Blissful Life

Category: values

  • All the world’s a stage

    I have this weird issue. I tend to be non-conformist. I notice the performance of societal roles. I am more painfully conscious when I have to perform societal roles myself.

    The first time it became a real problem was when I started practicing medicine. You just can’t be yourself in the consultation room. Doctors have to be chameleons. They have to adapt themselves to the patient and “perform” a dance that contributes to healing. And I couldn’t get myself to do that.

    I had this peculiar philosophy. I didn’t want to answer things with confidence when the science itself was uncertain. I didn’t want to act like I’m caring when I didn’t really care. I didn’t like wearing the white coat. I didn’t like playing the doctor role. It felt like a lie.

    Why is this performance necessary? Because human beings are irrational. We don’t use logic to operate. We use social cues and emotions and biases to operate.

    A doctor has to appear smart, because otherwise the patient will assume the doctor is incompetent. And so on.

    I changed myself. I rationalized the performance in ways that made sense to me. The consultation room is a special place where you have to prioritize healing and no other philosophy matters. So, some “lying” was okay.

    It didn’t stop there, though. Leadership needed performance too. You’ve to be chatty when you’re really tired, you’ve to lead with vision when you’re lost, and you’ve to inspire even the people you are angry at.

    And I rationalized that too.

    The world really needs leaders so that we can change it for the good. And we can’t let philosophy come in between.

    What’s this philosophy, you might ask. It is a form of anarchist thought. Anarchists want every human being to operate through their own agency, as capable and rational beings. The performance of leaders and doctors could be seen as “manipulation” by anarchists. At least that’s what I used to think about these.

    That this philosophy is utterly impractical, is the strongest argument I have discovered against anarchism.

    Human beings are human beings. They’re not perfectly capable beings. They like being led. They rely on a shoulder to cry on.

    Yet, the anarchist dream is too deep in my mind that I’m not been able to get rid of it.

    I work closely with a person who does plenty of successful activism. He was telling me how when he goes to meet decision makers he carries a box of chocolates or some gift like that. To me this was unacceptable bribery. These were dark tactics to get what we want. But his logic was undeniable — the world needs to change and that was more important than any purist philosophy.

    That is the difference between an anarchist and a socialist or a pragmatist. An anarchist cares deeply about the means to the end. The socialist cares only about the end and wouldn’t mind a bloody revolution. The pragmatist would be okay with some shortcuts.

    Let me make it more clear. I want the world to be more rational, egalitarian, honest, and so on, and I don’t like using the tools of today’s oppressors to reach there. And psychological manipulation (power games, etc included) are part of those tools.

    Inside my mind it is the same that I apply to consultation room and management positions. I want people to get better without me having to employ the wrong tools.

    The places where this creates problems are infinite.

    I can’t stand my extended family members and their routine patriarchal performances.

    I can’t stand companies/organizations and their bullshit capitalistic policies.

    I can’t stand academicians. Not a bit. Their jargon and their credentials and their ways of claiming exclusive rights to discuss what they’re discussing. Their hypocrisy and their exclusive focus on their careers and publications. But more irritatingly, the reverence with which others look at academicians. The way people go “Oh, wow! This person is from IIT! (/Harvard/Oxford/blah blah blah)”

    In my first visit to JNU, I was fuming about the opulent waste of resources that it was and Swathi had to put a lot of effort into shutting me up.

    When people say “OMG! This was published in Nature (or Lancet or whatever)” my blood boils.

    There could be other emotions contributing to this too. Envy, superiority complex, know-it-all complex, all of that.

    But if you believe me, the biggest problem for me is the societal roles and the unquestioning conformity by everyone to those.

    I realized this today when I was attending a public health writing workshop by Nivarana. I was listening to people talk about how to write a story, how to write in simple language, how to pitch, etc. And I was struggling with the “performance” that journalism was.

    There is a particular societal role for a journalist. They’re supposed to be arbiters of truth. They are supposed to write in a particular tone, one that conveys a sense of reporting of the truth. The reader, on the other side, is expected to play the role of taking in the truth without question.

    In light of the shit-show that Indian journalism today is, I’m particularly disillusioned by the performance of the journalist role.

    There is a rigid script that journalists follow. You start out with an uninformed audience, you introduce certain hooks, you establish authority through some expert testimonial, and you conclude the narrative in a particular direction you want the reader to go in.

    My philosophical discord is with how everyone buys this shit. Truth isn’t packaged as neatly as journalism makes it out to be. And behind every piece of journalism there is a human playing the role.

    Like judges in courts. They’re performing too. Acting like some wise ass.

    Yet human beings are like “this is how it has to be!”

    No. This is just a particular social order created in a particular space and time.

    Why am I writing all this?

    Because I am tired with my philosophy. I want to go beyond and be like regular humans. Earn some brownie points in the human world. And even though I am deciding to do that I think my philosophy and my pain is valid. What I write may not be meaningful to everyone or be added to the anarchist library. But I hope that there will be at least a few people who resonate with this particular sub-niche of agony.

    How will I rationalize journalism then?

    One way is to think of it as mass education. Like teaching, but at a larger scale. As an intermediate strategy till people are able to educate themselves.

    Another is to imagine it as fiction. I mean, I don’t have a problem with fiction because it comes with a label that it is a performance art. Perhaps journalism can be seen as a performance art. The sentences and the style can give joy to the readers. Make it about creating art.

    A third way is to think of it as reclaiming spaces. But of course this makes sense only if we put under-represented ideas and thoughts into those spaces. We can’t play by their rules and call it reclaiming. It maybe possible to cleverly subvert the rules and reclaim the spaces.

    tl;dr is that I’m struggling to practice anarchist philosophy and forced to rationalize the performances of societal roles to be able to thrive.

  • Organizations, Like People, Have Values

    I stole the title from Peter Drucker’s Harvard Business Review article titled “Managing Oneself” [pdf]. It has been 4 years since I graduated medical school and in that many years, having worked with (and escaped having to work with) organizations of different kinds, I have come to the same conclusion.

    Organizations have values. These values can be determined by observing the way the organizations work. Whether or not you will feel happy working with an organization is determined by whether your values are compatible with the value system of that organization.

    The values of an organization exist independently of the values of people in its leadership. The leaders have a great role in determining the values of an organization. But often leaders are distracted by a “pragmatic” approach that usually follows money in an increasingly capitalistic world. And this makes them make compromises without even realizing what they’re giving up.

    And you can’t blame them. Organizations, by definition, have the motivation to grow. Growth is easier to achieve if an organization focuses on either money or power. Because they have a top-down nature, it is easier to wield money and/or power to direct growth. There might also be an argument that a top-down approach like that will lead to larger and faster results too.

    This also leads to a particular set of values. Even if the leaders of an organization have a different set of values in their personal life, their choice to focus on money/power will lead their organization to have a value system in which retaining and increasing money/power will be a core priority. That influences the kind of values that can thrive in those organizations.

    On the other hand, choosing to focus on things like “people” will lead to organizations being structured in very different ways, especially with regard to decision making. Such bottom-up structure fosters different values altogether.

    When I say bottom-up, I am not talking about a “top-down disguised as bottom-up” management structure. In fact, the right way to run any organization is that top-down, yet bottom-up way as explained in this article: “How to Design a Self-Managed Organization“. But eventually such an organization is still one where there is a leader who ultimately is in charge (even though they rarely use that control in day-to-day activities of the organization). I am not talking about that bottom-up style.

    I am talking about a truly bottom-up style where there are no leaders at all. This is akin to participatory research. 

    “Participatory research comprises a range of methodological approaches and techniques, all with the objective of handing power from the researcher to research participants, who are often community members or community-based organisations. In participatory research, participants have control over the research agenda, the process and actions. Most importantly, people themselves are the ones who analyse and reflect on the information generated, in order to obtain the findings and conclusions of the research process. ” ~ source

    What would organizations look like if they embraced the participatory approach? What would the role of a leader be in such an organization?

    The P2P foundation wiki has lots to speak about it. On the same, I found a link to The Three Ways of Getting Things Done by Gerard Fairtlough. This book provides two alternatives to hierarchy – heterarchy and responsible autonomy. 

    “If hierarchy is the power system of centralized systems, then heterarchical power is the power system of decentralized systems and Responsible Autonomy is the power system of distributed systems.”

    Similar thoughts about adaptive leadership is mentioned in Complexity Leadership Theory (H/T: Dr Ramakrishna Prasad).

    The question of money or “business model” also has a big role in deciding the values of an organization. Organizations who raise money before work is done tend to have made promises which decide how the work is done. The nature of these promises decides the value of these organizations.

    Sometimes, such commitments can make an organization take up values that are antithetical to their own mission. Especially when it comes to free software, or free knowledge, having financial commitments lead to organizations wanting to make money out of software and knowledge – which is arguably easier if you restrict freedoms.

    An organization with the wrong structure cannot have the right values. And if you find yourself in a situation where the people in an organization wants to have the right values but aren’t radically restructuring the organization, then run away as fast and far as possible.