I am me – (living by my own authority).

I am me. I am not you. I am comfortable (I think) with my beliefs, with my likes and dislikes, with my judgements and opinions; I try to be as honest as I can; I try to be truthful; I try to be kind and compassionate and generally try to behave towards other people as I would like them to behave towards me. In other words I like to think of myself as an ordinary kind of bloke trying to live by my understanding and interpretation of events and circumstances. In other words I am trying to live by my own authority.

And yet how many of us do things, have beliefs or have interpretations of events which we never worked out for ourselves – ones accepted by us because we heard them on ‘talk back’ radio, or saw them on TV or read about them somewhere - ones spoken or written about by someone we consider an ‘authority figure’? This means accepting, even if subconsciously, the decisions of someone else, who, we must think, also subconsciously, knows more, knows better. Otherwise why should we accept their opinion, their view of the world and how we should interpret it?

To accept someone else’s decision is to accept their view of what they think our lives should be and how we should live it. In other words (whether we actually like it or not) we conform to someone else’s set of values, someone else’s views of life, not our own. We are not living by our own authority. This reduces our range of choices, our range of actions because we are constrained by what we think someone else would do in the situation presented. We may have followed someone else’s directions for so long that when we are presented with a situation that demands our input we are unable or unwilling to do so. We are now unable to think for ourselves or to make a judgement based or our own interpretation of events. To have arrived at this point means we are now controlled; we have been diminished as human beings and are unable to live by our own authority.

Very few of the judgements we make on a daily basis, about what is “right” or “wrong” for us, are made by us, based on our true understanding of the situation as presented. It often seems that the more important the decision, the less likely we are to rely on our own thoughts and ideas, based on our own experiences. Advertisers tell us what we should buy – what we ‘deserve’; we are told what books to read, or music to listen to; we are told what fashion dictates we should wear and such like. Statisticians tell us that it is a statistical probability that, being a male in a certain age group and with certain racial physical characteristics and with certain religious beliefs, we will have certain likes and dislikes, be of a certain height, be overweight, even obese and have this or that medical problem and that when presented with an ethical dilemma we will answer in this or that way. But we are not a ‘probability’ – we are human beings.

No doubt it is a great nuisance to business and strategic planners that mankind is not uniform but compounded of individuals with their own likes and dislikes and their own interpretation of events and situations.

One does not do something to be happy – one IS happy and does something to express it. One does not do something to be ethical – one IS ethical and does something to express those ethical ideals. We don’t need someone else to tell us – we act on our own authority.

So it should be with all activities.

In business it is assumed that things are different and that money, cash flows and profit margins are the beginning and the end of the business model. This is not so.

As has been repeatedly stated in these articles, money is a human construct, has no intrinsic value and that its principle use is as a medium of exchange in the facilitation of trade. To place the consideration of money before the consideration of people and the environment that sustains life as we know it, abrogates the duty of care that everyone in business must have regarding their staff and customers – those very people who provide the money those in business so desperately seek. Such a positioning of money first, before people, alienates the employee from the organization in that they become an accessory to that organization, rather than being seen as a part of it; as a human being doing something for him or herself to help the organization. If this is the corporate mentality then the customer will be similarly alienated. People are not a means to an end – making money. To consider them as such is unjust and creates a great deal of disharmony and distress.

The ‘economy’ cannot be paramount – it is ‘humanity’ that is paramount. It is not humanity that is set free by competition; it is, rather, capital that is set free. To consider anything else means that the ‘market’ comes to dominate humanity.

Commerce and industry must again revert to the position of the servant of humanity and never try to subvert this wherein humanity is considered the servant of commerce and industry.

Life is about choices and no one can make a choice for you, that suites you – be it as an employee or customer. It is your life and you need to live it your way, as you see fit to bring you peace of mind – your mind, not someone else’s. You need to live by your own authority – yours, not someone else’s.

It is unhelpful for the individual to be ‘categorized’, to be considered a ‘statistical probability’ – again this is someone else’s idea of what we should be or do. The essence of every life is the fulfilment of the potential each is born with. All human life is bound to individuals who manifest it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every human is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the journey to that destination or the fulfilment of that destiny is the only thing that makes sense of life. We are all members of the species ‘Homo Sapiens’ (reasoning man) why not try to live up to the promise of that and live by our own authority?

There is no need to change yourself, just BE yourself. How can you be successful in your life if you live by someone else’s ideas? You must live by your own authority.