Management books such as Good to Great chronicle the importance of a tenacious, hedgehog-like dedication to perfection in a single domain as the key to creating a profitable and enduring company. The same is true of sports teams, political campaigns, and even churches. Finding and articulating a Big Dream that can inspire people to move in the same direction is thus at the core of true leadership.
Our country consists of almost 300 million individuals who are not only politically and economically linked but also psychologically. Getting even a majority aligned in a similar direction is no small task. But without that alignment, our noblest potential as a country is squandered, lost in the swirl of personal agendas and political infighting. We move away from greatness and towards mediocrity, too much of our creative energy dissipated on competing concerns.
So America, like any collective, needs a shared focus to activate our highest potential. The question is only what should that focus be. What Big Dream can galvanize our greatness, inspire our service, and help us to create something of enduring value? What is today’s equivalent of a lunar landing, the mission that can focalize a nation and inspire people to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?”
Right now, America has chosen the war on terror as our singular focus. It is the political drumbeat of this administration and we spend the greatest amount of money and time honing our skill at fighting this war.
A war isn’t always a bad way to galvanize a country. Stopping Hitler in World War II was a noble act and the single most important factor in pulling America out of our economic depression. The war inspired great sacrifice for the good of the whole, which was enough to break our depressed economic spiral. The American Revolution freed America from England and provided a common cause around which our latent greatness could activate. After 9/11, the war on terror gave our country something to rally around and provide a collective focus for our pain and outrage. It inspired sacrifice for the good of the collective. America stood united for a time.
Using the war on terror as America’s long-term orienting mission, though, generates many problems. Wars are best as temporary, short-term, means-to-an-end ways to mobilize countries. As long-term orienting missions, they create many problems. Our drive towards excellence becomes focused at the level of conducting war and expanding our wartime apparatus. Success becomes measured by our military dominance in battle rather than our success at achieving peace. In the heat of preparing for battle, we forget that the real desired outcome, even for most hawks, is peace. War is only the means chosen to reach that end.
By choosing to focus America’s collective intention on the means (war on terror) rather than the end (world at peace), a number of things happen. First of all, we create unnecessary polarities between hawks and doves. When our primary mission is the War on Terror, there’s not a significant role for peacemakers and pacifists, who represent a very important segment of our population. If we’re focused on creating a world at peace, the skills of the peacemaker AND the military leader are both required at different times and in different situations. As an orienting compass, then, a war on terror fails to include both polarities, which amplifies internal power struggles.
Second, the war on terror mission skews us heavily towards masculine modes of governance. When our shared focus is the war on terror, power moves towards those who are most adept at conducting a war, which is usually the men. As a country, we move away from masculine-feminine balance and towards a dangerously lopsided masculinity, which undermines our ability to create political wholeness.
Third, the war on terror as a mission fails to instill a vision of a positive outcome that can inspire people for long-term service and sacrifice. As a vision, it doesn’t look far enough or go deep enough. When our intention is focused on war, we tend to amplify the psychology of fear that fuels and perpetuates war. We create a martial climate. The manifesting power of our subconscious in this way is harnessed to create the conditions for more war rather than accelerate the dawning of peace.
Fourth, the war on terror as a long-term mission undermines the trust of other nations. They begin to see us as committed to military power rather than peacemaking prowess. Global peace can be a unifying goal for all countries but a war on terror tends to pit different nations against each other.
Finally, putting our focus on war can lead to a sense of hopelessness, depression, and collective fear. The gloomy atmosphere of today’s America is partially a reflection of a shared negative mission that has been at the forefront for too long. Without a positive sense of mission, we begin to feel less proud of ourselves and our efforts.
Shifting our collective intention to the ultimate result – a world at peace – rather than one strategy to achieve that result – the war on terror - holds the potential of bringing people from across the political spectrum back together as we recognize that we all hold complementary pieces of achieving that goal. When we commit our country to becoming excellent at peacemaking rather than simply warmaking, we can reconnect with a more authentically positive view of ourselves and find many more allies at home and abroad. That doesn’t mean the war on terror ends or we dismantle our defenses. They just become part of working towards a much nobler, and more inspiring mission.
www.stephendinan.com
Stephen Dinan is the author of Radical Spirit and the founder of the Radical Spirit community, as well as the Director of Membership and Marketing for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in human biology and holds a master's in East-West psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Stephen directed and helped to create the Esalen Institute's Center for Theory & Research, a think tank for leading scholars, researchers, and teachers to explore human potential frontiers. Stephen has several books in process, including a companion volume to Radical Spirit entitled Radical Spirit in Action, a memoir set in India called In Kali's Garden, and a collection of poetry called Angelfire.
Yes Stephen this idea about War is a loser. In fact even identifying the right kind of War we are fighting. President Bush calls it the War on terror. He is mistaken, it is the War on Energy. Have we forgotten the Enron price hike of electricity? And is it a coincidence that the War on terror just so happens to be in the areas where the worlds oil supply happens to be located? No coincidence I think.
It is the War on energy. Who controls the resources, and who collects the money. In my opinion the fight over oil is a waste of time, because it is such a limited resource. There is only so much of the stuff to suck out of the ground and then what? Its gone. Go find another fishing hole? No. The big world bowl of oil is going dry. No one is putting oil into the ground.
The real war is about energy and making a liquid fuel that will support the transportation industry. Making new hybrids only slows down the problem. The fuel needs to support present day engines, cars in the past, trucks of today, Buses of tomorrow.
The fuel is Ethanol. We need to make alot of it quickly and easily, and without weather interruption. How much damage is done to our crops yearly from hurricanes and tornado's? Quite a bit. But we need to grow Ethanol. Some say all the land in America could not support all the needs we have for fuel consumption. So they kill the idea.
My idea is to take it off the land and into the Ocean. Use the ocean as a conveyor belt to grow thousands of acres of sugarcane floating on aquarafts dead on the equator give or take 5 degrees. The equator is Hurricane safe. No storms cross the line. The area is Mega, is huge, is expansive. Plenty of space to wage the war on creating energy. Think of the jobs made to build this Energy Company.
The availabilty to fight our way out of the energy dilemma is real and achievable. We need people in Washington to stop fighting this false war of terror and fight the Energy War by creating real fuel for the people, not fighting over a limited resource called oil.
We are killing people who want to stop democracy? I totally disagree. They have oil that we want. They don't want to give it, because they want more money than we wish to give, or they don't want our Oil drillers there polluting their country and changing their culture.
If we can produce our own fuel, what need of their limited resource. You know Republicans are famous in saying get off your dead ass and find a job. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Change your attitude, get off welfare.
Well Oil is a welfare pacifier. It isn't going to be around very long. We are killing folks and making the world angry because we want the last cookie in the cookie jar.
By to Jesus get off your Republican elephant asses and get to work by building this company and this idea in making fuel. It is estimated that the amount of Ethanol grown by hydroponics will create enough fuel to supply the world and more, with jobs to boot. How can that be a bad thing.
Yes from the false War of Terror, to the Peace drive in making Energy is the shift of direction the United States needs to make. There is a Y in the road. The Y on the right is going dry. The Y on the left has alot of fuel there. Lets make the correct direction.
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Dom Jermano (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 40 diaries, 934 comments)
on Saturday, June 10, 2006 at 7:15:32 PM
