Jack

Whether it’s teaching, consulting, coaching or psychotherapy what matters most in helping others to help themselves for the Good of all is not method or technique or HOW (what can be taught) but the person or WHO (what can only be learned by living wisely). I argue that the 20th into 21st century obsession with technique and technology, aligned as it inevitably has been and will continue to be with destructive government and corporate power, has created the Weberian “Iron Cage”, the monstrous Man-Un-Kind Machine of the modern Welfare-Warfare State worldwide. A favorite writer of mine, Lewis Mumford, addressed this corruptive convergence of the Power Elite with what he termed the “Machine” in his book, The Myth of the Machine, where he exposed “the convergence of science, technics and political power as a unified community of interpretation rendering useless and eccentric life-enhancing values” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine) To carry my theme forward, I recommend reading the following: House of Cards by Robyn M. Dawes; A General Theory of Love (AGTOL) by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon; any of the work of the neuroscientist and psychobiologist, Jaak Panksepp; any of the work of the cardiologist and epidemiologist, James J. Lynch. I think once you read the above you will understand and agree that it is the PERSON that is (or should be since it is often not the case) where our attention and assessment is best directed and not technique and technology where we tend to treat persons as things that can be manipulated and controlled by our latest methodology. If you read the above references, you will discover the 3 Rs of Resonance, Regulation, Revision (AGTOL) and our Limbic Emotional Brain System with its 7 Emotional Centers (Panksepp): SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, SEPARATION-LOSS, PLAY which explain why our WHO, rather than our HOW, is the IT we should be trying to target and hit. It is these evolutionary elements of the Human Brain that make us the predominate SOCIAL ANIMAL of all the species which then makes HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS as the WHAT in What Matters Most (see the book by that title by the anthropologist and psychiatrist, Arthur Kleinman). And to take one step further into our WHOs, the WHAT that matters most to we Human Beings is LOSS which I insist is the defining condition of the Human Condition in terms of how a person responds to it. And HOW you respond to LOSS is, I believe, WHO YOU ARE. And if you learn how to use LOSS to LINK you again to others, then you are doing what is Good for yourself and Humanity. I term this Good as being RESPONSIBLY FREE. And it is this that you must learn to be if you are to be a truly Good-For-Humanity consultant, coach, human being, etc. To be a “Responsibly Free” person is to have undergone LOSS events to the point in your personal development (PD) where your HOW has been transformed into a WHO that is useful to other WHOs in their PD to come (again, for the Good-For-Humanity kind of PD). I hope this topic might be of interest to those here at the HUB of things and people. I leave you with two quotes, the first by me, the second by the historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology, Lewis Mumford, I referred to above. “You are only as free as you take the responsibility to be.” “Primitive man mistakenly treats things as if they were persons: but modern man treats persons as if they were things; and that is perhaps an even more dangerous superstition.” Cheers from Jack in Santiago, Chile at home there and the rest of the Universe too.