A population of voracious consumers only superficially connected to one another is one which can be relied upon to greedily consume the outputs produced by the economy. Believing in little other than their own entitlement implies that they are unlikely to balk at society’s transgressions against their neighbor. The distrust those in the narcissistic paradigm feel towards one another means there is little likelihood of their banding together to create an organized opposition to the status quo. Lacking the collective will to be defiant; those in power can rely upon their mute compliance. This makes them relatively easy to manage. In this sense, the capitalist system is far more efficient than communism or autocracy, requiring a much smaller investment in a police apparatus – here the sheep can be relied upon to herd themselves. Gradually the government can remove their freedoms safe in the knowledge that whatever resistance they may offer will only be temporary. If this process is sufficiently gradual, the majority will never even notice.

This New Leviathan we find ourselves in is different than the natural state theorized by Hobbes in key respect: instead of being the inevitable outcome of a naturally occurring series of events, it is created by design. It is an ordered matrix of producer/consumer robots isolated from one another, and the environment, by a rigid, narcissistic, linear way of seeing the world.

With the dominance of narcissism, instead of being seen as an unfolding of possibilities, life is reduced to zero – sum games in which there are only two outcomes – winning and losing. The conditions, which sustained the previous order, trust in our neighbor’s communal interest, no longer holds. Those of us who cling to this old belief are the new dinosaurs, completely non-adaptive to the new reality and destined for extinction. Instead of a brotherhood of man, we have a free-for-all in which it is each man for himself in a fight to the finish. The winning strategy becomes one of doing it to them before they do it to us. The distinction from Hobbes’ variation is that here all actions, no matter how blatantly self-serving, are veiled by extravagant proclamations of sentiment. In other words, everyone feels compelled to appear nice before others and themselves. The result is that it becomes impossible to sustain anything but the most superficial form of relationships, with human interaction being reduced to a series of isolated transactions.

Thinking!

We keep ourselves engaged. We keep ourselves busy. We write to-do lists for ourselves and then frantically go about completing them. Those terrifying gaps between one activity and another are eliminated, as we squeeze more and more doing into each day.

It reminds me of Lidio, an old cabinetmaker from Friuli. Lidio would arrive to work each day at exactly the same time; a quarter to seven and slowly and purposefully, he would unload his tools and machinery from his truck. Next, he would methodically set up in the house and start work.

Lidio would work steadily at an even pace; his movements perfectly synchronized in a slow ballet, until his morning break. After eating his apple, he would continue straight through to lunch, which was always a panini with some fruit afterwards. He repeated the process in the afternoon until it was time to quit, when he replaced his tools in his truck, in the same slow deliberate way in which he had unloaded them. He repeated this routine each day for several weeks until he finished all the cabinetry in the house.

I know it sounds dull, uneventful. However, out of this unremarkable process an amazing amount of the most exquisite cabinetry was produced. Lidio was in his fifties at the time and the intervening 20 years I have not seen any 30 year old that could hold a candle to him in precision or speed.

Was Lidio a happy man? Far from it! His wife suffered from a disabling illness, and his marriage was an unhappy one. He had a very shy and good-hearted daughter, Carina, whom he loved very much. He worried for Carina, fearing for how someone so soft hearted would be likely to make out in this world.

Lidio had had several business partners over the years all of whom had swindled him in one way or another.

So, in the end, is Lidio a winner, or a loser in the game? One can hardly call him a winner. His life reads more like a character out of a Dickens novel, rather than someone you are likely to see on ” Livestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Lidio has neither power, influence, nor happiness. So logic tells us, he must be a loser. Yet, would you consider a man who devoted his life to his work and his family, and produced an extraordinary amount of the most exquisite cabinetry, a loser?

I am not just asking this question rhetorically – I would really like to know!

So what is wrong with this? Why does it bother me so much? Maybe I’m just as much an idiot as my friend is, for thinking that such trivia should merit a whole article? For me it speaks to the fact that we have become so self absorbed that we’re being becoming incapable of authentic relationship. It is not uncommon to see people with over 1000 friends on Facebook –how can anyone be friends with over 1000 people?

Friendship has become devalued completely. It reminds me of what the communists did to the word comrade. Comradeship is the strongest bond between two people, and beans you place the others life and welfare a head of your own in times of crisis. Communists turned it into a prefix, a form of address, completely generic, applicable to everyone. In the process it devalued the word completely. In a land where everyone is a comrade, authentic comradeship cannot exist.

The Hungarians solved this linguistic dilemma by creating an entirely new word elftars, a communist comrade, not to be confused with the original bajtars, thereby maintaining the integrity of the original intact. Maybe we should do the same for friendship. Invent a new term which conveys the kind of insipid and meaningless connection inferred by “friend” on Facebook.

What all these offerings share in common is that they are promising benefits that are easy and immediate. They’re all based on the irresistible lure of the good deal. The seduction of getting something for nothing.

We all say we know that nothing in life comes for free – but our actions speak otherwise. In the movie “The Flim Flam Man,” the con man says to his young protégé, “You can never cheat an honest man.” We blame people for being greedy and living beyond their means, yet our whole economic system is based on just that premise. Few of us will own up to fact that we wish to have more than our due. The good looking or talented seek to leverage their gifts to get the most they can while offering the least in terms of their own effort. Ironically, the more we get for what we can give, the higher we esteem our own value and the more we demand in the future. If we don’t get it, we feel wronged, cheated in some way. We might even say to ourselves and to our friends that they’re trying to get one over on us, to get something for nothing.

It seems that these days we all need to be plugged in, and tuned out from the world around us. Silence has become unbearable to us. We need stimulation. We need it not just some of the time, but all the time! |If for nothing else we need it to block out all the other noise around us. After all, it’s better to be listening to our noise than theirs. Maybe that’s what freedom means in our society: the God given right to choose our own noise.
We might choose the brand of noise, but we have an absolute need for some noise, any noise! Why is it that we need this noise fix so badly?

Is it to distract us from something? Something so unpleasant, so distasteful, that we cannot bear to think about it even for a second? For each of us it might be something different. What is it for you?

Or have you ever noticed how we you can work your tail off and have very little to show for it while others seem to glide through life effortlessly, without a care in the world? Even when they do stumble –get caught breaking rules, get fired, or even screw up completely, they always seem to land on their feet. How is that?

Did you ever feel that there is a game and you are on the outside of it? As if there were a secret that they share – some unspoken, invisible code that only they understood.

Well you were right! Over the course of my life I have encountered the same thing over and over. I’ve run companies in Eastern Europe, owned a construction and development company here in Canada. I’ve worked in small business, big business and government on both sides of the Atlantic. No matter the environment – at the club, on the job, even at home in with our own family, I began to see the same pattern playing out over and over.

Bit by bit I figured it out – the hidden dance, the other secret, the one no one talks about. In my mind this is the real secret! I invested over 30 years of thought into this problem and I believe I have cracked the code.

Now this is all very well and good but how does it help us in our lives in the here and now?

Well, it helps us to know the score and not be blindsided by what life throws at us.

It helps us to be proactive – perceive and react to situations before they arise- so we can get nip them in the bud or take evasive action to sidestep the problem altogether.

It can help us to engineer the outcome that we want in our lives.

It provides us with security so that we protect ourselves and our loved ones, not just today, but in the future as well.

Sometimes life just happens and we find ourselves in a tight spot with our backs to the wall. Knowing this game, the players, and how this Game is played can be invaluable in helping us to extricate ourselves from these tight spots.

And perhaps more important than all the above, understanding the Game and coming to know the Players; helps us to live our lives as we wish; instead of the way in which others wish us to, we feel we have to, or still worst, the way we’ve been forced to.