Next level

Kennemer Dunes, today. Focus on the task [ meditation ] 

Min/max temperature: 4°C/7°C; humidity: 99%; precipitation: 1 mm; sea level pressure: 997 hPa; wind West 15.9 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds: Few 335 m., Scattered Clouds 762 m., Mostly Cloudy 1188 m

"Perhaps the most powerful revolutions are the ones that deny they ever happened. They install a new approach and erase an earlier practice so successfully that we look at the world trough the structures they leave behind. The reinvention of money in early modern England was such an event. […] At first glance, money seems an odd place for a revolution. According to much of modern thought, money is an instrument, an empty signifier, a function. In economic terminology, it is a unit of account, a mode of payment, and a medium of exchange, more interesting for what it does than for what it is. [...]  That, in fact, is part of the revolution's vanishing act. […] Making an entity that can answer demands at once so intimate and so impersonal, so material and so artificial -- making money -- is a governance project, one of the most penetrating that societies undertake." […] "I heard a wise man compare the hammers of the Mint in the state unto the pulses of a natural body, […] For as these beat strongly, it argues health, but if faintly, weakness in the body is natural." From the medieval trough the early modern period, metaphors casting money as blood or another bodily fluid were common in Europe (it was early days, after all, in the science of the body and notions varied about exactly how blood, humors, or other flows worked) " [ Money ]… is to the body politic what blood is to the human body," the French Estates General noted in a 1484 communication to King Charles VIII […] At the end of the century, a critic of the bank of England used the traditional understanding to sound an alarm. "A wise state […] should constantly discourage a monopoly of cash and credit, they being to trade what the blood and spirits are to the body, which then thrives best, when every part receives its proportion, and there is a free unrestrained circulation throughout the whole…" The money as blood metaphor, "virtually a stock-in-trade for five hundred years," lingered trough the 18th century. " [It ] has seldom been used since." A new metaphor has replaced the old one. Money, wrote David Hume in 1752, would remain proportionate to the art and industry of a nation just as "water", wherever it communicates, remains always at a level. […] "Ask naturalists the reason; they tell you, were it to be raised in any place, the superior gravity of that part not being balanced, must depress it, till it meets a counterpoise." [ Capitalism ] constructed a money tuned by individual exchange for profit, institutionalising that motive as the heart of productivity. [ It ] identified that money as neutral, locating all value and judgements about value in the "real economy" it facilitated. […] There is no romantic baseline to the coming of capitalism. [ Looking ] at the history of money does suggest that the market is a matter of constitutional design, a political and legal creation. It is a governance project all the way down, starting with its money. That enterprise, rather than the space outside it, makes the economy real."

Christine Desan in  'Making Money', page 1, 422, 423, 424, 434, first published in 2014 by Oxford University Press, United KIngdom

"I hear stories about directors who scream at actors, or they trick them somehow to get a performance. And there are some people who try to run the whole business on fear. [ This ] is such a joke -- it's pathetic and stupid at the same time. When people are in fear, they don't want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people become angry at their boss and their work. If I ran my set with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And there would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It's supposed to be great living; it's supposed to be fantastic. Instead of instilling fear, if a company offered a way for everyone in the business to dive within -- to start expanding energy and intelligence -- people would work overtime for free. They would be far more creative. And the company would just leap forward. This is the way it can be. It's not the way it is, but it could be that way so easily."

David Lynch in 'Catching the Big Fish, meditation, consciousness, and creativity', page 73, 74, first published in 2006 by Bobkind, Inc., USA

"Imagine being completely free of internal restraints and doing whatever you please. Imagine a mental state that entails no conscience. Imagine having no feelings of remorse or guilt, whatever unpleasant things you may be doing. Imagine caring only for number one, and having absolutely no concern for the well-being of others. Imagine responsibility being an empty term, having no conceptual meaning. Imagine giving no second thought to the shameful, harmful, or immoral actions you have taken. Wouldn't such an emotional deficit be a great blessing? Wouldn't life be much simpler and more pleasurable without inhibitions? A conscience is a nuisance; empathy a drag. Without the usual pangs of shame and guilt, you would be able to do anything. Nothing would hold you back. We tend to assume that a conscience is a universal human feature, which makes it hard (for most of us) to imagine that there are people with this kind of personality makeup. […] We don't recognise them. The presence or absence of conscience creates a deep divide between people. For the purpose of maintaining our own sanity, we had better accept that a small portion of the population has a psychological makeup and mindset very different from the rest of us. […] They assume a kind of stealth position within organisation and society […] Their lack of conscience means that the usual tools for societal control don't work and are irrelevant to them. […] These people can bring havoc to the lives of others and are often described as psychopaths. […] But only a small subset of psychopaths becomes the violent criminals so often fictionalised in films and novels. […] Not all psychopaths are destined for prison; some may even be in top executive positions. […] The power games that typify organisational life come naturally to them. […] They know how to blend in and conceal their difference in order to manipulate others more effectively. […] These people are unable to experience "normal" feelings of shame, guilt or remorse. And although their stealth behaviour makes them hard to recognise, there are plenty of them out there. According to Robert Hare, a major specialist in psychopathy, approximately one percent of the population falls within the psychopath category -- and a much larger number can be found in executive positions. Estimates vary, but approximately 3.9 percent of corporate professionals can be described as having psychopathic tendencies, a figure considerably higher than is found in the general population. [ Many ] people working in organisations have a fair chance of experiencing a pathological boss."

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries in 'Mindful Leadership Coaching, Journeys into the interior', page 107, 108, 109, first published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan, USA