Post 73
Today, I am interested in leadership. A friend recently recommended I read the book, Radical Candor. It’s ostensibly about how to create a management culture based on honesty and genuine human connection. However, it was written by one of the social media CEO’s. I bring this up for two reasons. 1. Social media (ie Facebook, Twitter, even Google) are famous for promoting lies, false information, and terrible privacy practices that are not transparent, open or ethical in most cases. Yet, the scion of these medial moguls is the one writing a book supposedly encouraging people to bring this standard of ethics and communication into their own industries. I am suspicious that her behavior directly contradicts her message. Never a good sign. And 2. business is by its nature a political creature built on lies and smoke. People may say that they want a boss to be open, honest, and help steer the ship to a place of sound ethics and rock solid morality, but in my experience, that’s just a cover for their own insecurities and belief in getting ahead.
People don’t know what to hold onto or let go of. And I stole that directly from Buddhism, lest someone think I’m trying to take credit for some original thought here. Don’t worry, I’m not.
I also read an interesting discussion on “A Gentle Cult” blog by Johnny Zacharias. The blog also copied Buddhism in saying that we create our own reality and that fiction and experience are all tied up in our own minds. That essentially our perception is colored only by conditioning and exposure and that we are inventing relationships and stories to create our reality. This is a fundamental tenant of Buddhism as well and it’s an important element of the idea of emptiness and the importance of disciplining the mind.
I bring this up because our minds are conditioned to see the world in a certain way. Social media is one of those ways. The more time we spend on the internet, the less time we spend seeing what is real. The internet in general is only an abstract representation of our conditioning. It’s the hollow positive feedback loop of our choice, just deepening our conditioned responses and taking us further away from the mental discipline needed to actually see what is true and not true.
The Dhammapada says:
“Mistaking the false for the true
And the true for the false,
You overlook the heart
And fill yourself with desire.
See the false as false,
The true as true.
Look into your heart.
Follow your nature.
An unreflecting mind is a poor roof.
Passion, like the rain, floods the house.
But if the roof is strong, there is shelter.
Whoever follows impure thoughts
Suffers in this world and the next.”
I bring this up because I think reading self-help books and leadership books like Radical Candor , especially from people who are building products specifically designed to lie to us and brainwash us as consumers into a deeply conditioned, unreflecting state is unhelpful. Maybe even unethical, though I don’t really need to have an opinion on that. But more than that, seeing people struggle through dharma concepts using neuroscience and self-help theory, like our friend Johnny is, is painful. Instead of seeing a dharma process that must be realized through meditative stability and deep internal reflection, they seem to be offering this as a public journey. As their own thoughts harmonizing with the great ebb and flow of internet opinion and social validation. But it’s not their path, anymore than Radical Candor can take credit for inventing a new communication style that emphasizes truth, justice, and the American way. It’s just dharma. And that’s been around for 2500 years. That dharma isn’t something that can be shared, necessarily. The personal growth and the reflection must be completed internally and can only be presented when it’s combined with profound ethics. That’s why monks and nuns exist. Dharma is only an academic exercise, no different from philosophy or science until it is combined with personal ethics and personal practice. And these experiential shifts cannot be articulated. For reasons I still don’t understand, the reason that Buddhism is a religion and the reason that it works to ease mental suffering and restore true nature is precisely this combination of understanding, ethical morality, and wisdom. Until those things come together, dharma can be preached and thought about, discussed, written, whatever, but it will not be successful. I can implement all the lessons I want from Radical Candor. I can fill out all the worksheets, I can have one-on-ones with all my employees, per recommendation. I can even see my relationships as conditioned constructs and marvel at the complexity of the human brain as it perceives itself in the great void, but my heart will always be sick. I will always see my own ego as something to be protected. I will always see the world as a vicious Hellscape holding me back from success and happiness. I will always see my mother as an abusive narcissist, like Johnny. But these things don’t really exist. Without experiential ethics and morality, without meditative stability and contemplative wisdom from Buddhism, none of the analytical dharma will work. I will just be gratifying my own mental concept of an eternal “I” that isn’t there.
True leadership, for others and for myself, requires compassion. Real compassion. Real wisdom. And that follows the dharma. Both the words and the actions. For example, no killing (of anything…that means you, spiders), no lying (of any kind, even the soft lies we tell people to not hurt their feelings), no stealing (even taking things that are not yours…a promotion, a person’s time), no sexual misconduct. None of it. For me, this means adopting the monastic precepts. The clearer and more intentional your behavior is, the clearer and more realistic your thoughts are. Meditations on death, impermanence, all these things we discount as Westerners because it’s not part of our conditioning are the real ways to build wisdom and compassion. Reading a book or mentally masturbating over illusions of reality only propagate our false conditioning.
And yes, I realize the irony of my argument that the internet is a massive addictive facilitator to ego and false conditioning as I post this on the internet. Yep. You are absolutely correct. I will stop now.
A proper talk about the role of science, technology, and leadership motivation is given here: