*If you missed the last 2 weeks' posts / essays in a new series entitled "Healthy Work", check them out first:
http://www.scottgodwin.net/blog/healthy-work
http://www.scottgodwin.net/blog/what-is-the-purpose-of-work

“There is only one ethics, one set of rules of morality, one code: That of
individual behavior in which the same rules apply to everyone alike.”

 “Management is doing a thing right; leadership is doing the right things.”
-Peter Drucker

Does the name Kenneth Lay ring a bell?  Kenneth Lay was the CEO of ENRON, the disgraced American energy, commodities, and financial services company found to be defrauding consumers and investors out of billions of dollars when it filed for bankruptcy in 2001.   Before bankruptcy ENRON had approximately 20,000 staff and was one of the world’s largest corporations with claimed revenues of nearly $111 billion dollars.  At the end of 2001, it was discovered the company’s sizable financial position was sustained predominately through institutionalized, methodical, and creatively planned accounting fraud.  The implosion even took down the famed accounting company Arthur Anderson, who had been involved in the company’s accounting schemes.  In a cruel case of irony, Fortune magazine named ENRON “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years.  

It is the responsibility of every business to be honest.  This is not rocket science.  Honesty is telling the truth in every way possible, to investors, employees, consumers, and the government.  Trade secrets which might damage a company’s competitive advantage and which are ethically held private are of course, an exception.  When it comes to honesty and business ethics, transparency is a key idea.  Transparency to investors and regulators is of particular concern.  Debt, profits, revenues, and all relevant accounting data should be objectively detailed and reported. 

Governments play a key role in regulating business activity and legality.  Without government regulations, businesses would undoubtedly be tempted to “cross the line” of ethics.  In recent years, business schools in America have pushed the idea that businesses have an obligation to participate in society and contribute to a greater good.  Though this is a somewhat ambiguous and amorphous ideal, it is sound and I support this idea wholeheartedly, though individual employees should have the right to voice and disagree with their owners, managers, or fellow employees as to what exactly a “good” society consists of and be able to refrain from engaging in activities which conflict with their own moral and ethical code.  A business has a responsibility to create value in an honest, ethical, and legal way. 

Where I live in Atlanta, GA, I have access to many morally questionable activities within a short driving distance.  It is not up to me to decide whether or not these businesses should or should not be available to residents in my area, it is up to the local government.  Smoking cigarettes, blowing money at strip clubs, eating fatty junk food, drinking excessively, playing poker, or racking up piles of debt at shopping malls may not be good for anyone, but we as free Americans have the right to do these things.  The freedom to do them doesn’t make them right, or good, but they are available nonetheless.  Culture does affect the quality of life and health of a particular place, but the laws of our land allow freedom of expression and local control of businesses and certain morals. 

Practically any business product or service can hurt someone.  A chiropractic adjustment gone bad could injure, a meal with bacteria could poison, or an appliance faultily wired could catch on fire.  The list goes on.  Our system is a system of checks and balances.  Businesses should regulate themselves, governments should reasonably regulate businesses, and consumers should beware of the products and services they buy.  If necessary, in cases of ethical mistreatment of consumers or investors, legal retribution may be required.  Sure, too much alcohol, debt, or sugar could be bad but these things can be a net good in life, if used responsibly, so we’re not going to ban them.   It’s not up to a business to determine how a consumer uses a product or service, a customer must be responsible for his own behavior.  After all, a knife could be used to kill, but a knife is an indispensable part of life.  We want to live in a free world, with free markets, where people are allowed to decide for the most part what makes them happy, but business still must always abide by Peter Drucker’s admonition to lead by “doing the right things.”

In response to government pressures to reduce carbon emissions, automobile manufactures signed on and agreed to create more fuel- efficient vehicles.  These ongoing efforts since the 1970s have significantly reduced pollution and smog in American cities.  Whether you agree with climate change regulation or not, or pollution standards or not, it is the responsibility of businesses to follow the law.  Volkswagen (VW), the iconic German car manufacturer who also owns the Audi brand, was recently exposed as having implanted a sensor into their car engines which would allow the engine to “know” when it was being tested in a lab setting, so that the engine could skirt by emission standards in a lab setting. 

"We've totally screwed up," said VW America boss Michael Horn, while the group's chief executive at the time, Martin Winterkorn, said his company had "broken the trust of our customers and the public". (bbc.com) As a result of this moral lapse, the company, investors, and consumers will all be damaged by these actions, referred to popularly as the “diesel dupe.”  Chalk another iconic company up on the dust heap of disgraced brands in corporate history.  Companies and business people should tell the truth.  Radical honesty is the only way. 

In medicine, ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν or Primum non nocere, means “first, do no harm” and refers to the Hippocratic Oath, often thought of as the guiding ethical principle of medicine.  Why not use this guiding principle in business?  We live in a new era.  The internet and technology are ubiquitous.  For a business model to be sustainable over the long haul, a race to the top is in order.  What is best for everyone?  What is the best way to create value along the value chain, in an ethical way?  These are the questions every business should ask and the only way to operate responsibly and healthily. 

Disgraced investor Bernie Madoff, serving a life sentence for defrauding clients out of millions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme said “The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is 'the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you'”.  I couldn’t disagree with Mr. Madoff’s win-lose dichotomy more.  How about, as Stephen Covey, in his classic business book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” we think in terms of win-win instead.  When value, real value that is, is created, all parties are the better for it. 

*If you missed last week's post / essay in a new series entitled "Healthy Work"check it out first:
http://www.scottgodwin.net/blog/healthy-work

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
-Albert Einsten

Men and women work for many different reasons because individuals have different desires and goals.  Some men, like Donald Trump or Barrack Obama, work to become powerful because they enjoy the intoxication or because they feel a duty to steer the group into a direction they see as best.  Some people work simply to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their head.   Others work to travel, so that they may make enough money to have adventurous lives.  We cannot say to any significant extent what exactly people should work for, because individual people value economic goods differently. 

Some value free time above all so they work only enough time to acquire the basic means of survival, so that they may use their life in leisure or hobbies.  Others may have a goal to acquire $10,000,000 in their lifetime.  It is not up to us as rational and moral citizens to judge whether why someone works or what they work for is “right / good” or “wrong / bad”.  Value judgements about how much, how hard, and how long someone works are truly subjective, because every man is different in how he values the fruits of his labor, in his views about his own life and its purpose, and in how he views the world around him. 

That being said, as we covered in the last essay, we can and in actuality we must say that to work is good, or right, and that to not work is wrong, when not working produces a drain on others.  Otherwise, work would have no real meaning, emotionally, morally, spiritually, or intellectually.  The purpose of all work, work which in and of itself is noble and leads to societal flourishing, work done for various reasons, is to create value for business owners, entrepreneurs, capitalists, and workers, and to fulfill the human needs and desires of each, no matter how different they might be. 

In some parts of the world, rural India or Mexico for example, workers work to create value so that they might have enough money to buy groceries or to pay a utility bill.  On the far other side of the spectrum, highly educated young professional Manhattanites might be working to create value in order that they can make enough money to retire at 40, and use their stored financial value to move to a small bucolic town or to travel the world.  In both cases, the worker works to create value in the marketplace in order to fulfill his or her desires.  Capitalists, savers, and entrepreneurs are driven to do the same thing.  In the case of the capitalist, he or she is driven to create financial value through lending and earned interest and in the case of the entrepreneur she is driven to invent something of value so that she might acquire value through money or other goods.   The saver has an excess of value and stores it, usually in the form of gold or money, and hopes to use it more efficiently at a later date. 

By this token, since the purpose of work is to create value, work which is not valuable has no rational purpose or meaning and should not be done, unless one wants to act irrationally (which people do).  To do meaningless work which creates no value is irrational and frankly a waste of time.  Even worse than wasting time, work which is destroying net value or is illegal is futile and destructive to all parties involved.  It would be better for a man to find a different path.  If a man partakes in an effort to steal or destroy, he is actually taking value away both from himself on a moral and spiritual level and from society on an economic basis.  Work should be always be done to create value, not take value away.  Work that does not create value is at its best futile and meaningless and at its worst, destructive. 

Additionally, not all work creates value in monetary form.  Many examples are evident: the soldier, the missionary, the volunteer, the artist, the parent, or the family member or friend.   In these instances work creates value in the form of friendships, love, security, moral or aesthetic beauty, or for simple self-fulfillment or a sense of duty or calling to a higher purpose.  Still, the work is done to create value, just not always monetary value. 

In 2008, the US economy went through a period of crisis.  Interest rates had been low for so long that an inevitable bubble arose in the housing and stock market.   Equal opportunity government lending schemes, lack of financial regulation, consumer irresponsibility, risky loan packages, and unethical repackaging of mortgage-backed security derivatives each played a part in the 2008 crash as well.  Many economists believe this crisis to have been the worse since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  1000s of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, and their investments savings.   Since 2008, the economy has recovered, albeit tenuously, as governments across the globe have stepped in to provide liquidity and stimulate the economy. 

Somewhere in the debate about what should have been done and what can be done now to prevent or manage another crisis, many seem to have lost sight of the fact that the only rational, reasonable, or noble goal of a business or even of work itself, is to create value.  Many of the actors involved in the 2008 financial debacle were destroying value by knowingly taking worthless financial products, repackaging them, and selling them to unwitting buyers.  These bad actors, criminals in many cases, were engaging in the destruction of value by unethically selling inflated derivatives at too high of market price.  In the car business they have a law to prevent this, which they call the “Lemon Law”.  Investors who bought mortgage backed securities bought “lemons”, and all of us suffered a loss of value as a result.  As far as I know, no one has been put in jail for any of this, but they should have been. 

At its best, business is simple.  Valuable goods or services are created and customers and/or clients pay for these goods and services and quality of life goes up for all parties.  Entrepreneurs create, workers build and serve, savers save, and financiers support the value creation process and we as consumers and citizens are the better for it.  Healthy work is work that creates value, both for the worker, the organization or business, and for the community at large.   
 
 Read Next: The 12 Commandments of Fitness

We as Americans, if we are the type who work, will spend much of our lives working.  Sometimes we work so much we don't stop to think about why we work and what our work means.  Work really is a way of life.  Rest is important too but our work is an important representation of who we are.  It doesn't matter what type of work we do, how much money we make, or if we even make any money at all.  If we view our lives as important, then our work will be important.  Whether it's mental, physical, or both how we approach our work will have a huge impact on how healthy we are.

Based on the enthusiastic feedback I got in regards to my new book, Movement & Meaning, and the sections in it which emphasized the importance of work, I've decided to write some long-form essays on the topic of Healthy Work.  Look at these as first and foremost as a defense of the nobility of work, from the simplest of tasks to the most complex engineering.  This series of essays is coming along at the right time. I just read that the American Middle Class is now a quickly shrinking minority.  In other words, it is getting harder and harder as workers in America so it's good to take a step back and look at work.

  “What Ranks Above All Else For Economic and Political Reconstruction Is a Radical Change of Ideologies.  Economic Prosperity Is Not So Much A Material Problem; It Is, First Of All, an Intellectual, Spiritual, and Moral Problem.”                
-Ludwig Von Mises

The preceding figure is a mythical Ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail.    A dilemma we face in the modern world is that of a value-less society.  A society which values nothing could eventually destroy itself like the Ouroboros because it will have no legs to stand on, no basis in reality, no meaning, and will have nothing to declare or to defend or fight for as “good” or “bad”.   Rational thought, grounded in reality and morality, require judgement and discriminate thought, or in other words to say something is good or bad we must first say that good and bad exist.  Equality and tolerance are indeed important, as part of a larger framework of values, but when it comes to work we must be willing to say that work is without a doubt good, in its own right. 

As common sense as it sounds to say that “work is good”, if a modern liberal society values only equality and tolerance then we must tolerate non-work, or slothfulness, as an equal “good.” So in other words we must move beyond equality and tolerance to a more inclusive and comprehensive view of what constitutes a “good” society in order to truly value work.  We must ensure equal protection and opportunity, but not outcomes.  We must tolerate behaviors and people we find difficult to deal with, or disagreeable to our tastes or our own morality, so long as they aren’t illegal and they don’t endanger our community.

If, on the other hand, equality and tolerance are all we have, then to say this is “good” or this is “bad” we will always be violating our values and not be able to say that work is good or bad one way or the other.  For to tolerate everything is to endorse anarchy, and to ensure equal outcome is to render life meaningless- and so Ouroboros swallows its tail, and at the end of the Super Bowl no one wins.  All the same, when we say “men should work”, or “it’s good to work” we are making a moral judgement which bumps up against the neo-liberal ideology of non-judgemental thinking and its core values of equality and tolerance.  Because if we say “men should work” we are saying that men who don’t work or won’t work and who are a drain on society should not be treated as equals to working men, nor should willfully slothful behavior be tolerated in any significant degree.  We must, in other words, treat working people and slothful people as unequal and existing on differing planes of moral existence.

In order for work in and of itself to be deemed good and meaningful, we must rationally judge sloth or perpetual inaction to be bad, or unhealthy.  Without bad, there is no such thing as good, and vice versa.  In order to judge or to discriminately choose between two or more options, we must think and be rational.   We must make a choice about what is good.  We must decide how to act, think, and judge in our own best interests but also in the best interests of the community and world in which we live.  When it comes to work, we must ask, what is best in life?  President Bill Clinton once said “Work is the meaning of what this country is all about. We need it as individuals. We need to sense it in our fellow citizens, and we need it as a society and as a people.”

When I ponder work and what it means I think about many things. I think about the essence of man’s existence, the purpose of man’s life, and what is abhorrent, repulsive, and noble.  I think of the satisfaction of being mentally and physically tired at the end of a work day.  I consider the satisfaction of looking in the mirror and saying to myself: “I did the best I could. My work is done, for today.”  I consider the guilt I feel when I know I could have done better. Most of all, when I think of work, I think of values.

When I was growing up, I was taught ancient wisdom by my family and mentors and how to apply it to my life.  Immature, and morally and spiritually disillusioned by my 6 years of scientific graduate study and my grasp of the rational world, at times I discarded the wisdom of the past and pursued the methods of science, and frankly hedonism in some instances.  Erroneously coming to view a spiritual and moral existence and rational scientific thought as mutually exclusive, my life became somewhat of a meaningless abstraction.  By my embrace of unimpeded rationalization, life started to lose form because the way I saw it either everything in life mattered or nothing at all did.  For a while, nothing did. 

I forgot to some extent the inherent wisdom, beauty, and rejuvenating power of what I would now call core human virtues and values like loyalty, respect, service, self-restraint, courage, discipline, compassion, bravery, and honesty among others.  Without these there is nothing- no meaning, no joy, no goodness, only self - destruction.   Many others in the post-Darwinian Age have probably experienced similar self-destructive urges.  After a long struggle, I decided my life did mean something, all of it, and that my work did as well.

As changing as the world may be, it is built upon something.  In order for anything to become, it must first be.  Values are built upon revealed truths of the past about what is best in life or good.  Some things in this world truly are better than others.  Values allowed civilization to be built and sustained and they will always be important.  Values created man and allowed him to evolve and become more self-aware.  Men made valuable alliances, they were loyal and cooperated and so they survived. 

Some political agendas portray capitalism as bad, and it most certainly has a downside when corrupted.  Capitalism and the technologies of finance aside though, trade is itself one of the single greatest forces for peace, stability, survival, and progress the world has ever known.  Work, craft, and specialization are defining characteristics of man.  Men worked, cooperated, traded, progressed, and they survived.  CS Lewis, in his “Abolition of Man” writes of a future time when men may no longer be men at all- men without chests he calls them.  Like the branches of a tree attacking the roots, man as we know him may not survive if he gets too far from the roots of his existence, if he forgets the lessons learned from the past about what is good.  Without values, man might destroy himself. 

Work, if it is to be a healthy endeavor, requires us to make judgements.  We must say that work is good. We must say that man was made to work, trade, and cooperate.  Whether the community banker, the forklift driver, the math teacher, the plumber, the IT Specialist, or the office janitor we must recognize the inherent moral goodness of all work.  We must also say that a lazy man who does not work is not a good man.  It sounds harsh, but if work is truly a noble way, then laziness and sloth, and a non-working draining economic resources from others, without contributing at all, must be by definition ignoble.  For work to be healthy, it must be meaningful, and meaning comes from values.  The worker should be proud of his work and his chosen way of life.

Work is a way of life.  Work is good.  It is a way of being, a rational, intellectual, spiritual, and moral choice, and a way of seeing the world and our place in it.  We choose to work and create value, or we choose not to. 

"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark raving mad.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Read Next: Sparta vs. Babylon

I had an incident happen to me which changed me forever which I think relates somewhat to some of the tragedies we’ve been witnessing lately in America.  Maybe improved gun control, fewer violent games or movies, or fewer drugs could prevent some of these horrors, but to say there isn’t more going on is irrational and dishonest because America has always had guns, but America used to not be as pointlessly violent and cruel, in regards to inner city killings and mass shootings.  This is a fact: something deeper is going on.  A wind is blowing through our culture. What has changed?

I was lucky enough to travel to Russia in 2013.  Having grown up during the latter stages of the “Cold War” between communist Russia and my own country, this was an adventurous dream come true.  In Moscow, I visited a royal estate on the outskirts of the city with my tour guide, a young woman from the Moscow Rotary Club.  As we toured this grand estate, now run by the Russian government, we decided to visit the church which is onsite there, and which the royal family used for services and special events. 

Having been raised Baptist, I had never been in an Orthodox church, to my memory, particularly one involved in a service.  My guide, Irina, placed a cover on her head and we entered the church.  It was a “Saint’s Day” and so we were among a crowd of people paying homage and respect to icons of the saints long gone.  As we respectfully wandered around the incense-filled church that day, we encountered an orthodox priest dressed in black.  Suddenly, in Russian, the bearded priest asked me to take my hands out of my pockets! I was shocked.  It was cold and I was unaware I had my hands in my pockets but I did what I was told, out of respect.  Though I obeyed, my initial automatic reaction, the first few seconds anyway were me thinking to myself “he can’t tell me what to do.”

After we left, I asked Irina why the priest had asked me to remove my hands from my pockets, and she said that the church was a holy and sacred place and the required gesture was a sign of respect.  So was her putting on the veil. This was an experience which has haunted my memory ever since.  First of all, I am making no argument here for orthodox religion, though I have recently been drawn closer to the faith through an Anglican church.   To the contrary, my hopeful argument is much simpler.  In our denial of any sort of sacred meaning to life, we are coming unhinged.  We are a snake swallowing its own tail.   The ring, from The Lord of the Rings, is consuming us and we are destroying ourselves.  We the branches are killing the roots of the tree by which we live.  Not just with shootings and violence, but with irrational and unreasonable thought, with narcissism, and with a lack of respect for one another or for authority.

Entering into any place regarded as sacred is not something that happens in America.  As a matter of fact, nothing in America is sacred at all.  Football teams who bow even in a moment of silence are often treated with hostility by the angry offended minority- the cult of the self.  Disregard religion in any organized form completely and consider that simple fact.  Other than the boundless individual ego, the unencumbered and unlimited individual, unrestrained by God, gods, or even concepts, ideas, or memories of God or gods, nothing remains other than man and the culture in a cycle of self-destruction.

It struck me that this experience in Russia had bigger meaning.  If our lives mean something, anything at all, then our lives are sacred as whole.  And if our lives are sacred then our experiences are sacred, no matter how trivial, in that they have some sort of significance.   Either my life matters or it doesn’t.  I needed then to decide and I need now to decide:  Either everything I do matters or nothing does.  Is anything at all sacred?  We cannot logically say that our existence matters and then say the things we do don’t matter.  We must say that our lives are sacred, in that they matter. Or else. 

Increasingly, all we have left in America are shopping malls, stores, bars, and sporting events- consumer related events.  The places we go, the places we learn, the places we sleep, and the relationships we have are all defined for the most part by nothing other than our existence as consumers.  Nothing is sacred in a timeless sense.  Nothing matters.  When people latch on to a radical version of religion and kill people we should not feel surprised.  They feel as though they are god.  Listen to commercials and this is the mindset: man as god, the individuals feelings are all that matter. 

When a person becomes god, in his own mind, he can do whatever he wants.  When people feel they can take human body parts and sell them for “scientific progress”, we should not be surprised.  Then should we be surprised when people trample one another to death on “Black Friday” to buy a stupid TV? The human being is capable of horror.  When people abuse one another, we should not be surprised.  Nothing matters anyway and our lives are all a dream, we are gods, or figments of our own imagination, and gods can do whatever they want.

This experience in Russia changed me.  Symbols matter.  Behavior matters.  Words matter. Actions matter.  Life matters.  This experience of “the sacred” made me realize how nonchalantly I view my own life at times, and my own decisions.  We must never forget that the greatest mass murders in history, murderers of 100s of millions of people, took place within communist regimes who viewed human life as meaningless and who hated the very idea of God.  We must never forget either that all people, every single one of us, is capable of evil and capable of wrong.  Religion, just like government, is run by people, and people are capable of anything.

My argument is simply that life is sacred.  We need to return the experience of the sacred in our mundane and routine daily lives.  I am not a theologian, but I have experienced many things.  I’ve dined with Muslims in my own house, I’ve worshipped with Roman Catholics, drank beer with Aborigines, clapped along with Pentecostals, visited nursing homes as a boy scout, dated doubters, and played sports with agnostics and atheists and I can tell you this for sure: we as individuals are not God.  I know that for sure.  We need to bring back the irreplaceable cultural value that life has meaning outside of our self. 

From my own experience, I can without a doubt say that God can heal the human spirit.  I’ve felt it happen and I’ve seen it happen in the lives of others- in the lives of inmates, CEOs, parents, abuse victims, and washed out alcoholics.  But first we have to say that we are not god, and that life matters.  America has denied that life has meaning, that there is eternal virtue, that anything at all is sacred, that we can know anything at all to be true, and now is the time to put a stop to this madness.