding ground for fundamentalism. A deepening sense of uncertainty only whets our appetite for certainty, and the quest for certainty in any context comes to feel like a search for some version of the Holy Grail.”

In science, certainty is also slippery as in religion. Mackay says “certainty in science, like certainty in everything else that relies on assumptions, interpretations and theories, is more slippery than we might care to imagine. Scientific truths are, by their nature, always provisional.” He quoted the British philosopher Bertrand Russell who says science is “always tentative, expecting that modification in its present theories will sooner or later be found necessary and aware that or its method is one which is logically incapable of arriving at a complete and final demonstration.”

The author notes that “Einstein’s theory of relativity is being tested and challenged, and it may well turn out that, contrary to Einstein’s conviction, it is possible for particles to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light.”

Not too long ago, I read that some scientists are talking about us being able in the future to travel not only in space but also through time! They may have found sufficient basis to reconfigure Einstein’s formula!

He concludes: “Certainty is the enemy of reason and reasonableness. It fuels our complacency and arrogance, wrapping us in a cocoon of self-confidence, perhaps even self-righteousness.”

To lead the Good Life, we must take nothing for granted. We know the pursuit of certainty or black- and–white simplicity may distract us from facing life as it is “in all their chaos and unpredictability, their mingled joy and sorrow.”

Indeed to lead the Good Life is to be a realist.  For comments, email npestelos@gmail.com###

NMP/04 March 2016/9.06 a.m.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 2

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Reflections on the Good Life – Part 2

During the past few days, the mass media have been full of what have been called thought pieces about the 30^th anniversary of the EDSA Revolution. As almost everyone knows, this massive demonstration of protest again Marcos rule resulted in our enjoying freedom or what has been described by the phrase “democratic space in our society.”

The historic EDSA revolution ended decades of muzzled press and restrictions on our freedom. Those four days of bloodless or peaceful revolution were hailed as our gift to the world.

As I continue to distil insights from the book “The Good Life” by noted Australian psychologist, Hugh Mackay, I have at the back of my mind the sacrifices of hundreds of young people who gave their lives in those three decades of struggle leading to the historic EDSA days. All through the past thirty years, I have carried the burden of knowing that thirty-three (33) of my friends, doubtless among the best and brightest of our generation, were among those who perished in this struggle for freedom.

Each time I think about those EDSA days, I cannot help but be reminded about these outstanding Filipinos who sacrificed their lives so that most of us could be assured of freedom and our democratic rights, extinguished by the brutal Marcos regime. I salute them. My thirteen (13) years in the underground, some of them in detention in a military camp and restricted movement in an office, were nothing compared to their sacrifices.

Now back to the book, The Good Life-

I find Chapter 2 quite interesting. It deals with “How the pursuit of happiness can make you miserable.”

First, the author asserts: “The popular idea of happiness is focused on a pleasant sense of uplift, maximizing the possibility of positive emotional experiences, such as pleasure, gratification or fulfillment; nurturing a generally positive attitude. It goes without saying that we enjoy that uplift and sometimes seek out experiences that will create it. But if we confuse … such happiness with the good life, we create some emotional and cultural hazards for ourselves –even some moral hazards.”

Then he makes this distinction: “The most obvious one is that all the talk about happiness puts the emphasis on Me and how I’m feeling, whereas the goodness of life … is about moral sensitivity and integrity rather than emotional well-being.”

He says if this is accepted then “… it follows that the measure of a good life could hardly be based on some assessment of how happy we are; it will depend primarily upon how well we treat others, regardless of how that makes us feel.”

Mackay points out that “… an obsession with happiness can make us scared of sadness and rather unhealthy in our pursuit of the positive.”   He says without sadness we would never know how it is to be happy. Sadness is “too often and too quickly put under the microscope in case it turns out to be an early sign of the disease …” called clinical depression.

He observes: “Clinical depression, unlike sadness, is never going to visit most of us, and for that we can be grateful … Most won’t be crushed by the sense of futility, relentless anxiety or terminal bleakness that depression can visit on those who suffer from it, and who clearly need professional support and careful treatment.”

The obsession with happiness may be a result of “heightened awareness of … depression.” He says: “We want to avoid becoming depressed, just as we want to avoid heart disease, cancer or diabetes, and perhaps we think being happy is a preventive strategy, a bit like keeping fit, or watching your diet. Yet the truth is that to be fully human – to be normal, to be healthy – is to be occasionally engulfed by waves of grief or sadness, stymied by feelings of despair, paralyzed by doubt or crushed by disappointment.”

He says we must “be wary of pursuing happiness as the main goal of our life, not only because happiness is one of the most elusive and unpredictable of emotions, but also because  … most valuable experiences of emotional growth and personal development have come from pain, not pleasure.”

Sadness, he asserts, is not only “an authentic an emotion as happiness. It’s also far more instructive.”

He adds: “The fleeting moments of bliss and joy, and even the deeper sense of contentment that occasionally envelops us, make sense only because they represent such a contrast with the experience of pain, trauma, disappointment or sadness, or even with those times when we feel ourselves trapped in the drudgery of tedious, dreary routine.”

He clarifies this does not mean wishing sadness for ourselves and our children: “ It would be strange to welcome disappointment or trauma into our lives, but we might do well to accept that a noble, courageous, well-lived life is one in which we are equipped to experience and negotiate the full range of emotions: neither seduced by the lure of happiness nor obsessed by the grim and gritty aspects of life, but open to whatever comes and ready to learn from it all.

“Bereavement happens. Relationships break down. Illness takes its toll. Children (and parents) disappoint us. Friends let us down. We fail. What should we do? Pretend we’re not upset? Take a happy pill? Deny ourselves the chance to experiencing the full richness of human experience?”

The author notes : “Most of us have no trouble handling happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, euphoria, contentment or triumph. Even a little bliss is quite nice occasionally. But the fact that such emotions are so easy to manage is precisely the reason they don’t have much to teach us. In fact, too much euphoria can blind us to the truth of our situation.”

He cites this example: “Take falling in love. Most people experience that heady state as sublime form of it happiness, and yet from the outside it looks more like a mild neurosis. When we’re Hhead-over-heels in love, we’re typically quite dysfunctional, distracted, disorganized and inclined to make absurdly unrealistic judgements about all the wonderful qualities miraculously combined in the person who has become the object of our affection.”

Then he hit us with this insight: “… we do the same when we ‘fall in love’ with political leaders, investing unrealistic measures of hope and optimism in them and their ability to change society for the better.” Well, so there, just to nail the idea hard!

The author admits that that there’s an almost universal tendency to relieve ourselves “from relentlessness of our emotions so we can feel relaxed, elevated, excited or calm on demand.” 

He further observes: “It’s no accident that the happiness movement has coincided with an explosive increase in the use of recreational drugs in the general population and mood-altering drugs in psychiatry.” There is a frantic rush to control emotions to be able to produce happiness but an emotion “that can be summoned at will is not an authentic emotion.”

“If we allow ourselves to become preoccupied with the manipulation of our emotions, we risk becoming emotionally disabled unable to function without artificial support,” the author adds.

Then he makes this point: “An important step towards understanding and embracing the good life is to acknowledge that it has nothing to do with how you happen to be feeling from moment to moment. Living the good life isn’t always going to make you feel terrific … A kind or virtuous act performed for our own emotional benefit amounts to exploitation of the person towards whom we’ve acted charitably.”

A profound insight indeed. Then he suggests: “We need to delete our own happiness from the list of motives for any act that is going to count as noble or virtuous: such acts are exclusively about the benefit to others, without counting the cost, let alone the benefit to ourselves. To claim them as pathways to our happiness is to misread the whole idea of morality.”

Towards the end of this chapter, the author quotes the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Morality is not the doctrine of how we make ourselves happy but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.”Concludes the author, Hugh Mackay: “At the core … of so much of the world’s wisdom, is the belief that  happiness is at best a by-product, not the goal, of a well-lived life.” ###    

 NMP/25 Feb 2016/6.15 p.m. 

Reflections on the Good Life

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

The Lenten season, which started on Ash Wednesday last week as part of a 40-day observance of the sufferings of Jesus Christ prior to resurrection, is a great time to think about the Good Life. Aside from readings on daily reflections, I retrieved from the shelf  the book entitled “The Good Life,” written by Hugh Mackay, noted Australian author.

The book was sent as Christmas gift in 2013 by my former high school classmate and close friend, Sydney-based Milwida Sevilla-Reyes. More as impulse rather than a deliberate act, I pulled out the book in haste to see if it could help me provide some fresh insights on how to be good at a time when morality seems to be under savage and relentless attacks at all fronts.

Let me share with you some of these insights from a noted psychologist, a newspaper columnist for 25 years and a professor at the University of Wollongong.

On the word “Good”,  the author says that like the word “love” it has “many possible connotations.”  He says that  ‘Good time’, has almost no relation to the idea of being good.

He adds: “Good food, good party, good job, good journey, good conversation,  Good Friday: same adjective, many shades of meaning. Some of our uses of the word are ambiguous: ‘a good woman’, for example, might refer to anything from a virtuous wife to a good-time girl, and ‘Good luck!” can be heartfelt and ironic, depending on your tone of voice.”

The author says that in the context of his book, the “good life”  means “life that is characterized by goodness, a morally praiseworthy lsife, a life valuable in it impact on others, a life devoted to the common good.”

He observes:

“Having spent most of my career listening to people in research projects talking about their lives – their dreams, their passions, their joys and their sorrows – it strikes me that though most of us know deep within ourselves what constitutes a good life, we spend much of our time, barking up a succession of wrong trees. Perhaps we are genuinely unsure of how to put our convictions into practice.”

He cites the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you? It sounds like a the recipe for a good life, but how in practice do you stifle your perfectly natural urges towards greed, ambition, competitiveness or revenge, the very things likely to leach goodness out of your life? How do

you shed grudges you actually enjoy carrying? How do you find the emotional wherewithal to forgive someone who’s wronged you? How do you let go of stuff you’ve done in the past?”

He says that in pursuit of the Good Life, we may be distracted by “glittering baubles that offer variations on the themes of self-indulgence and self-instructions – money, pleasure, status, possessions – that have the power to seduce us. Or perhaps we’ve made a calculated decision to go for the good time before embracing the good life, just in case we miss some of the fun. Saint Augustine is supposed to have prayed this ruthlessly honest prayer: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’

All seven chapters of the book are littered with fresh insights. I cannot possibly summarize them all this column but I will extract some which may be useful for us to understand how to lead the Good Life to supplement our reflections based on the Scriptures during this season.

Mackay notes that many people in the West, whose lifestyle is getting to be the standard for the rest of the world, it feels like the Golden Age has arrived:

“Extraordinary advances in medical science; the explosion of information and communication technology that stimulates, informs and entertains us like never before; swift and cheap international travel; efficient, reliable, affordable cars; promising talk of a clean-energy revolution; online shopping; plentiful year-round fresh food supply that defies the four seasons; ever-smarter manufacturing and distribution processes that whisk tulips from Amsterdam to florists in Melbourne, and European fashion labels  from their Chinese factories to warehouses all over the world; to say nothing of the sophistication of modern marketing techniques tha stroke our egos with seductive skill. If ever we were going to be able to live the good life, surely this would be the time.”

For the rest of the world, … there is the “… teeming squalor of the world’s refugee camps, the ravages of continuing wars (driven, as usual, by religious rivalries or territorial greed, or both), the eternal tensions between India and Pakistan, or the looming problem of global food security. In fact, even in the West’s comfortable and relatively secure cities and suburbs, our dreamy blue skies are sometimes clouded by the frightening possibility of global warming wreaking ecological and geopolitical havoc on our planet. But in the busy round of daily life, most of us manage to put such thoughts out of our minds. We have a more appealing, more immediate agenda; the pursuit of perfection …”

Such relentless pursuit of perfection, at the expense of social consciousness, leads to what the author calls the Utopia complex:  “We have enshrined towering self-esteem as a cardinal virtue and the greatest gift we can pass on to the rising generation. Utopians are conditioned (and are fully conditioning their children” to assume that perfection in anything should be within their grasp.”

The author observes further: “The Utopian complex fills a vacuum where political passion, religious faith or social idealism once inspired dreams of a better world rather than a perfect life. Having fallen for the blandishments of the consumer society, many of us have adopted materialism as our driving philosophy, sometimes managing to remarry it with religious or political faith. In the West, the capitalist model of materialism has captured our hearts and minds, and mass marketing is its most obvious face.”

There is too much preoccupation with self “or the wish to lead a life based on economic security and material comfort.  As a species, we’ve been focused on these ever since our forebears started storing food for the winter and lining their caves with animal skins.

“Looking for our after our own interests is natural; it’s even necessary, up to a point, for our physical and emotional survival.  In a modern capitalist society pursuing the goal of endless economic growth, the health of the economy depends on every consumer being driven by self-interest. .. What’s changed is that the self we are increasingly being encouraged to indulge is a buffed-up, idealized self that doesn’t always correspond to the person we know ourselves to be, or to the life we know we are really living. “

The book says that if we continue to market Brand Me, “we may find that we have become the foolish victims of our own hype.”  In promoting Brand Me, “particularly via our status symbols and online bragging, it’s easy to forget that we may sacrificing the very thing that will lead to the deepest sense of satisfaction: self respect based on self-control. There is no shortcut to that, and no amount of self-promotion will get us there”  

More insights from the book, The Good Life, next column.  For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com

NMP/19 Feb 2016/5.56 p.m.

NEED FOR GOOD STRATEGY VERSUS THE DRUG ABUSE PROBLEM

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Let me share with you some gems of thought from the book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt, described as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers on strategy and management.” He is considered by the prestigious The Economist “as one of the twenty-five living persons who have had the most influence on management and corporate practice.”

Another magazine, McKensey Quarterly, profiled him uniquely as “strategy’s strategist,” to further stress his significant contribution to strategy formulation not only by giant corporations but also by relatively small organizations in the educational and not-for-profit worlds.

I chanced upon the book while looking for something that could be put to good use in this continuing saga to advocate and demonstrate how to address effectively the ever-growing drug menace in our midst.

Let us start with what he says on page 108 of the book’s paperback edition: “No matter how desirable it might be to stop the use of illegal drugs, it is not a proximate objective because it is not feasible within the present legal and law-enforcement framework. Indeed, the enormous efforts directed at this objective may only drive out the small-time smuggler, raise the street price, and make it even more profitable for the sophisticated drug cartels.”

He argues here for identifying a narrower and, therefore, a more winnable objective. Thus he observes that “every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting.”

The noted strategist asserts:  “An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem – one that is solvable. Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of ambiguity about the specific obstacles to be overcome.”

For him, to be a responsible leader is “more than a willingness to accept the blame.” To be such a leader means setting proximate objectives and handing the organization a problem it can actually solve.”

Earlier at the start of Chapter 7, he asserts that “one of a leader’s most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective – one that is close enough at hand to be feasible.” He says a proximate objective “names a target that an organization can reasonably be expected to hit, even overwhelm.”

He observes: “Many writers on strategy seem to suggest that the more dynamic the situation, the farther ahead a leader must look. This is illogical. The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be.

”

The author adds: “The proximate objective is guided by forecasts of the future, but the more uncertain the future, the more its essential logic is … not of looking far ahead,” but rather of “taking a strong position and creating options” to address current problems.

Rumelt cites the lesson to be learned from the game of chess: “One does not win a chess game by always selecting moves that are directly aimed at trying to mate the opponent or even trying to win a particular piece. For the most part, the aim of a move is to find positions for one’s pieces that (a) increase their mobility, that is, increase the options open to the them and decrease the freedom of operation of the opponent’s pieces, and (b) impose certain relatively stable patterns on the board that induce enduring strength for oneself and enduring weakness for the opponent.”

While reading this chapter on proximate objectives, I was actually breaking down in my head the myriad tasks and key players involved in the so-called war on drugs. I realized the need to define proximate or feasible objectives at each level of engagement in this campaign and to cascade down to the lower levels, e.g. local government, community, household, the concern to reduce the demand for drugs and simultaneously on the problem piece by piece rather than have all this noise and pronouncements at the higher or macro levels about the same boring messages on the evils of drug use without specifying proximate or feasible objectives at each level to win this war.

Indeed we must zero in on those pockets of opportunities at each level and achieve victories by defining actionable and winnable objectives. As in many advocacies and campaigns, this will require leadership by those who are supposed to govern us at each level. If this is wanting, then we just hope that an enlightened citizenry and any of existing institutions, such as the Church, civil society or the local business community, which is severely affected by the impact of drug addiction on the economy, may take such leadership role and adopt more effective ways to deal with the social problem which is fast developing as a major crisis in our midst.

Hence, the need for us ordinary mortals most affected by the crisis is to know a little bit about strategy in the hope that most of us can be active participants in this war we must win for us and future generations.

On this matter, I can only contribute some precious lessons from this book I have found useful in clarifying good strategy from a bad one from someone who has had “a lifetime of experience at strategy work- as a consultant to organizations, as a personal adviser, as a teacher and as a researcher.”

Let me summarize some of these lessons from this book -

First, a good strategy “acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.”

Hence, it is more than the usual exhortation to achieve a goal or vision. It involves so much more. It must not be equated with success or an organization’s ambition or goal. Strategy to be a useful tool should not be confused with “ambition determination, inspirational leadership, and innovation.”

I find this definition quite useful: “Ambition is drive and zeal to excel. Determination is commitment and grit. Innovation is discovery and engineering of new ways to do things. Inspirational leadership motivates people to sacrifice their own and the common good.”

Strategy is often confused with goal setting. The author says: “Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring how to advance the organization’s interests. Of course, a leader can set goals and delegate to others the job of figuring out what to do. But that is not strategy. If that is how the organization runs, let’s skip the spin and be honest – call it goal setting.”

In this sense, strategy is linked to action or a set of actions considered vital to address specific obstacles or problems. A good strategy, according to Rumelt, has an essential logical structure consisting of diagnosis, a guiding principle and coherent action.

Once we get familiar with these three components which he calls the kernel of strategy, we are in a better position to achieve specific goals in pursuit of a mutually-agreed vision. Applied in the current situation in Bohol and the country as a whole, faced with disintegration of family and community cohesiveness due to the growing dominance of illegal drug use, it is important that ordinary citizens and their organizations learn the basics of strategy formulation.

Their vigilance must seek the only remedy left, aside from localized actions, which is “to demand more from those who lead.”

As the book says: “More than charisma and vision, we must demand good strategy” from those who lead or those who pretend to lead us against a social malady too obvious to be ignored. #Boholdrugabuseproblem

NMP/05 Feb 2016/7.41 a.m.