(What follows is a
look at a social phenomenon from a particular perspective. At some point I will
follow this post with a look at this same phenomenon from a different
perspective – Don’t Feed the Beast II:Dissolving Face.)
A few weeks ago I had the educational honour of discussing
guaranteed income (in German) to a live audience as one of a panel of three
‘experts’. The polite host asked gentle questions, and the three experts
responded, agreed and disagreed. Why is this relevant to Econosophy?
There were cameras, lights, and expectations. Before the
discussion started, the host asked me some questions about my position, my
past, my present, what sort of a human I am. He was to introduce his guests and
so needed to know something about them, and seeing as the whole affair had been
allotted a mere hour, the introductions had to be brief (sound-bite conditions).
After our short chat, his introduction transformed me into an economist and philosopher.
I had asked him to announce me as a simple blogger, but he probably wanted to
lend me – and by extension the panel – a certain gravitas. I did not correct
him on stage during his introduction. Not only was it my first time as an
‘expert’ on stage, I am by nature polite and did not want to cost him any face.
Nor myself, for that matter.
Social face is incredibly important. Its import seems to intensify
with age, more so when you are seen as an expert for whatever reason, then even
more so when you are on a stage with lights and cameras on you, with anonymous but
expectant folk looking up and listening to what you say. Public loss of face
hurts and can have real consequences for career and thus lifestyle. We are imaginative
social critters suspended in a society of one kind or another by a web of
interconnected meanings and layered value judgments. Sever too many strands of
your personal web and it can be as if society has ejected you. (The direct links
between face and money should be obvious enough, especially if I quickly point
out the parallels between face and capital.)
Anyway, the discussion was cordial and probably not all
that unfruitful. But what I felt most keenly during that intense hour – and why
I wrote “educational” in this post’s first sentence – was how I had been effortlessly
slotted into a societal pigeonhole, so as to be more easily dealt with, digested,
neatly positioned somewhere clear and fixed in society’s lexicon. I was
suddenly granted a social face I wasn’t aware I had a right to don. It was so
automatic. The evening just powered forwards and dragged me along with it,
changed me, obliged me to behave a certain way. I can now imagine what it is to
be a politician, a mouthpiece for something NotYou. People become mouthpieces
and lose ‘autonomy’ as a consequence of powerful social forces (I’m ignoring
ego-ambition and sociopathy here for the sake of brevity). It’s how all this
works, how complex society of highly specialised careers works. This vast dynamic
is not easy to change, to put it mildly.
Social face also happens to have an inverted Janus
aspect; it points both outwards and inwards; ‘escaping’ it is therefore far
from easy.
I happen to have been my family’s primary breadwinner since
forever. My wife has concentrated on the (in my eyes) far more noble role of
housewife and mother to our two daughters. This is our family situation. For
various reasons and against that particular backdrop, I quit my job in October
2011 with a sketchy plan for both my wife and I to earn money, for me to earn
and ‘work’ less than before so as to free me up to study and write more and to be the change I want to see in
the world. In short, to stop feeding the beast.
In other words, I turned our family’s then 16 year old
dynamic around on a dime. It was my attempt at a small leap forward.
I ‘failed’, and that ‘failure’ hurt (there’s far more to it than this simplistic rendering, but
time and space don’t allow …). So I am at work again full time, now for an even
bigger corporation, having hated the constant uncertainty of freelance
translation work (for corporations). And I was struck too by my daughters’ need
to save their faces in their public arenas: to appear in certain clothes, own
certain gadgets, live a certain lifestyle. Even though I am their father, who
am I to ask them to believe what I believe, to faithfully represent my philosophy as their ‘own’ social
faces develop and are woven into their lives?
My life does not belong to me. It cannot. Such a concept makes
no useful sense. It ‘belongs to’ (is caught up in and a part of) my social
face, both inward facing (to self, family and friends) and outward facing. Not
completely, but very much so. Attempts to change it have consequences not only
on you, but on those around you. The entire web of your life is affected.
Be the change you
want to see in the world. If we attempt this, we attempt it for the world,
for society. In doing so we create a new social face and slowly turn into it,
perhaps unknowingly. In some ways we become leaders, which is an obvious
consequence if we want our example to inspire others. One consequence of this
is that we become indebted to our task, a servant of it, owe it and others our
time and creativity. And it becomes a source of pride, of positive identity.
How then do we stay objective, how do we maintain our posture of service? To
what do we stay true? Pride or principle? To those flesh and blood people who depend
on our leadership or to something more abstract? Changing face, changing
direction sets up dissonant forces that upset existing elements of our lives;
the conflicting demands are difficult to balance. Where does I end and Face begin? An unanswerable question, but what is certain is that
balancing the new with the old is not easy. Emotions and pride are powerful, as
are the needs to belong and contribute.
This challenge to fundamental change magnifies as we scale
up the type of living system that can be said to have a social face. Numerous institutions
have co-evolved with society and increased in complexity since we began our
civilizational journey many millennia ago, each institution with its own face
and representatives (with their own faces) tasked with upholding their
respective institution’s face (be it ideology, money system, political party,
etc.). Oh what a tangled web we weave…
Institutions cannot just be stopped, smashed, changed;
they are emergent consequences of underlying social forces and beliefs, just as
our personal faces and identities are. Until we have transcended them, ‘destruction’
of any institution will simply cause its recreation, with a new name perhaps,
but with the same general dynamic.
As I have repeatedly said, we are the beast. The beast is the comfort we have become
accustomed to, our habits, the social and cultural momentum that is greater
than us as ‘individuals’, the face we have invested in. The beast is ugly when
we defy it, go against its grain, go solo, march off out of step to Somewhere
Else, or when we have nothing of ‘value’ to feed it with. To fight the beast
you need to have a certain robust insensitivity coupled with a fine
sensitivity, buckets of patience and stamina, and the freedom to fight. Only a
very few people are blessed (cursed?) with these traits and circumstances, and
thus knowingly construct a social face which, if only in part, has its roots in
a slightly different dynamic. Ralph Boes is one (on whom more in a later post),
Franz Hörmann is another.
And yet none of the above means Perpetual Growth can
‘work’, it just touches on one aspect of human social life that goes some way
to explaining why profound change is profoundly difficult, why we are entitled
to a little forgiveness, why we need both patience and passion. The mighty
forward momentum of this paradigm will grind down in the end; nothing lasts
forever. Not one of my experiences alters the fact that paragdigms grow old and
die, that now, in this complex and tightly global world, profound change is
afoot, change brought about by the odd calculus of civilisation, and by the
stirring emergence of empathy and brotherly love as it reaches outwards across
borders and out to other species, in fact to all life everywhere. And beautifully,
as it reaches out, it cannot understand the eddies it creates in the global
mind as they task us with letting go of the old and beginning with the new,
however we ‘choose’ to go about this work.
