Agreements Based in Deficits

What happens when you lop off or collapse human beingness?  How does that influence the experience that person has?  The experience others have with that person?

Much of what we know about how people work comes from studying deficits, from studying the behavior of people who are missing something.  What happens when people, either by birth or through an accident, are missing specific parts of their brain?  How do they behave different than “normal” people, people who still have that part of the brain?  Researchers discovered that those people with the deficit could not feel certain things, or smell, or count.  Dr. Oliver Sacks has written some very approachable books on research in this area.  In essence, this huge body of research shows that people lacking something that most people have behave different than most people.

This deficit-based approach leads me to ask, what would happen to a human being that was closed off from their relationship to others?  To their own self?  To the group?  To nature? To spirit?  To the vibrant essence of being human?  Then I add on to this thought the experience of the agreements embedded in human interactions.  In many human interactions, we accept that it is okay to be closed off from these primary relationships.  In essence, we agree to having our human beingness lopped off, collapsed.  We agree to operate from a human beingness deficit.  Why?  Why would we ever want people we engage with daily to operate from a beingness deficit?  To operate from a state of being much less than they normally are?

Lots of recent research shows that this is quite normal in the workplace.  While some disagree with the high degree suggested in these findings, none disagree that it exists.  I suggest that this is a choice, a choice that most of us are unaware of, but a choice nonetheless.  Ecosynomics shows how to see the choice and choose a different agreement.

I would love to hear what you think.  Why do we lop off human beingness in our interactions?  What can do to engage the full human beingness sitting right in front of us?  Please share what you think here.

3 thoughts on “Agreements Based in Deficits

  1. In my opinion a crucial reason for lopping off human beingness in interactions is the lack of consciousness and trust that abundance can be our daily life experience.

    Scarcity is yet a predominant agreement in life and society. In line with a self-fulfilling prophecy, this agreement results in scarce conditions which are seemingly proving every day that scarcity is the only reality. Many people do not question this perceived reality and if there is actually a choice. In other words, they are not aware that they are closing off human beingness and the potential of abundance. Here I often hear the sentence “That’s just the way it is, isn’t it?”.

    I also encountered people who stood up to change this scarce condition, because they trusted in the possibility of more human beingness. Many of them lost their trust after feeling or being frustrated, exploited or burned out. Ironically, they concluded after these experiences that living in and adjusting to a scarce world is healthier than sticking to an evidentially not realistic belief. Here I often hear the sentence “This is a great perspective but just a pie in the sky”.

    Almost everybody experiences more or less abundant situations in life. In both above described cases, these situations are rather interpreted as lucky moments where life is generous – the exception proves the rule of scarcity. They are not being seen as a proof that abundance can be our daily life experience and that we have the choice to bring it to our reality.

    I think that one first step on the way to engage the full human beingness is to increase the consciousness that exactly this is even possible as well as to give inspiration that it’s worth trusting and investing (again) in it.


  2. Pingback: The Disengaged Paradox « Jim Ritchie-Dunham

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