In this Sunday video I muse upon my observation of various people I know still in the conventional world of commercial work. They are overwhelmingly doing their best to be “good”, and that involves having conventional work hours, conventional lifestyles, and conventional opinions. The outcome is, unsurprisingly, rather conventional. Unfortunately, being conventional right now may also require abandoning one’s conscience at the company door. That is because the morality of contracts — honour, lack of controversy, need for remedy — is often at odds with what is righteous and holy.
I have spent five years in the professional wilderness because I wouldn’t shut up once I spotted a big lie, even if lots of people believed in it. Failure to comply comes relatively easily to me, as being conventional is somewhere between aspirational and impossible. This time away has given me perspective on the morality of convention vs the morality of conscience. The former leads us to the success of having status in a spiritually corrupted society, with accolades, approval, and accumulation of toys. The latter may well weal to character assassination, ostracism, and a semi-permanent overdraft with no pension savings.
I don’t make a big secret of having played as hard as I worked, if not harder, and I got some feedback from the cosmos as a result of that too. My three best friends are misadventure, misdemeanour, and mistake. I have my own journey to sort out my own less that righteous ways of being, and that’s on me alone and nobody else. Looking up and raising our standards is not easy. It makes us deeply uncomfortable with where we have been, and what we might have done under the justification of the “horizontal” morality of contracts. Writing “political” newsletters in the run up to an election got me bonus income in the past; this doesn’t, but I am saying it anyway.
Do you want status success or sacred success?