A philosophical treatise on the metrics of societal success.
I just came back from holiday at the Croatian sea. Nobody there… ghastly. Ripe for unperturbed exploration.
I went there with my co-workers… have you heard of team-building? It’s a thing we do in liberal western countries, meant to encourage cohesiveness of a team and to lift the spirit of collaboration.
Certainly helps… the monotony of daily task-smashing can leave one uninspired to keep reaching goals in the absence of human connection and meaning. Team building is a way to alleviate the monotony of performance-based function and raises the morale of the collective.
A few notes on organizational axioms from your resident philosopher;
A company is people. One can try to institute martial discipline at work but one cannot also then expect longevity of a company.
Meaning matters. I know everyone is afraid of a profound thought these days, but absent of meaning, man is but a biological shell whose purpose becomes to be yelled at by his daughter for being ‘ancient and useless’ (except for his wallet, of course)
Okay, let’s not waste your busy time, in a busy schedule, doing, doing, churning. I respect you taking this moment of your eternal fate, away from keyboard, to read this provocative address to your ‘soul’.
I want to talk about something i find sorely missing in today’s discourse on any topic. It is something like ‘the metric of success’
I will arrogantly proclaim that lack of ancient philosophical education in people today really shows. Many of you are brilliant technologists, but it ill-equips you to capture the essential concerns of life, to respond to them with ‘what is good, better, best’
There simply is no metric. I am not sure if people know what is best for them. It is like a shot in the dark for most.
‘Having a hacienda at the sea is better than not having one’
‘Having a job that stresses you out is better than not having a job at all’
‘Having kids is … oh wait, why do i have kids again??’
A quick review on the purpose of philosophy on this fine rainy morning. Philosophy aims to equip the mind to discern value, meaning and course of action based on reason and unambiguous evidence.
Notice the lack of any metaphysics in this declaration, and how it essentially sounds like the scientific method. Thus, philosophy could be said to be ‘scientific method for the mind’
So why am i saying this? Partly due to aftermath of some short encounters butting heads on certain critical issues while attempting to enact a team building effort at the sunny shores of Croatia.
The problem being; in my assessment as a philosopher; people do not know dialectics, the Socratic method, Aristotelian logic, NEARLY enough to be able to even come near to the truth. (not that people even strive for the truth)
It all becomes a type of banter which my best friend, the ‘chubby Leonardo Dicaprio’, calls ‘Ego-clash’ .
The remedy as he sees it is gym time for a season to establish a metric of perfect Platonic Leonardness, to complement his million dollar face with a body worthy of carrying it.
And more pressingly, the remedy for ego-clashes is to establish a metric of success of fruitful discourse.
So in traditional philosophy (nothing like what is taught today… modern academia invokes my pity)
Conversations would be set up like this:
‘Both of us, we must strive to determine the truth of what we discuss. I am certain of your good intentions to determine the truth of the matter, and i fully accept being corrected if my effort for truth is found to be off course.’
That is a basic example of a metric for conversation. To determine the truth of a discussed matter. Now then, let us discuss some macro in light of my recent thoughts.
Let’s say you wanted to build a perfect society. God only knows the angry mobs on the streets right now have some faint visions of a ‘better’ society, absent racism i gather. Yes certainly, racism ‘bad’. (i write this in the time of ‘post-George Floyd death’ riots all over the west)
It quite pisses of a systemic thinker like myself to have to review poorly constructed visions of a ‘better’ society, with metrics so vapid as ‘no discrimination’. But the angry youth will always strive to fix the world, and fail at it as they always do. Good thing we have parents to offset the rabid youth just a tad.
Same with the hippie generations. They imagine a retreat to a perfect island is a way to fix all wrongs in the world. Escapism at it’s finest.
Metric of success. Meaning. What must i make you smoke so that you will realize that meaning matters? Motive. Motivation.
Motivation means to find a motive. Action means movement ONLY once meaning, motive, reason is established. Without a motive, man never moves. He becomes a slug. He consumes and wastes away, like the jellyfish, the brainless spineless consumers of the ocean society, washed senselessly on the shores of Kamenjak.
I say these things over the course of the day, but to my peers it often seems like ‘Darko is smoking the good stuff again’. Thus i keep gently planting the seeds of meaning until one of them germinates into a beautiful flower.
I say things like ‘The best metric of success in fitness, exercise and health is to be able to do anything that your children do, for as long as they do, without aches, injuries or fatigue that might prevent you from playing with your children ad-nauseum’
I derive this metric from a set of biological imperatives. A grown up realizes with children how ‘i am not young anymore, i cannot crawl, jump, fall, bounce and run like they do’
It is perfectly fine to say that humans simply age and deteriorate. But a GOOD metric of fitness nevertheless, is to NEVER lose the youthful energy and spark to do all things that you were able to do as a child.
Yet still, admirable Leonardo would say ‘I just want to restore the fullness of my Leonardness, without the extra layers of dad-bod… that is MY metric. And there can exist different metrics of fitness success.’
Thus this little conversation is closed, and who am i to push any annoying little nuance of life? He is right by the way.
I leave all children to play and enjoy a game that ‘does not exist’, and i leave all grown ups to act out a story of life that they have painfully constructed over many years, to find a motive, a reason, a meaning to keep living.
The macro then. What is the metric of a good, better, best society? Here it is; some of my finest philosophical thinking that took me decades to accrue:
The metric of success of a society is rooted only in the prospect of it’s children.
Emphasis on only. It might appear like an error, but it is not, because by hedonistic, Epicurian standards, a hippie society may live in perfection and bliss, but it cannot cater to it’s next generation and becomes extinct in two generations.
The highest (but not only) metric of societal success is measured in the wealth, health, happiness, safety and purposefulness of it’s children. That is a conclusion borne of high philosophical thinking.
Now then, let us measure some other things that rarely ever get measured with any degree of objectivity.
A success of a mother can be objectively measured in the degree of security, health, happiness and prosperity of her children.
A success of a father is measured by the same token, with children being the cornerstone. Masculinity is fatherhood. Masculinity is the protective layer of parenthood. A ripped, ‘masculine’ physique does not a masculinity make. At least not the objective, ‘high philosophical’ meaning of masculinity.
It is certainly okay to say like German women do ‘I shall not produce offspring, ever, for any reason, and i am my own metric of success’
But the rod of philosophical objectivity will fail to spank these women with blissful strikes of meaning.
They might instead look for kinky sex to viscerally instill a moment of meaning in place of the glaring void that is meaningless, jellyfish like existence.
All is well. Childless German women’s lives matter.
I got to know an amazing woman and her children during the time of this holiday. I saw real success in a light that rings true, beyond any fancy post-modern philosophy lacking touch with grounded reality.
She told me: ‘I rarely see any parents, much less someone childless, investing as much time and energy for the kids as you do’
And my well smoked philosophical mind could only discern meaning upon hearing this. How meaningful, poetic and wise it is to;
Invigorate one’s spark for life like it once shone in youthful past. Is it not only to re-invigorate youthful bliss in us grownups that we crave and aspire to be parents?
The vision, meaning and motives that we lost, now requiring team building, holiday, time off to replenish. Children have that spark copious amounts. They teach us in sublime wisdom how to return to that spark, even if only for a moment.
Wisdom is the crown jewel of philosophy, and wisdom herself teaches the cycle of life; of youth, maturity, parenthood, and a return to youthful vigor.
Wisdom herself teaches that indeed; nothing may be more important for a man to do than to see his children grow wise.
No vision for a company, job, worldly success being as pertinent as seeing one’s children become the vessels of an endless cycle that transcends all jobs, currencies, eras.
A cycle of life, losing youthfulness and gaining wisdom. Having vigorous youth bereft of wisdom, and the interplay of both in what can only be described as…
The game of life.
Nothing excites an old philosopher like myself more that to play with children in whose actions and play primordial wisdom lies, like kernels of truth to be discovered, exposing my own fallacy.
No memory of this holiday is more worthy of keeping than the time spent with children who see not left nor right, but are pearls in the human ocean of jellyfish. I cannot get drunk enough with grownups to equivocate the feeling.
That pearl lies buried inside each of us grownups. Under the layers of societal pollution, below the speedways of jellyfish this pearl lies, clamped in a shell of ‘grownup-ness’.
How easy it is to play with children without end, once this pearl is allowed to be liberated, exposed to the rays of sun and even to the toxic touch of lurking jellyfish, who seek to corrupt all goodness of youth! Children never fail to un-clamp this pearl within me.
While wisdom herself teaches:
‘As long as you see children being happy, roaming free, you will never lose hope. The cycle of life is never complete. Failure is never etched in stone.
As long as there are children, who are the pearls of society. Thus, objective meaning is made easy for man to comprehend.
