WARNING: This is really, really rambling. It gets better toward the end, though.

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For whatever reason I am finding Yeats’ conception of the tinctures very helpful in thinking about brand.

Here is how I would express what I see as the fundamental problem of business today: Business tends to radically separate the tinctures, thinking almost exclusively in primary terms internally and antithetical terms externally. Business wishes to do the will of its customers and shareholders, and so it 1) sets aside its own will and adopts an externally defined mask, and 2) concentrates on applying its collective creative mind to understanding and influencing the body of fate.

Here is what I believe has happened: the positive vision that we call “the American Dream” — a potent fusion of images and hopes — that powered the post-war economy began to dissolve in the 60s as its concrete aspiration were realized, but at the cost of still-unrealized hopes, much as youthful expectations are simultaneously fulfilled and denied by marriage, children, etc. As Heraclitus said: “Nature loves to hide.”

This kind of disillusionment is normal and healthy, if it is not misdiagnosed as a sign that things have gone horribly wrong. The married couple can stand in their new life enraged or dismayed at their dashed expectations as disappointed youth, or they can accept the fact that they have been seduced to adulthood, and accept their next spiritual assignment. This next assignment is the gradual dawning of the insight that this is the very form spiritual assignments take: You pursue something you want, but when you succeed it’s nothing like what you thought it would be. It’s good in an unexpected way, and what you expected is absent or no longer relevant.

The Persian poet Rumi said it well:

Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

Most people balk at their assignments. Some become disillusioned, angry and cynical and refuse to go forward. Others go into denial and pretend that their expectations were fulfilled, or they keep their disappointment private, or they become very loud advocates of their old ideal to the rest of the world… and then they treat this refusal to accept the new assignment as an act of great spiritual heroism, staying the course, refusing to waver… faith. (I saw a great La Rochefoucauld quote this morning: “That which the world calls virtue is usually nothing but a phantom formed by our passions to which we give an honest name so as to do what we wish with impunity.”)

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I think the United States is collectively entering the disillusionment of early adulthood. Half of us are pissed as hell and are tempted to reject business altogether as something intrinsically shallow, artificial, filthy, vicious, exploitative, etc. The other half of us know our work lives suck pretty horribly, that it asks way too much of us — more than we have to give –, that it may never fulfill us more than it depletes us, but we think that’s only because we’ve fallen short, have failed to put enough into our careers, that we haven’t “gotten off our lazy asses”, or maybe we fear we don’t have what it takes, or some other personal failing that we should take full responsibility for and not blame the world, etc.

So what’s the next assignment? I think we’ve got to take a hard look at a fundamental question that my own troubled generation has always specialized in asking, to which we’ve always demanded real answers to: WHY?

The answer we’ve always gotten: BECAUSE.

When we were kids we had the luxury of responding back: MEH.

We were scolded for being “apathetic” and scolded again for being apathetic toward about our scolding. I’m still proud of refusing to dignify pure phoniness with cooperation or even full-on defiance. We just sort of stayed away from it.

But now we’re the adults, and the pat-answering adults who cruised through the post-war USA prosperity and hope are now cruising into luxurious retirement along with their answers, and we’re out in the work world holding it all together purely our of habit, anxiety and fear of shame, without any of the cheerful delusions that used to make it all worthwhile, or at least not excessively depressing.

If we want anything better than this, we’re going to have to stop waiting around for the cosmic cycle or the Invisible Hand to restore us to prosperity and happiness. I think that force that turns the wheel is crapping out inside us, in our own wills. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to re-examine our lives, especially our work lives and our work ethics, and discover in them something worth working for, suffering for, living for. The negative motivators are not nearly enough to power our economy, and I’m flaky enough to believe that our economic depression is a collective psychological depression.

We’ve been trained our whole lives that doing things for no reason except that we’ve been told they’re good is what makes us virtuous. “Ours is not to reason why, but to do or die” etc., etc. That might have been true at one time, but this nonsense is killing us, now.

It is irresponsible to fail to ask Why.

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We’re used to looking for objective, functional, quantifiable answers to the question “Why?” As long as we continue to answer that way we will not have an answer.

I find these questions exciting.

This is why I’m always going on and on about brand. I think the answer to our malaise will have a lot to do with brand. Imagine your company as something akin to your favorite brand or sports team…