If you can show that your intuition will bear fruit, you can win the support of the community to develop it. If you can win the support of the community to develop it, your intuition will bear fruit.

If you can prove your value, you will win the conditions you need to be valuable. If you can win the conditions you need to be valuable, you will prove your value.

*

A harassed mind can produce ideas of a certain kind, but it will be unable to produce others. A harassed mind thinks about many things at once, and it concentrates only in small intense and disconnected bursts. It is like an mental factory fill of mental assembly lines, which can be stopped and started by a skillful manager. The products sit patiently, ready for the next part to be added as time permits, until they arrives at the end of the line, in finished form, as specced. Halfway through its course, a product is half-assembled. Atomistic ideas are produced in this manner, piece by piece, systematically.

Concepts are different. A concept is conceived all at once in a burst of insight. A concept maintains its wholeness throughout its development as it self-articulates under its own generative forces into differentiated organs. Its struggle for viability cannot be stopped and started at will. It develops like a fetus, not like a machine.

*

A harassed mind produces only atomistic ideas.

Many people who naturally think atomistically see no problem with universal harassment. It’s unfair to subject some people to harassment, while others are permitted to concentrate and dream up ideas. And to be realistic, while holistic concepts are often inspired and inspiring, business rarely demands inspiration as much as it does efficiency, predictability, flexibility, speed, repeatability. Or is that just the case because business has been dominated by atomistic thinkers?

If someone keeps finishing your sentences for you: 1) He might be trying to show you that you’re not alone in seeing things the way you do; or 2) he might be trying to understand you into harmless redundancy; or 3) he might be trying to bend the alien to the familiar; or 4) he may be trying to speak the familiar over the alien and silence it; or 5) he might be racing you to the insight; or 6) he might have forgotten everything in the world but the thought.

Altruism is a parody of magnanimity.

Buber, on the social vs the interhuman:

It is usual to ascribe what takes place between men to the social realm, thereby blurring a basically important line of division between two essentially different areas of human life. I myself, when I began nearly fifty years ago to find my own bearings in the knowledge of society, making use of the then unknown concept of the interhuman, made the same error. From that time it became increasingly clear to me that we have to do here with a separate category of our existence, even a separate dimension, to use a mathematical term, and one with which we are so familiar that its peculiarity has hitherto almost escaped us. Yet insight into its peculiarity is extremely important not only for our thinking, but also for our living.

We may speak of social phenomena wherever the life of a number of men, lived with one another, bound up together, brings in its train shared experiences and reactions. But to be thus bound up together means only that each individual existence is enclosed and contained in a group existence. It does not mean that between one member and another of the group there exists any kind of personal relation. They do feel that they belong together in a way that is, so to speak, fundamentally different from every possible belonging together with someone outside the group. And there do arise, especially in the life of smaller groups, contacts which frequently favour the birth of individual relations, but, on the other hand, frequently make it more difficult. In no case, however, does membership in a group necessarily involve an existential relation between one member and another. It is true that there have been groups in history which included highly intensive and intimate relations between two of their members — as, for instance, in the homosexual relations among the Japanese Samurai or among Doric warriors — and these were countenanced for the sake of the stricter cohesion of the group. But in general it must be said that the leading elements in groups, especially in the later course of human history, have rather been inclined to suppress the personal relation in favour of the purely collective element. Where this latter element reigns alone or is predominant, men feel themselves to be carried by the collectivity, which lifts them out of loneliness and fear of the world and lostness. When this happens — and for modern man it is an essential happening — the life between person and person seems to retreat more and more before the advance of the collective. The collective aims at holding in check the inclination to personal life. It is as though those who are bound together in groups should in the main be concerned only with the work of the group and should turn to the personal partners, who are tolerated by the group, only in secondary meetings.

Nietzsche, on the same insight:

Dialogue. — A dialogue is the perfect conversation because everything that the one person says acquires its particular color, sound, its accompanying gesture in strict consideration of the other person to whom he is speaking; it is like letter-writing, where one and the same man shows ten ways of expressing his inner thoughts, depending on whether he is writing to this person or to that. In a dialogue, there is only one single refraction of thought: this is produced by the partner in conversation, the mirror in which we want to see our thoughts reflected as beautifully as possible. But how is it with two, or three, or more partners? There the conversation necessarily loses something of its individualizing refinement; the various considerations clash, cancel each other out; the phrase that pleases the one, does not accord with the character of the other. Therefore, a man interacting with several people is forced to fall back upon himself, to present the facts as they are, but rob the subject matter of that scintillating air of humanity that makes a conversation one of the most agreeable things in the world. Just listen to the tone in which men interacting with whole groups of men tend to speak; it is as if the ground bass of all speech were: “That is who I am; that is what I say; now you think what you will about it!” For this reason, clever women whom a man has met in society are generally remembered as strange, awkward, unappealing: it is speaking to and in front of many people that robs them of all intelligent amiability and turns a harsh light only on their conscious dependence on themselves, their tactics, and their intention to triumph publicly; while the same women in a dialogue become females again and rediscover their mind’s gracefulness.

Nietzsche makes a lot more general sense and seems a little less sexist if you decode his comments on women with the aid of this Rosetta stone (from the preface of Beyond Good and Evil): “Supposing truth is a woman–what then?”

*

This distinction is completely relevant to brand, not only externally, but also internally.

Comparing the experience of two people in the same situation, some elements of the experience will be identical, some different but compatible, some different and conflicting.

Those elements of experience that are reliably identical across experiences are interpreted as attributes of objects, and we call objective. Those elements that are reliably different across experiences we call subjective, and are interpreted as attributes of subjects.

In the end, however, all comparisons are made by subjects between subjects, through the essentially intersubjective medium of language, and they deal with experiences had by subjects. Objectivity is a subset of subjectivity with a very blurry edge and perhaps nothing but blurry edge around a point-of-approach suggesting a metaphysical existence. And other subjects are essentially different from one’s own. We are comparing unlike beings as though they are like, through language and phenomenal reference points — so the subjectivity of others is also a point-of-approach suggesting a metaphysical existence.

*

To think of objectivity as somehow more real than subjectivity, and subjectivity as more real than intersubjectivity is to take what is furthest for what is nearest, and it has disastrous practical implications, as does taking objectivity to be unreal and invalid.

When we read a mystery we try to discern the essential truth of the mysterious situation from a smattering of details. We begin tentatively, with a hypothesis or set of hypotheses which orders our understanding and, more subtly, through the uncanny influence of relevance, our perceptions. Some details are regarded as significant, others as trivial, and some fail to register at all until much later.

As the mystery develops, anomalies accumulate; things stop adding up; we suspect that our failure to make sense of things might have less to do with absence of clues, than it does with misreading the significance of existing clues. The investigation becomes reinvestigation. We try on different interpretive schema, look at the picture from different angles, ask ourselves what understanding develops if some innocent-seeming character is hiding something, or if some suspicious character is actually benign or benevolent. We find our allegiances shifting, and with it the balance of relative certainties.

Eventually, an epiphany occurs. Often it comes in the form of a crystalizing paradox which changes everything at once, as a whole and in every detail.

We can also experience this same strange phenomenon — the hermeneutic shift — reading mystery novels, though the effect is mostly confined to the experience of the book itself. In reading real-life mysteries, the world itself is transfigured, ourselves with it.

Experience and invention. — However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown to him. This nutriment is therefore a work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold — the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it. Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of nourishment, but the nourishment is scattered indiscriminately without distinguishing between the hungry and those already possessing a superfluity. And as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole, fully grown polyp will be something just as accidental as its growth has been. To express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification — or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness — these are all metaphors –: it then regards every event of the day with a view to seeing how it can employ it for the attainment of its goal; whether a man is moving, or resting or angry or reading or speaking or fighting or rejoicing, the drive will in its thirst as it were taste every condition into which the man may enter, and as a rule will discover nothing for itself there and will have to wait and go on thirsting: in a little while it will grow faint, and after a couple of days or months of non-gratification it will wither away like a plant without rain. Perhaps this cruelty perpetrated by chance would be more vividly evident if all the drives were as much in earnest as is hunger, which is not content with dream food; but most of the drives, especially the so-called moral ones, do precisely this — if my supposition is allowed that the meaning and value of our dreams is precisely to compensate to some extent for the chance absence of ‘nourishment’ during the day. Why was the dream of yesterday full of tenderness and tears, that of the day before yesterday humorous and exuberant, an earlier dream adventurous and involved in a continuous gloomy searching? Why do I in this dream enjoy indescribable beauties of music, why do I in another soar and fly with the joy of an eagle up to distant mountain peaks? These inventions, which give scope and discharge to our drives to tenderness or humorousness or adventurousness or to our desire for music and mountains — and everyone will have his own more striking examples to hand — are interpretations of nervous stimuli we receive while we are asleep, very free, very arbitrary interpretations of the motions of the blood and intestines, of the pressure of the arm and the bedclothes, of the sounds made by church bells, weathercocks, night-revellers and other things of the kind. That this text, which is in general much the same on one night as on another, is commented on in such varying ways, that the inventive reasoning faculty imagines today a cause for the nervous stimuli so very different from the cause it imagined yesterday, though the stimuli are the same: the explanation of this is that today’s prompter of the reasoning faculty was different from yesterday’s — a different drive wanted to gratify itself, to be active, to exercise itself, to refresh itself, to discharge itself — today this drive was at high flood, yesterday it was a different drive that was in that condition. — Waking life does not have this freedom of interpretation possessed by the life of dreams, it is less inventive and unbridled — but do I have to add that when we are awake our drives likewise do nothing but interpret nervous stimuli and, according to their requirements, posit their ’causes’? that there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming? that when we compare very different stages of culture we even find that freedom of waking interpretation in the one is in no way inferior to the freedom exercised in the other while dreaming? that our moral judgments and evaluations too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of acquired language for designating certain nervous stimuli? that all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text? — Take some trifling experience. Suppose we were in the market place one day and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us — and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world — and in each case a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey: why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait. — One day recently at eleven o’clock in the morning a man suddenly collapsed right in front of me as if struck by lightning, and all the women in the vicinity screamed aloud; I myself raised him to his feet and attended to him until he had recovered his speech — during this time not a muscle of my face moved and I felt nothing, neither fear nor sympathy, but I did what needed doing and went coolly on my way. Suppose someone had told me the day before that tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning a man would fall down beside me in this fashion — I would have suffered every kind of anticipatory torment, would have spent a sleepless night, and at the decisive moment instead of helping the man would perhaps have done what he did. For in the meantime all possible drives would have had time to imagine the experience and to comment on it. — What then are our experiences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already contain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent? — (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 119)

When the Earth looks toward the Sun, its vision moves within the Sun’s bright blue-bounded heaven. Only when the Earth turns its back to the Sun and looks out into space through its own shadow does it gain a broader perspective on the heavens. It is comforting to imagine worlds cradled in daytime among the icy, silver specks.

Goods are necessary to sustain meaningful work.

1) We need the right goods to live right and be able to work well; and 2) we need other people to need the goods we produce, or the work lacks functional tension.

Neither means nor ends are dispensable.

*

Since the industrial revolution we’ve treated means as an undesirable nuisance, which through the help of technology we can minimize. Less work was necessary, and that necessary work became worse work.

The dialogical process of making vanished. The circling process that makes work as absorbing as conversation — where the maker listens to and responds to his own work as he works on it — the feedback loop of craft — was snipped and straightened into the linear monotony of the assembly line.

*

Knowledge workers work on assembly lines, called processes.

The same philosophy that produced and blessed assembly lines, produces and blesses processes. To this philosophy, efficiency is self-evidently good, numbers are more real than what we see, what we see is more real than what we feel, objectivity is truth, subjectivity distorts truth, ends justify means.

(Actually, this isn’t even a philosophy, it’s just “how things are”. Philosophy is what pretends things can be otherwise.)

Living by this reality, we set a specific, defined goal, then after follow a straight line as directly as possible to that goal. After the goal is defined and the line to the goal is planned out, we stop listening or looking: we execute.

If we hear or see something in the course of execution that suggests a change of course, what we hear is evidence of an error committed, and what we see is a mistake.

But through the eyes of craft, these errors and mistakes are twists and turns of a conversation.

Through the eyes of craft, the correction of a flaw, the improvisation in the face of the unexpected, the discovery of a blind-alley — these are the essence of development.

Through the eyes of craft, these meanderings, tackings, abortive explorations and failed hypotheses are the opposite of regrettable. They’re the pleasure of work.

*

Marx was wrong to attribute alienation to not owning the means of production: alienation is loss of craft.

*

Possessions and freedom only increase the odds you will be able to do what you were born to do (aka fulfill your destiny).

If you were given possession of the whole world and the freedom to do anything you wished, except for doing what you were born to do, you would feel empty and dead.

If all your possessions were taken away and were forced to do what you were born to do: you’d be happy.

The latter happens when fate thrusts exactly the right catastrophes on a person.

*

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

– W. B. Yeats

*

Do you know what you want? — Have you never been plagued by the fear that you might be completely incapable of knowing the truth? The fear that your mind may be too dull and even your subtle faculty of seeing still much too coarse? Have you not noticed what kind of will rules behind your seeing? For example, how yesterday you wanted to see more than another, today differently from another, or how from the very first you longed to find what others fancied they had found or the opposite of that! Oh shameful craving! How you sometimes looked for something which affected you strongly, sometimes for what soothed you — because you happened to be tired! Always full of secret predeterminations of how truth would have to be constituted if you would consent to accept it! Or do you believe that today, since you are frozen and dry like a bright morning in winter and have nothing weighing on your heart, your eyes have somehow improved? Are warmth and enthusiasm not needed if a thing of thought is to have justice done to it? — and that precisely is seeing! As though you were able to traffic with things of thought any differently from the way you do with men! In this traffic too there is the same morality, the same honourableness, the same reservations, the same slackness, the same timidity — your whole lovable and hateful ego! When you are physically tired you will bestow on things a pale and tired coloration, when you are feverish you will turn them into monsters! Does your morning not shine upon things differently from your evening? Do you not fear to re-encounter in the cave of every kind of knowledge your own ghost — the ghost which is the veil behind which truth has hidden itself from you? Is it not a horrible comedy in which you so thoughtlessly want to play a role? —

– Nietzsche

Faced with a perplexity, we can accept the perplexity as a such and try to uncover the problem concealed in it. Or we can respond to the perplexity it as a known problem — one we already know how to pose and resolve —  and bury the true problem deeper in words and activity.

*

For every premature answer, there’s a premature question.

*

Perplexities are innovation goldmines.

Most of the time we try to invent ingenious ideas to solve the same old problem.

But when we see problems in new ways, new solutions suggest themselves. It’s just like asking a question from a new angle that effortlessly brings forth a surprising new answer.

(Inspired by this picture. See also Chemical Brother’s “Salmon Dance” video and the “Ambition” poster from despair.com. I may have to make myself another stained glass salmon.)

Words are weird.

I was thinking about how unpleasant incumbent brands tend to be, compared to lean, fresh, inspired challengers. Then I became curious about the etymology of the word “incumbent”.

Incumbent: ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun): from Anglo-Latin incumbens, incumbent-, from Latin incumbere ‘lie or lean on,’ from in– ‘upon’ + a verb related to cubare ‘lie.’

Incubus: ORIGIN Middle English : late Latin form of Latin incubo ‘nightmare,’ from incubare ‘lie on’.

So far so good. Incumbents, lying around, leaning heavily, incubi, nightmares — that all fits. But then:

Incubate: ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin incubat– ‘lain on,’ from the verb incubare, from in- ‘upon’ + cubare ‘to lie.

In goal-directed activity, a goal is to be accomplished by whatever means are necessary. The goal is primary and the activity is secondary and variable. And if the goal is met, activity is no longer valuable.

In intrinsically valuable activity, such as play, there may be multiple possible outcomes, and there may be no goal at all. The activity is primary, and the goal is secondary, variable, and possibly even non-existent.

In consummational activity, means and ends are bound together so that the end and means are inseparable. The value of the means consists in its being the pursuit of the consummating end, and the value of the end consists in its being the consummation of the means.

With consummational activities, questions of the primacy of means versus ends, often posed as theoretical — “What if we have to chose one?” — are attempts to reduce the consummational relationship to the terms of means versus ends. The proper answer is “It is both, or neither.” This answer is factually true, and it is also practically and morally true.

Practical truth: once one assigns primacy to means or to ends one begins to think in terms of satisfying one at the expense of the other within the current way of seeing the problem rather than looking for new perspective on the problem where both can be satisfied as a whole.

Moral truth: the consummational relationship is what separates moral action from the merely functional. In morality, ends do not justify means, but just as much means do not justify ends. To pursue an end one considers morally “good” by immoral does not justify the means. It desecrates the end. But also, to act according to moral precepts even when the action clearly leads to disaster — this is usually presented as showing courage, integrity and faith — but in fact, it only shows intellectual and ethical sloth — a preference for exertion of body over recognizing the finitude of the human mind, even in its ability to codify principles or interpret scripture. To believe one possesses godlike knowledge of the moral absolute is arrogant, and to apply that knowledge as if it were a technique is a cowardly avoidance of dread in the face of the infinite.

To achieve moral ends by moral means in the infinite flux of concrete situation requires constant, dreadful, excruciating effort to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our world. It is this tension that straightens the potentially closed circularity of human-animal existence into a forward-thrusting outspiral toward human-divinity.

I think destiny may just be a way to express the state of being in which a person discovers optimal harmony of all his multifarious drives and talents in goal-oriented action.

Ordinary fate offers a little bit to this aspect of the self, a little to that, while suppressing or crippling other aspects. Destiny is a moment within fate where the entirety of self recognizes in an image of accomplishment its fullest, unified potential.

*

The goal is taken as destiny, but this goal is not to be reached by whatever means are most expedient. The goal provides the focusing image of the pursuit. The pursuit itself is the root of the value, but the pursuit is consummated by the goal, and the two are inseparable.

This is another example of the consummation relationship, and it is entirely different from goal-directed activity (“the ends justify the means”) and intrinsically pleasurable activity (“the journey is the destination”).

*

A boy who falls in love with a girl is called to give her a glimpse of his characteristic reaction to destiny.

Principle — ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, from Latin principium ‘source,’ principia (plural) ‘foundations,’ from princeps, princip– ‘first, chief.’

A principle comes first, or it is not a principle.

A principle might be an articulation of what is already coming first, a naming of an instinctive motive. Or it can be imposed and made to precede action, in the form of a law. (These two should be kept distinct. If one behaved instinctively, one should remember it and not pretend one was following a code.) The best principles are between instinctive motive and law — the cultivation of an instinct or a constellation of instincts into a disciplined force.

Too often however, principles are added last as justifications for unjustified behavior. It is usually easy to find some principle or another to self-interpret actions as moral. The unprincipled nature of such actions and interpretations come out only in examining and comparing how one applies principles in judging one’s own and other’s actions. Is the application of the principle consistent from moment to moment and person to person? Is the memory constant, or does the story change?

We keep working to provide more and more, cheaper and cheaper, better and better products to consumers.

Nobody in our era has more attention lavished upon him than the consumer.

Why? Because satisfying customers is what brings us success, and success brings us great rewards — bigger homes, cooler cars, higher-fi home theaters — all eventually culminating in a comfortable retirement.

We work hard and make sacrifices to improve the lives of consumers so we can have better lives as consumers.

So, we, ourselves, are split between roles of slave and master: as producers we sacrifice everything; as consumers we bask in autocratic pleasure  — we expect everything, and we are always right.

But does this way of living make sense? Is it possible that we are sacrificing the better half of life?

To repeat a cliche: does consumption bring any lasting happiness at all? What if the cornerstone of lasting happiness is not having, but doing? Are we selling our only hope of fullness (of doing) for empty promises of happiness in having?

Or worse, do we actually think these sacrifices to who-knows-what make us “good people”?

*

This is not a merely theoretical question: If we see consumption as the point of production, we will naturally live a very different work ethic than someone who sees production as the point of production.

And even among those who see production as intrinsically valuable, the attitude one takes toward the consumer’s role in production will also determine one’s work ethic.

It is here — in the attitude toward the other — that people get tangled up in their thinking. Things seem to come down to terms of selfishness vs selflessness. It seems that ethically one’s self is mainly something to either indulge or overcome. The give-and-take of coming to agreements is finding the selfish-selfless balance so nobody takes more than their share of the goodness. We compromise by averaging our interests. Or we claim the higher good for our self by sacrificing our own lower interests in order to be altruistic. But what is gained, really?

I find this way of looking at things depressing. I think the example of really great gifts shows an alternative.

*

When we give an inspired gift — the kind that brings enormous pleasure to giver and receiver — the gift-giver and the gift-receiver participate together in a gift-exchange relationship. Both parties must participate in the right spirit or the gift is spoiled.

The giver must care about the receiver and act, not selflessly, but otherfully and togetherfully. The giver is attuned to the receiver’s being (in the form of the kinds of things the receiver loves in the world) but also to the relationship that binds the giver and receiver together. When the gift is loved for its especial, specific perfection — perfect in a way that shows that the giver really knows and acknowledges the receiver — the relationship is consummated in the gift.

As always, the cliche is true: It is the thought that counts. But the thought in question is not the mere intention to please (though that is very important). The best gift shows that the giver values and has thought about the receiver, about the relationship they share, about what can express that relationship in concrete form, consummate it, make it more concrete, more social, more visible to the world.

*

Let’s compare the otherful-togetherful gift with the selfish gift and the selfless gift.

A selfish gift is one that gives the receiver a sense that they as an individual did not really factor much into the gift. The selfish giver might give something he himself wants and indulged his own desire to buy it, using the occasion of the gift as an excuse. Or he might buy something he thinks the other should want to have, disregarding the question of whether the receiver actually does want it. Or he might buy the gift as a form of self-expression, showing his wealth or great taste or ingenuity, etc., but not thinking at all about the intrinsic value of the gift to the receiver.

The common quality is that the giver does not consider the experience of the receiver, only his own experience. The giver does not share the receiver’s pleasure (though he might take pleasure in his own success). The receiver is not fully present to the giver in the act of giving.

A selfless gift is one that is intended to give the receiver pleasure, but in a distant, non-involved way. The receiver is viewed as an individual independent of relationship, and so the gift does not affirm the relationship between the giver and receiver. The gift is simply the transfer of desired property from one party to another. The selfless giver will sometimes ask what the other wants and give him exactly what he wants. Or the selfless giver will buy his way out of the obligation to give a gift by simply transferring money to the receiver. Or the selfless giver will give the appropriate gift for the occasion.

The common quality is that the giver does not consider his own experience giving , only that of the receiver. As with the selfish gift, the giver does not share the receiver’s pleasure, but in this case, it is because he does not take pleasure in the giving. The giver is not fully present to the himself in the act of giving.

With the selfish gift, the gift could have been given to anyone.

With the selfless gift, the gift could have been given by anyone.

An otherful-togetherful gift could only have been given by this gift-giver to this gift-receiver.

*

Few gifts are purely selfish or selfless or otherful-togetherful, but the point here is not to create classifications. It is to point to an ideal.

The ideal of otherful-togetherful is completely outside the discourse of individualism vs collectivism, of selfishness vs altruism, and of company-centricity vs customer-centricity (or user-centricity).

The otherful-togetherful gift transcends both self-centricity and altruism and points to a paradigm of relationship-centricity.

This paradigm is the form of successful friendships, marriages, businesses, and communities. It is lack of awareness of this paradigm that has allowed so many precious cultural assets to decay into burdensome, pleasureless irrelevance.

*

When businesses learn to stop thinking their choice is either 1) selfishly foisting products they think are great on customers they barely know, or 2) selflessly losing themselves in conforming to the customer’s wishes (which takes the form of coercing employees to sacrifice their own health and happiness in the quest to satisfy the customer), and learn instead to be relationship-centric it will be far more possible for people to create, give and receive happiness in producing and consuming.

*

There’s also a selfish and selfless mode of receiving gifts, and that is also relevant to how business is done.

*

I’m beginning to see brand as the symbolic tokens of a gift-giving relationship.