Look after number one; no one else will. We have been taught this.
If you don't use other people, they will use you. We experience this.
Our companies send us on team building, but when the chips are down the gloves are off. Our 'teams' are sent on facilitated visioning days, but most of us only want the team to succeed if it helps me. Our employers talk big about personal enrichment, but the bottom line is whether it makes the CEO and shareholders richer.
In such a world the jungle-law holds. It is survival of the fittest, and the fittest often turn out to be the ones who live by the three rules we started with. In other words, look nice, but play nasty.
Many spiritual paths claim to give us the edge in this deadly game. Inner power to mould life to my advantage. What does John say?
"Those who love other people live in the light ... those who hate other people are in the darkness and walk around in the darkness; they do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them."
That is a rather different take on it. Can I choose a spiritual path which might make me genuinely put others first?
Well, Darwinian thinking has its downfalls - as Bernie Madoff and the American banking catastrophe have proven. It seems that only when we operate collaboratively that we achieve any real or lasting success. I recall how the truth and reconciliation commission saved South Africa from disaster. Everyone was poised for fight, and into the jaws of the controversy strode the likes of Desmond Tutu. But it always seems to take effort to act collaboratively, as if some unseen hand resists us.
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