How Farmers Resort to Gandhigiri to Fight MNCs: Interview with Paul Hawken
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How Farmers Resort to Gandhigiri to Fight MNCs
Interview With Paul Hawken
October 31, 2007
Mahatma Gandhi used satyagraha to fight British imperialism, but today thousands of social activists across the world are using consciously and unconsciously the Gandhian method of peaceful resistance and protest to get multinational corporations, indigenous companies and their governments to pay attention to preserving nature, and bring about social justice, asserts Paul Hawken in this interview with Rediff India Abroad Managing Editor Arthur J Pais.
One of the most socially conscious entrepreneurs and influential environmentalists, Hawken, 61, is the author of the book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. He writes on the movements from India to Peru that are challenging the large corporations to be ecologically, socially and morally responsible — and how they are slowly succeeding.
He is author and co-author of dozens of articles, op-eds, papers, as well as six books including The Next Economy wherein he coined the term ‘restoration economy’ in 1983.
In his new book Hawken describes a convergence of the environmental and social justice movements as the largest social movement in history, and the fastest growing movement, comprising over 1 million organisations in most countries in the world.
Hawken, who runs several businesses, has his books published in over 50 countries in 27 languages, selling over 2 million copies. Growing a Business became the basis of a 17-part PBS series, which Hawken hosted and produced, and was shown on television in 115 countries and watched by over 100 million people.
He founded Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler, in the 1960s, relying solely on sustainable-agricultural suppliers. He later co-founded the Smith & Hawken garden supply company.
‘Farmers in India are showing us the way’
October 31, 2007
Please tell our readers about the title of the book. Those who are familiar with your work may know what you were writing about.
I don’t think my readers necessarily know what this book is about. Because what I’m writing about is something that none of us, including myself, realised a few years ago. The book is about how this large and broad grassroots movement is correcting the ills of social injustices in the environment in the world. I, too, was surprised at the extent of the movement.
Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that was largely unseen by politicians or the media. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture.
The farmers in India are showing us the way, for instance, how to combat social injustice and have a sustainable environment. The movement has been organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.
You see this around the world that people are really addressing injustices and pay attention that this is the fastest growing movement in the world: faster than radical Islam or right wing Christianity or Hindu nationalism. So, this unnamed movement is the fastest growing movement.
I had many titles for the book. I was going through many titles for the book and none of them was quite right. I was in Namibia and I ran across this quote by Agnes De Mille written about Martha Graham (it was really about artists) of how very upset De Mille was that a particular show that De Mille had choreographed six months after she had won awards for it.
Martha Graham, also a distinguished choreographer, looked her in the eye and said that basically as an artist you are never satisfied; there this is divine dissatisfaction, and there is this is blessed unrest and it makes us more alive than the others.
It just seemed to me that in these words — divine dissatisfaction, blessed unrest — there was this idea of the willingness of people to address what is not going right in the world and to try to make it right is in fact a very deeply sacred act. Even if the activists do not necessarily think so and it is not a religious act or coming from religion.
I think my new work is a spiritual book; therefore, the title. In the very last chapters you will know I talk about Confucius and Buddha and so on.
I do not think the real protest is globalization. People are opposed to corporatization.
When did you conclude that the movement is far, far bigger than you imagined?
I grew up in Berkeley, California. My father taught in the library of the University of California, Berkeley. I grew up in the library that is the 3rd or 4th largest in the country. I was what they call a ‘Berkeley brat’ (a kid on the campus). I knew research. When I became interested in the growth of socially conscious movements worldwide, I began researching.
This was more than a decade ago. I started with 30,000, then went to 70,000, then 100,000, then 140,000 and so on: the figures just went up and up and up.
That’s when I realized that this movement needed to be aware of itself and we needed to become aware of as well, something we have never seen before; usually social movements have a center, a core, a leader like Mahatma Gandhi.
He was the center of his movement; Nehru was the center of the Indian Congress. The point is there was centrality in satyagraha. I worked with Martin Luther King. There was a centrality to his movement. I saw social movements, and though some of us are centered on a leader or two, by and large they have no central, authoritarian or spiritual leaders.
Therefore, I thought it was important to map the quantitative aspect (the numbers) of such organizations along with how they work and why they can work with no leader. I think to be really honest, the book (with 342 pages including extensive notes) could have been 3 or 4 times thicker. But I wondered if anybody would have read it. I did not want it to be a GUB (great unread book)!
About the movements: There are anti-globalization and anarchical movements on the one hand and sustained protest movements on the other hand. Compare the two.
I do not think the real protest is globalization. People are opposed to corporatization: the way sea, the water, the human capital and the culture are used at the service of what I call economic fundamentalism, the unregulated trans-national global markets. Ironically, the so-called anti-globalization movement is extremely globalized and benefits hugely from globalization in trans-cultural communication and travel.
I always thought that anti-globalization was a misnomer. Globalization has already happened and it is dying anyway.
Let us look at the widely covered protests in Seattle (where thousands of anti-globalization activists, including many Indian Americans, protested leading to some violence a few years ago)… There the cabinet ministers and corporate delegates were meeting and they thought they were doing so in relative privacy. Soon they realized that they could no longer meet without other people saying that there were people (the stake holders) missing in the room.
And these missing people included the corn farmers in Mexico whose lives are directly affected by the decision made by these people on the tariffs and regulations and trade law and deregulation.
The Seattle protests got huge coverage in the media and many viewers saw only the violent protestors.
What was happening on the other side and what continues to happen is that in communities, towns and villages around the world people are coming face to face with insults to their culture, their water, their livelihood, their security.
And that is why movements, including the Narmada project, are demanding that the governments and corporations not ignore the interests of the ordinary people.
In those cases, people then look around and say, ‘I thought my government was supposed to protect me. I am a citizen, and there’s no one there to protect me, speak for me and, listen to me.’ And that is why grassroots people are organizing themselves. This is not about rich and poor; this is not just poor people protesting, it is also upper middle class people saying we have to work together.
People formed these movements spontaneously. It is true many of them are a little amateurish, they do not fully know their aims, they do not fully know what their intentions are. So it’s easy to dismiss a group or movement as being a little awkward and not well organized. But what’s happening is that there’s a lot of learning, a lot of transference of information. And, these groups or movements are becoming better, and better, and better.
They are living the thoughts of Buddha, Thoreau, Emerson, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I write in the book that maybe the best way to understand the future implications of the movement’s daily actions is to remember Emerson’s moral botany: corn seeds produce corn; justice creates justice, and kindness fosters generosity.
How do we sow our seeds when large, well-intentioned institutions and intolerant ideologies that purport to be our salvation cause so much damage?
One way is through smallness, grace, and locality. We look at Buddha, Emerson, Thoreau and Gandhi. Thoreau insisted in Civil Disobedience that if only one man withdrew his support from an unjust government, it would begin a cycle that would reverberate and grow. Gandhi was inspired by that and so are thousands of people, even those who have not read Thoreau.
There is more money to be made by restoring the world than destroying the world’
What are some of the biggest challenges this worldwide movement has thrown to the big corporations?
I deal with a lot of corporations. The thing that I notice is that they have felt threatened for a long time by these movements. They used to think it’s just a small group of activists or protestors or whatever. But the movement has really changed very, very dramatically. In some cases, big corporations are facing challenges by the children of their CEOs.
Young people are coming back from their universities and schools and talking to their dads, and saying, ‘Hey what are you doing and why are people protesting outside the offices and waving banners?’
Now the wall has been broken between the economic establishments. Now, you see the corporations trying to work with the NGOs and trying to learn from them. The NGOs are being co-opted but they teach the corporations what they know about oceans, about forests, about fisheries, about diamond mining, about genetically modified seeds, about indigenous cultures, about organically and biologically produced fruits and vegetables, about solar power, about renewal energy, about green building, about design, about living wages.
These NGOs are not going away and some corporations have realized that there is much more fun to be in the tent with them rather than have them outside the gate.
I ask corporate leaders if they see a transition, whether they are realizing that the global climate change is just a big mistake. As many people say, there is more money to be made by restoring the world than destroying the world! And the NGOs are challenging companies in their own countries and from outside their countries to think about this concept.
In 1991, Sunita Narain, the director of the Centre for Science and the Environment in India, called global warming environmental colonialism. She was one of the first to question whether environmental management should be based on human rights rather than legal convention.
Today, ordinary people, farmers, students and activist across the world concern themselves with global warming and related issues. We have an economic system that basically tells us that it is cheaper to destroy the world in real time.
We don’t say I’ll save money if I don’t put oil in my car, if I don’t put a new roof on my house that leaks. We are better off if we maintain things in real time, we are made to think. How did we get to an economic system that tells us we can destroy the earth and get rich? We know that’s not true. Yet, that is what we are doing collectively!
Underneath all that, we know that even though it is what exists right now, there’s more money to be made sustaining and now restoring the earth than there is in destroying the earth. Now, it is a matter of how do you make that transition to a new world?
First of all, inside, conceptually, and secondly how do you do it strategically? As a company, how do you do that so you can implement it step by step and make that transition?
When you talk about the companies who want NGOs and other environmentally conscious people ‘in their tent rather than outside their gate,’ would you say these corporations comprise about 10 of the total businesses?
I would say out of the Fortune 500 (global companies), at least 25 percent have begun responding to the unchartered global movement.
Unilever in Asia is trying to get their cosmetic ingredients from small holders locally, not just from big plantations. They are working with cooperatives and other organizations so they can preserve the integrity of village agriculture and things like that. So we’re seeing it in the food business where we have the concept of the food not traveling for 2,000 to 3,000 miles before reaching the shelves in the big markets but being produced locally and distributed locally. Even Wal-Mart is considering this concept (for goodness sake!).
Some corporate leaders could also be thinking that the big knocks retailing and globalization do not create a healthy economic system that in turn creates security for people.
This movement is a movement of kindness to strangers. It goes back to the Buddha. Back to biblical time.”
What is the philosophical basis for the ecological movement?
We’re are doing something that is collectively brilliant and intelligent, and this movement is bringing people from different parts of the world, people who were strangers till the other moment, together. But we don’t see it because what we see on TV is the death of strangers; we don’t see the kindness of strangers.
This movement is a movement of kindness to strangers. This goes back to the Abolutionists who fought slavery. The movement goes back to the Buddha, it goes back to the biblical times, and it encompasses the thoughts of Confucianism and many centuries later, the thoughts and ideals of St Francis.
It is not about religion or martyrs but about how do we transform ourselves, how do we re-imagine ourselves what it means to be a human being on this earth given the dangers and perils we face. That is what’s bringing people alive, that is where our young people are going, that’s where the juice is, that’s where the excitement is, that’s where the social innovation, the social technology is, that’s what is bringing us together.
Beyond just a non-profit movement it is bringing together businesses, venture capitalists, religious leaders. This movement will be named 100 or 50 years from now and we’ll look back and we will see that this was our finest hour; right now we’re seeing it as our darkest!
You are a best-selling, highly influential writer. If there were a few books you were to recommend to corporations to inspire them how to conduct their business, what would they be?
Now, these are basic books, though, not all are bestsellers.
I would probably send them back a little bit to Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare by Paul Colinvaux, an American professor at Yale university. It came out in the early 1990s. It gives you a sense of ecology. It explains how nature works. And you go, ‘Oh! I did not understand it before.’ Another book is the Diversity of Life by E O Wilson. Another very important book is False Dawn, by John Gray, the conservative MP, in the UK and adviser to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who now believes that the trade policies instituted by Thatcher, Reagan and others were a very, very big mistake. Another is Wendell Berry’s What Are People For, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. There are so many others, the teachings of Buddha, for instance.
What can a religious leader like the Dalai Lama tell a business entrepreneur about the world around us in order to be a responsible leader?
The Dalai Lama says that the main purpose of a human being is to be happy. Most people do not see religion as happiness, but about devotion, about sacrifice… But what causes happiness? What makes us happy? What makes us happy is not what business is about. What makes us happy is kindness, generosity, what makes us happy is love: loving and being loved in return, what makes us happy is cheer, is community.
It is none of the things that were taught that makes us happy. We keep putting up examples of people who were innovative, brilliant, rich, successful and saying that’s the model.
Everyone is not going to be rich and brilliant and innovative; so the Dalai Lama talks about a model existence where one finds fulfillment in the small things in life instead of trying to be the big things in life. I think people put so much pressure on themselves, in this culture now, in order to succeed in ways that are rare (they do happen, though).
It’s a tyranny of self and the Dalai Lama, I think, offers a way of seeing oneself in relationship to others that is based on compassion.
Interview With Paul Hawken
October 31, 2007
Mahatma Gandhi used satyagraha to fight British imperialism, but today thousands of social activists across the world are using consciously and unconsciously the Gandhian method of peaceful resistance and protest to get multinational corporations, indigenous companies and their governments to pay attention to preserving nature, and bring about social justice, asserts Paul Hawken in this interview with Rediff India Abroad Managing Editor Arthur J Pais.
One of the most socially conscious entrepreneurs and influential environmentalists, Hawken, 61, is the author of the book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. He writes on the movements from India to Peru that are challenging the large corporations to be ecologically, socially and morally responsible — and how they are slowly succeeding.
He is author and co-author of dozens of articles, op-eds, papers, as well as six books including The Next Economy wherein he coined the term ‘restoration economy’ in 1983.
In his new book Hawken describes a convergence of the environmental and social justice movements as the largest social movement in history, and the fastest growing movement, comprising over 1 million organisations in most countries in the world.
Hawken, who runs several businesses, has his books published in over 50 countries in 27 languages, selling over 2 million copies. Growing a Business became the basis of a 17-part PBS series, which Hawken hosted and produced, and was shown on television in 115 countries and watched by over 100 million people.
He founded Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler, in the 1960s, relying solely on sustainable-agricultural suppliers. He later co-founded the Smith & Hawken garden supply company.
‘Farmers in India are showing us the way’
October 31, 2007
Please tell our readers about the title of the book. Those who are familiar with your work may know what you were writing about.
I don’t think my readers necessarily know what this book is about. Because what I’m writing about is something that none of us, including myself, realised a few years ago. The book is about how this large and broad grassroots movement is correcting the ills of social injustices in the environment in the world. I, too, was surprised at the extent of the movement.
Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that was largely unseen by politicians or the media. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture.
The farmers in India are showing us the way, for instance, how to combat social injustice and have a sustainable environment. The movement has been organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.
You see this around the world that people are really addressing injustices and pay attention that this is the fastest growing movement in the world: faster than radical Islam or right wing Christianity or Hindu nationalism. So, this unnamed movement is the fastest growing movement.
I had many titles for the book. I was going through many titles for the book and none of them was quite right. I was in Namibia and I ran across this quote by Agnes De Mille written about Martha Graham (it was really about artists) of how very upset De Mille was that a particular show that De Mille had choreographed six months after she had won awards for it.
Martha Graham, also a distinguished choreographer, looked her in the eye and said that basically as an artist you are never satisfied; there this is divine dissatisfaction, and there is this is blessed unrest and it makes us more alive than the others.
It just seemed to me that in these words — divine dissatisfaction, blessed unrest — there was this idea of the willingness of people to address what is not going right in the world and to try to make it right is in fact a very deeply sacred act. Even if the activists do not necessarily think so and it is not a religious act or coming from religion.
I think my new work is a spiritual book; therefore, the title. In the very last chapters you will know I talk about Confucius and Buddha and so on.
I do not think the real protest is globalization. People are opposed to corporatization.
When did you conclude that the movement is far, far bigger than you imagined?
I grew up in Berkeley, California. My father taught in the library of the University of California, Berkeley. I grew up in the library that is the 3rd or 4th largest in the country. I was what they call a ‘Berkeley brat’ (a kid on the campus). I knew research. When I became interested in the growth of socially conscious movements worldwide, I began researching.
This was more than a decade ago. I started with 30,000, then went to 70,000, then 100,000, then 140,000 and so on: the figures just went up and up and up.
That’s when I realized that this movement needed to be aware of itself and we needed to become aware of as well, something we have never seen before; usually social movements have a center, a core, a leader like Mahatma Gandhi.
He was the center of his movement; Nehru was the center of the Indian Congress. The point is there was centrality in satyagraha. I worked with Martin Luther King. There was a centrality to his movement. I saw social movements, and though some of us are centered on a leader or two, by and large they have no central, authoritarian or spiritual leaders.
Therefore, I thought it was important to map the quantitative aspect (the numbers) of such organizations along with how they work and why they can work with no leader. I think to be really honest, the book (with 342 pages including extensive notes) could have been 3 or 4 times thicker. But I wondered if anybody would have read it. I did not want it to be a GUB (great unread book)!
About the movements: There are anti-globalization and anarchical movements on the one hand and sustained protest movements on the other hand. Compare the two.
I do not think the real protest is globalization. People are opposed to corporatization: the way sea, the water, the human capital and the culture are used at the service of what I call economic fundamentalism, the unregulated trans-national global markets. Ironically, the so-called anti-globalization movement is extremely globalized and benefits hugely from globalization in trans-cultural communication and travel.
I always thought that anti-globalization was a misnomer. Globalization has already happened and it is dying anyway.
Let us look at the widely covered protests in Seattle (where thousands of anti-globalization activists, including many Indian Americans, protested leading to some violence a few years ago)… There the cabinet ministers and corporate delegates were meeting and they thought they were doing so in relative privacy. Soon they realized that they could no longer meet without other people saying that there were people (the stake holders) missing in the room.
And these missing people included the corn farmers in Mexico whose lives are directly affected by the decision made by these people on the tariffs and regulations and trade law and deregulation.
The Seattle protests got huge coverage in the media and many viewers saw only the violent protestors.
What was happening on the other side and what continues to happen is that in communities, towns and villages around the world people are coming face to face with insults to their culture, their water, their livelihood, their security.
And that is why movements, including the Narmada project, are demanding that the governments and corporations not ignore the interests of the ordinary people.
In those cases, people then look around and say, ‘I thought my government was supposed to protect me. I am a citizen, and there’s no one there to protect me, speak for me and, listen to me.’ And that is why grassroots people are organizing themselves. This is not about rich and poor; this is not just poor people protesting, it is also upper middle class people saying we have to work together.
People formed these movements spontaneously. It is true many of them are a little amateurish, they do not fully know their aims, they do not fully know what their intentions are. So it’s easy to dismiss a group or movement as being a little awkward and not well organized. But what’s happening is that there’s a lot of learning, a lot of transference of information. And, these groups or movements are becoming better, and better, and better.
They are living the thoughts of Buddha, Thoreau, Emerson, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I write in the book that maybe the best way to understand the future implications of the movement’s daily actions is to remember Emerson’s moral botany: corn seeds produce corn; justice creates justice, and kindness fosters generosity.
How do we sow our seeds when large, well-intentioned institutions and intolerant ideologies that purport to be our salvation cause so much damage?
One way is through smallness, grace, and locality. We look at Buddha, Emerson, Thoreau and Gandhi. Thoreau insisted in Civil Disobedience that if only one man withdrew his support from an unjust government, it would begin a cycle that would reverberate and grow. Gandhi was inspired by that and so are thousands of people, even those who have not read Thoreau.
There is more money to be made by restoring the world than destroying the world’
What are some of the biggest challenges this worldwide movement has thrown to the big corporations?
I deal with a lot of corporations. The thing that I notice is that they have felt threatened for a long time by these movements. They used to think it’s just a small group of activists or protestors or whatever. But the movement has really changed very, very dramatically. In some cases, big corporations are facing challenges by the children of their CEOs.
Young people are coming back from their universities and schools and talking to their dads, and saying, ‘Hey what are you doing and why are people protesting outside the offices and waving banners?’
Now the wall has been broken between the economic establishments. Now, you see the corporations trying to work with the NGOs and trying to learn from them. The NGOs are being co-opted but they teach the corporations what they know about oceans, about forests, about fisheries, about diamond mining, about genetically modified seeds, about indigenous cultures, about organically and biologically produced fruits and vegetables, about solar power, about renewal energy, about green building, about design, about living wages.
These NGOs are not going away and some corporations have realized that there is much more fun to be in the tent with them rather than have them outside the gate.
I ask corporate leaders if they see a transition, whether they are realizing that the global climate change is just a big mistake. As many people say, there is more money to be made by restoring the world than destroying the world! And the NGOs are challenging companies in their own countries and from outside their countries to think about this concept.
In 1991, Sunita Narain, the director of the Centre for Science and the Environment in India, called global warming environmental colonialism. She was one of the first to question whether environmental management should be based on human rights rather than legal convention.
Today, ordinary people, farmers, students and activist across the world concern themselves with global warming and related issues. We have an economic system that basically tells us that it is cheaper to destroy the world in real time.
We don’t say I’ll save money if I don’t put oil in my car, if I don’t put a new roof on my house that leaks. We are better off if we maintain things in real time, we are made to think. How did we get to an economic system that tells us we can destroy the earth and get rich? We know that’s not true. Yet, that is what we are doing collectively!
Underneath all that, we know that even though it is what exists right now, there’s more money to be made sustaining and now restoring the earth than there is in destroying the earth. Now, it is a matter of how do you make that transition to a new world?
First of all, inside, conceptually, and secondly how do you do it strategically? As a company, how do you do that so you can implement it step by step and make that transition?
When you talk about the companies who want NGOs and other environmentally conscious people ‘in their tent rather than outside their gate,’ would you say these corporations comprise about 10 of the total businesses?
I would say out of the Fortune 500 (global companies), at least 25 percent have begun responding to the unchartered global movement.
Unilever in Asia is trying to get their cosmetic ingredients from small holders locally, not just from big plantations. They are working with cooperatives and other organizations so they can preserve the integrity of village agriculture and things like that. So we’re seeing it in the food business where we have the concept of the food not traveling for 2,000 to 3,000 miles before reaching the shelves in the big markets but being produced locally and distributed locally. Even Wal-Mart is considering this concept (for goodness sake!).
Some corporate leaders could also be thinking that the big knocks retailing and globalization do not create a healthy economic system that in turn creates security for people.
This movement is a movement of kindness to strangers. It goes back to the Buddha. Back to biblical time.”
What is the philosophical basis for the ecological movement?
We’re are doing something that is collectively brilliant and intelligent, and this movement is bringing people from different parts of the world, people who were strangers till the other moment, together. But we don’t see it because what we see on TV is the death of strangers; we don’t see the kindness of strangers.
This movement is a movement of kindness to strangers. This goes back to the Abolutionists who fought slavery. The movement goes back to the Buddha, it goes back to the biblical times, and it encompasses the thoughts of Confucianism and many centuries later, the thoughts and ideals of St Francis.
It is not about religion or martyrs but about how do we transform ourselves, how do we re-imagine ourselves what it means to be a human being on this earth given the dangers and perils we face. That is what’s bringing people alive, that is where our young people are going, that’s where the juice is, that’s where the excitement is, that’s where the social innovation, the social technology is, that’s what is bringing us together.
Beyond just a non-profit movement it is bringing together businesses, venture capitalists, religious leaders. This movement will be named 100 or 50 years from now and we’ll look back and we will see that this was our finest hour; right now we’re seeing it as our darkest!
You are a best-selling, highly influential writer. If there were a few books you were to recommend to corporations to inspire them how to conduct their business, what would they be?
Now, these are basic books, though, not all are bestsellers.
I would probably send them back a little bit to Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare by Paul Colinvaux, an American professor at Yale university. It came out in the early 1990s. It gives you a sense of ecology. It explains how nature works. And you go, ‘Oh! I did not understand it before.’ Another book is the Diversity of Life by E O Wilson. Another very important book is False Dawn, by John Gray, the conservative MP, in the UK and adviser to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who now believes that the trade policies instituted by Thatcher, Reagan and others were a very, very big mistake. Another is Wendell Berry’s What Are People For, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. There are so many others, the teachings of Buddha, for instance.
What can a religious leader like the Dalai Lama tell a business entrepreneur about the world around us in order to be a responsible leader?
The Dalai Lama says that the main purpose of a human being is to be happy. Most people do not see religion as happiness, but about devotion, about sacrifice… But what causes happiness? What makes us happy? What makes us happy is not what business is about. What makes us happy is kindness, generosity, what makes us happy is love: loving and being loved in return, what makes us happy is cheer, is community.
It is none of the things that were taught that makes us happy. We keep putting up examples of people who were innovative, brilliant, rich, successful and saying that’s the model.
Everyone is not going to be rich and brilliant and innovative; so the Dalai Lama talks about a model existence where one finds fulfillment in the small things in life instead of trying to be the big things in life. I think people put so much pressure on themselves, in this culture now, in order to succeed in ways that are rare (they do happen, though).
It’s a tyranny of self and the Dalai Lama, I think, offers a way of seeing oneself in relationship to others that is based on compassion.
