This is a cartoon I drew a couple of years ago. I just updated the font. It’s one of my personal favorites.
I had a dream a few years ago where I saw this picture. Strong and ambitious men climbed incessantly to the top of the pyramid, the top of the heap, where they celebrated their success. But it was only temporary, because the hand of God inevitably swung through and wiped out those at the top. However, the ambitious struggle to the top wasn’t stopped, and the strong men again and again endeavored to climb to the top, initiating the same process over and over again.
I’m submitting this to this week’s Illustration Friday under the theme “Heirarchy”.
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I just finished reading Garrow’s massive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bearing the Cross. Garrow is a great writer to be able to link together so many dates, events, and people in such a gripping and moving story.
One of King’s leaders, Jim Bevel, summarized what he felt were the four major forces which kept the ghetto in place:
- lack of economic power;
- political disenfranchisement;
- lack of knowledge and information; and
- lack of self-respect and self-dignity among the people of the ghetto.
He concluded that the project had
to create enough self-dignity and self-respect in the people of the ghetto so that they will not tolerate the inhumane system under which they are now forced to live, and will replace it with a community of love.
Bevel recommended to the leadership that they focus first on number one. His reason for advising this was because he believed that:
You fight a machine by making people grow so that they don’t fit into the machine anymore.
It struck me how King’s movement began with energy, zeal, vision and hope, but gradually ground to a slow and depressing struggle with small victories. The story again impressed me with how humanity has the uncanny ability to resist change by adopting manifold methods of entrenchment… anything from physical violence to empty promises to just plain refusal. King came to the conclusion late in his career that he was no longer interested in seeking integration into the present value structure. He realized that the structure itself was the problem and needed to be radically changed. The evil was systemic and not just personal. He even recommended some kind of modified socialism. Some believe this, and not the civil rights movement, is what got him killed.
We often face institutional power gone bad or systemic evil, as well as those who manage it. I found the four forces insightful. These four forces can be seen as stages for us to go through: self-respect to knowledge to shared power to equality. It is important and necessary for people everywhere to grow in their self-respect and dignity so that they cannot be controlled by these powers. New wine bursts old wineskins. Changed people conquer the principalities and powers that would enslave us. Even the ones we are comfortable with.
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I read Aravind Adiga’s dark novel, The White Tiger. Here’s Publishers Weekly’s synopsis of the story:
A brutal view of India’s class struggles is cunningly presented in Adiga’s debut about a racist, homicidal chauffer. Balram Halwai is from the Darkness, born where India’s downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot. Balram manages to escape his village and move to Delhi after being hired as a driver for a rich landlord. Telling his story in retrospect, the novel is a piecemeal correspondence from Balram to the premier of China, who is expected to visit India and whom Balram believes could learn a lesson or two about India’s entrepreneurial underbelly. Adiga’s existential and crude prose animates the battle between India’s wealthy and poor as Balram suffers degrading treatment at the hands of his employers (or, more appropriately, masters). His personal fortunes and luck improve dramatically after he kills his boss and decamps for Bangalore. Balram is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers, even as he rails about corruption, allows himself to be defiled by his bosses, spews coarse invective and eventually profits from moral ambiguity and outright criminality. It’s the perfect antidote to lyrical India.
Although you can gather what the story line is from the above synopsis, it underestimates the book’s moral power. This is a scathing critique of any society’s corrupt dependence on money and power. The whole purpose of the book is not to expose, say, the injustice of class struggle in and of itself, but how class thoroughly permeates relationships and transactions solely for the sake of securing wealth for the more powerful. The hopelessly poverty-stricken Balram learns early to use everything, including eavesdropping on any conversation, in order to escape poverty, and to get and stay ahead. He calls himself a “social entrepreneur”… someone who has learned to use people, relationships, and social mores to succeed. He’s willing to sacrifice his family, his freedom, his conscience… everything and anything… in order to become successful. Neither communism nor capitalism escape this critique. In a wonderful passage, he reveals that he even uses spirituality to succeed in the corrupt world he has chosen for himself, brutally earned for himself, and ingeniously profits from:
Incidentally, sir, while we’re on the topic of yoga– may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur’s day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea.
It was when I read this passage that I realized Adiga is critiquing our society’s marshaling of anything in order to profit from it. And it’s true. I’ve always believed it and am becoming more convinced of it. Spirituality is no longer concerned with dying to self in order to live a life of compassion. Now it’s all about winning, succeeding and triumphing. Spirituality has become an accessory for comfortable living. It is just one of the components of happiness, an ingredient for success, and a tool for the acquisition of wealth (I would include power, but even power is nothing in and of itself, for it leads to wealth, the ultimate goal!) In a nutshell, spirituality has become a mask for murder. In Balram’s case literally. But I would argue that spirituality and religion is used to classify, divide, separate, and ultimately alienate people. And this is not just analogous to murder, but is murder. Murder in the heart. Is there any other kind?
In my opinion this book should be read by every student of business and entrepreneurship!
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I watched a film the other night, Factory Girl. It is about Edie Sedgwick, a rich, young woman who became a part of pop-artist Andy Warhol’s groupies who hung out in his art studio, called “the factory”. I enjoyed the film, even while I found it disturbing.
Warhol is portrayed as an immature, egocentric, blood-sucking leech on the lives of the rich young people he exploited. The whole time I watched the movie I was thinking about Picasso, another artist, who seems to have been the same with those around him. And the whole time I’m watching this movie and thinking about these narcissistic men, I’m thinking about how easy it is for those with powerful personalities and charisma to use those who gather around them, to live off of the adoration of their groupies, to even destroy the lives of those who love them.
I’m fully aware of this dynamic because, as someone who oversees a community, the temptation to let the appreciation, respect or adoration of those you care for feed your ego is enormous and perpetual. I’ve allowed adoration and used it to position me above others. But I’ve been on the other end too… more than once… where I’ve allowed my adoration of a man (which in itself is questionable enough!) to feed his sense of power and importance, while depriving me of my individuality, autonomy, and self-respect. I often wish I could relive those times. But I can’t. They are gone.
However, I can learn from them. And I have. I have learned to never adore another person, no matter how powerful or charismatic or influential. I’ve learned never to elevate another person above myself but to see myself as equal because I am. I’ve learned to not nurture adoration from others. I’ve learned to question appreciation and have tried to learn to live and work without a need for it. I’ve learned to debase myself in the face of admiration. I’ve learned to refuse elevation above others. I’ve learned to be discerning when it comes to charisma in others, especially if it’s cultured. I’ve learned to be skeptical of magnetism in leaders. In other words, I’ve learned to become completely suspicious of anything that sniffs of pride, arrogance and pomp, as well as the children of these: manipulation, control and exploitation. The world abounds in these, and organized religion is at the epicenter of it all.
The photo is the creation of my friend, Mark Hemmings.
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David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
