The word “matter” is as semantically complex as any Greek goddess. It’s hard to explain what underlies the apparent chaos and gives it a mysterious coherence.

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matter

noun

1. physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, esp. as distinct from energy : the structure and properties of matter.
   • a substance or material : organic matter | vegetable matter.
   • a substance in or discharged from the body : fecal matter | waste matter.
   • written or printed material : reading matter.
2. an affair or situation under consideration; a topic : a great deal of work was done on this matter | financial matters.
   • Law something that is to be tried or proved in court; a case.
   • (matters) the present situation or state of affairs : we can do nothing to change matters.
   • (a matter for/of) something that evokes a specified feeling : it’s a matter of complete indifference to me.
   • (a matter for) something that is the concern of a specified person or agency : the evidence is a matter for the courts.
3. [usu. with negative or in questions] (the matter) the reason for distress or a problem : what’s the matter? | pretend that nothing’s the matter.
4. the substance or content of a text as distinct from its manner or form.
   • Printing the body of a printed work, as distinct from titles, headings, etc.
   • Logic the particular content of a proposition, as distinct from its form.

verb

1. [usu. with negative or in questions ] be of importance; have significance : it doesn’t matter what the guests wear | what did it matter to them? | to him, animals mattered more than human beings.
   • (of a person) be important or influential : she was trying to get known by the people who matter.
2. rare (of a wound) secrete or discharge pus.

PHRASES

• for that matter – used to indicate that a subject or category, though mentioned second, is as relevant or important as the first : I am not sure what value it adds to determining public, or for that matter private, policy.
• in the matter of – as regards : the British are given preeminence in the matter of tea.
• it is only a matter of time – there will not be long to wait : it’s only a matter of time before the general is removed.
• a matter of – 1. no more than (a specified period of time) : they were shown the door in a matter of minutes. 2. a thing that involves or depends on : it’s a matter of working out how to get something done.
• a matter of course – the natural or expected thing : the reports are published as a matter of course.
• a matter of form – a point of correct procedure : they must as a matter of proper form check to see that there is no tax liability.
• a matter of record
• no matter – 1. [with clause ] regardless of : no matter what the government calls them, they are cuts. 2. it is of no importance: “No matter, I’ll go myself.”
• to make matters worse – with the result that a bad situation is made worse.
• what matter? – Brit., dated why should that worry us? : what matter if he was a Protestant or not?

ORIGIN: Middle English : via Old French from Latin materia ‘timber, substance,’ also ‘subject of discourse,’ from mater ‘mother.’

An administrator sees an organization in terms of resources: measurable quantities of material at the disposal of an organization. An administrator is a What person, concerned with countable things.

A manager sees an organization in terms of work: goals, objectives, activities, tasks, cause, effect, effort and time. A manager is a How person.

A visionary sees the world in terms of meaning: the values that animate people from within and motivate them to contribute freely and to participate willingly in the life of the organization. A visionary is a Why person.

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Very few people simultaneously command all three dimensions, but out of the desire to feel individually complete and self-sufficient (from pride or fear of otherness) many people delude themselves into believing they are better equipped than they are to understand and command an organization without help from others.

“Help from others” means a person radically unlike yourself supplies something you essentially lack. You depend on another person to compensate for a genuine personal limit or incapacity. Most of us prefer to get assistance: to delegate something we could do ourselves to another person who has time or resources — or the inability to resist. We secretly think that if our organization were made up of clones of ourselves, we’d have a perfect organization.

While the belief that one is self-sufficient and complete in all three dimensions of leadership — What, Why and How — is not necessarily false, the self-sufficient leader is rare enough that claims of self-sufficiency should be assumed false until proven true.

The best leaders, whether they are most comfortable in the What, Why or How dimension of leadership are those who not only accept but actively seek out others who can do what they cannot do, who build alliances not with those like themselves but radically different from themselves, who desire nothing more than to help lead an organization that exceeds the scope of their own mastery to the greatest possible degree. A leader who can only feel comfortable leading what he has mastered has failed to master leadership.

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The problem of leadership is mutilated and oversimplified through invalidation and flattened through reductionism.

Invalidation is treating something as irrelevant, unnecessary, unworthy of concern, and perhaps even as bad:

• Administration is invalidated with words like: petty, base, pedantic, tedious, dry
• Management is invalidated with words like: constraining, linear, regimented, rigid, unfree
• Vision is invalidated with words like: subjective, fluffy, meaningless, bullshit

Reductionism involves collapsing one or two of the three dimensions into one of the others. Generally this happens innocently and without spite or aggression. A person for whatever reason simply does not see what is missing from his view. It is similar to color-blindness. The colors to which one is blind don’t look colorless — they just look like another color. Yellow and blue look the same, so until the blindness is discovered the difference is simply not there.

It is reductionism in action when administrators fail to understand that leadership involves a lot more than managing the organization’s resources. (The fact that most organizations call their employees “resources” is telling.) It is also common to see managers with no concept of inward motivation or values who believe it is their job to provide outward motivations (positive rewards, negative punishments) for conforming to the desires of the organization’s leadership. It doesn’t even occur to visionless leaders that their best employees are driven from within, and that to the degree that their inward motivations are connected with the goals of the organization, external motivations are superfluous (and often financially and spiritually expensive).

But with reductionism, nothing appears to be missing. (This is part of the phenomenon of the horizon.) Mere administrators “manage” by communicating expectations employees are expected to meet and by which they will be measured, and share a “vision” made up entirely of quantifiable success criteria. It’s not that these kinds of objectives are unimportant, but they should not be confused with management (which outlines a practicable how), or a vision (which makes people feel personally invested and inspired). Similarly, managers will tend to try to pass off practicable plans as vision, even when the plan is devoid of inspiration or moral value.

This is the root reason that business drains the essential meaning from every word it latches on to — levels them down and homogenizes them. The people who use and popularize them within organizations are often completely unaware of how much of words they miss. Once the words are drained of specificity they’re toothless at best and suspicious at worst.

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What is needed is for all leaders to question one of the most deeply-held American values: self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is not without value, but it has its time and its place. Self-sufficiency is of great value to isolated men or families pressing their way west through the wilderness. Self-sufficiency is king when the law is the law of the jungle.

But to the degree civilization has advanced, different values become (oddly) more valuable. Like it or not, that signals to us an undeniable higher and lower. Think about biology: an organism composed of barely-differentiated organelles swimming in a sack of proteins is lower than an earthworm, which is lower than a fish, which is lower than a dog, which is lower than a human being. The same is true for organizations. The parts become more differentiated, individuated — but at the same time also more interdependent.

(An analogy: does it matter that a Barbarian warrior can defeat a single Roman soldier when a Barbarian hoard clashes against a Roman phalanx? The Romans saw the problem of war very differently from the Barbarians, and for as long as Rome had enough of a sense of its Why that remained disciplined in its How and honest in its What the Barbarians were invariably trounced. Only when Rome lost its meaning and sunk into demagoguery, decadence and delusion did it become vulnerable to lower political orders.)

In civilizations, the capacity to make free alliances specifically with those different from oneself in order to extend the horizon of one’s own capabilities is what makes a man powerful. This is the trajectory of progress, from the lone man, to the clan of one’s own kind, to castes and subcastes, to universal unification of diversity within an ecumenical manifold.

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Let’s set aside the confusions of altruistic morality. Maybe there’s a metaphysical moral principle hovering beneath the world that somehow blesses the altruist in some unprovable way. Maybe there isn’t. But let’s concentrate on what is immediate and palpable: an organization that knows how to win the full, free cooperative participation of a diverse set of human beings with different talents, sensibilities and leadership instincts who allows each person to serve in his natural way, wasting neither the talent and energy of individuals, nor the resources of the organization in artificial motivations (rewards and punishments)… such an organization will prevail over homogeneous organizations with capabilities circumscribed by the type it employs and organization where the leadership unwittingly amputates the organization’s reach at the length of the leader’s own arm.

Prometheus is the god of those with foresight who can conceive and clearly communicate a detailed picture of a desired result, along with the steps that must be executed, the obstacles that must be surmounted, and the risks that must be mitigated to actualize his plan with minimum risk.

Argus is the god of the multitasking administrator who works long days and keeps an eye on myriad disconnected details.

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In ancient Greece, Hermes was (among other things) the god of commerce, but most of us have far too many pressing and useful things to think about to indulge in purposeless interpretation of cryptic myths.

How were 15th century explorers grilled before their expeditions were funded? What questions were they asked? What assurances were demanded?

If an enterprising 15th century bureaucrat had invented Colony Administration Certifications to protect investors from risk, the New World would still be undiscovered. But maybe the investors would have been just as happy with undeveloped Spanish beach real estate discovered and claimed in their names by Certified Explorers leveraging Six Sigma Exploration and Colonization Processes.

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“If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, two years before Waterloo

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“Executives often appear at  Yves Béhar’s door, saying, We want to be the Apple of our industry. His response: Do you have the guts?” (Fast Company)

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We need a new word for innovation. The meaning of the word has been so shamelessly blurred in the universal desire to be thought of as innovative, that we now use it for just about anything. Every company that tries to improve through incremental refinements wants to place “innovation” at the center of its brand.

And similarly every business leader with an ambition and a plan and a desire to make incremental improvements has “vision”.

I’d love to see a non-innovative business led by a non-visionary. That would be so different and strange it boggles the imagination.

If every company is innovative and every leader has a vision, what do we call a company which exists to radically transform its industry and the world and actively risks itself in the pursuit of that goal? What do we call a leader who has come to see what he does from a completely new angle revealing new possibilities invisible to the industry-standard eye?

Can we say such a company is doubleplusinnovative and its leader possesses doubleplusvision?

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Do not honor the worthy,
So that the people will not contend with one another.
Do not value hard-to-get goods,
So that the people will not turn robbers.
Do not show objects of desire,
So that the people’s minds are not disturbed.

– Tao Te Ching

It’s a hell of an assumption to believe that the source of pain in painful situations is essentially the birth pangs of an insight.

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It’s safer to assume that we can always learn from painful situations. The default lesson, though, tends to be: “never again.”

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“No pain, no gain” is easily distorted into “Pain, therefore gain.” Notice the variable: gain. Pain is the shell in a shell game.

Check out Bill O’Reilly’s outrage that such a top-selling act as the Monkees could be denied admission to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

I love it that O’Reilly didn’t really like the Monkees when they were new, but now that he can enjoy them on the oldies station, he’s making them another of his personal crusades. (Entertaining thought of the day: trying thinking of religions as oldies stations for crazed prophets.)

Reflection is only one kind of contemplation

Empathy is abstract sympathy.

A merely sympathetic person is limited to what he has experienced himself. An empathetic person can discover  shared or analogous feelings across different experiences and relate himself to an other different from himself.

In Jungian terms, I think introverted feeling might be more sympathetic and extraverted feeling more empathetic.

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

What is happening in this scene?

A typical modern “wise fool” of the religious right is made to feel her limits. She may be unable to comprehend the aesthetic truth which stands outside the horizons of her totalistic vision of life, but the certainty that there is something here to know and the certainty that she is missing it is a viscerally real experience.

This dreadful embarrassment might very well have been this woman’s first authentic experience of transcendent truth.

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It has become certain: something that concerns me is going on beyond my own sphere of intellectual mastery. How do I respond to this certainty? How do I relate myself to this beyondness, this Otherness? This is the root of one’s religious character. And everyone, without exception, has religious character.

Most forms of religiosity involve some kind of invalidation and reduction of beyondness. Invalidation: what exists beyond my mastery doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t exist in any way that concerns me, or its existence is a mistake, or it has no right to exist and ought to be annihilated. Reduction: what exists beyond my mastery is actually some by-product or derivation of things that are within my mastery. (The philosophies of Materialism and Metaphysical Idealism are two extreme, opposing forms of reductionism.)

Forms of religiosity based on invalidation and reduction reassure us: Whatever you need to know you already know. What you need to do is already clear.

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I think it might be time for a public debate on the difference between the foolishness of the wise and the wisdom of fools. What makes the “wise” foolish? Isn’t it feeling so wise that nobody can tell you anything you don’t already know?

We need to shed this prejudice that a low IQ protects a mind against the foolishness of the wise. Intellectual arrogance has a lot less to do with loving the extent of our intelligence than with reflexively hating what stands beyond the limits of our intelligence and inspires dread.

In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan speaks for all who close themselves to the dread of beyondness:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

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To the degree a man’s truth is closed and private, when he speaks his private truth he is crazy and when he lives his private truth he is evil.

To the degree that man figures out how to share that truth and to speak it with others becomes sane and good — to the others who share it, and to himself. But in the end, if he only considers himself and his community of fellow-believers he still has a private truth, and his insanity and evil are just multiplied, and his ability to recognize that fact is diminished.

It is tremendously difficult to be responsible for the sanity and good of your collective. The collective itself will hold your responsible for being responsible and not indulging its easy, insular agreement with itself that it is privileged in possessing truth and goodness.

Before 0 A.D., an individual had moral obligations only to his own tribe. Individuals were not permitted to be solipsistic and satanic (in Milton’s sense) — but nations were another story. The notion of loving one’s enemy was absurd.

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There is no way out of our current cultural impasse except to realize we all have important and disruptive lessons to learn from one another. We need the knowledge, but even more, we need the disruption.

Everyone has something to show us about life — even a filthy Samaritan, an arrogant Scribe, a noble Roman, a degraded prostitute, a corrupt official, a disgraced, discredited, godforsaken heretic.

An experiment: See if you can accept an insight from a fundamentalist or an atheist today.

Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human:

“Future of science. — To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?”

To us, things are such that they suggest they are more than they are to us. This suggested “more” is the subject of metaphysics.

We cannot believe a chair is essentially the phenomena by which we know it, yet we know the chair by way of its phenomena.

We cannot take a memory as something in the present. It exists in a moment in the past.

And nobody loves a person as given by experience, we love the person beyond the experience.

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We are constantly thinking in metaphysical terms, but we cannot believe metaphysics can be this simple, so we invent ghosts.

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Much of skepticism is just the selective severing of phenomena from metaphysical being.

A short tantrum inspired by Deb Owen’s blog article “are we waiting for an ‘education crisis’?”:

Training is a matter of preparing a student for specific kinds of situations by equipping them with necessary facts, theories and skills. Training is instrumental and it begins with a need, expressed as a role — a profession — and works backwards to the student.

Education works from the other direction. It begins with the particular student and that student’s virtues, and develops the student as an individual and citizen toward self-fulfillment through service to the community.

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The question of Why is not addressed in training. Training is focuses on What and How.

In education Why is foundational. Knowing how to ask Why — for oneself and with others — is the root from which What and How grow and give Why visible, concrete form. They substantiate and sustain it. But in education What and How are not permitted to crank away without the guidance of Why, as they are in training.

Education is both moral and practical. Training is only practical.

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Training and education are not exclusive categories. There is a degree of training in education and a degree of education in training, especially in a republic like ours. There’s not a bad or good. Neither can be dispensed with. The workforce undeniably needs efficient, effective workers who know how to perform specific kinds of useful tasks. However, it is just as true, but harder to see, that our culture also needs souls who have been cultivated to think beyond means, and to weigh and deliberate  and synthesize and communicate the relative value of various ends to various perspectives.

This is the kind of person who ought to be educators.

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My concern is that the education most of our educators have received is training in pedagogical technique and classroom management. Their entire outlook on education is limited to the domain of techne: skills and knowledge. The teacher has the skills and the knowledge to impart skills and knowledge, and to them, that is education. It is not enough for an educator to love teaching. An educator must also love education.

Nietzsche, again: “My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move, the line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which has a mid-point and is peculiar to him. Our ears enclose us within a comparable circle, and so does our sense of touch. Now, it is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses his senses as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world, we say that this is near and that far, this is big and that small, this is hard and that soft: this measuring we call sensation — and it is all of it an error!”

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People who think subjectivity is inside their heads and the objective world is that which encloses it have it all turned inside-out.

We just like to think of the world and ourselves objectively because objects — that which we grasp with the pudgy little fingers of our comprehension — are easier to think about. Much harder to think is truth which somehow includes, involves and exceeds us.

We reduce being to what is comprehensible and feel that we have mastered life.