Why We Need to Build Organizations Governed by Love, Not Fear

The Kinds of Organizations the 21st Century (Really) Needs

In this essay, I’m going to advance a single, simple, strange idea. One of our great challenges today — perhaps the greatest one of all — is building organizations governed and ruled by love, not fear.

Roll your eyes if you have to. Get it out of your system. We live in a cynical, ironic age. And yet, I’m not happy with the way the world is going. Are you? I don’t want to settle for being a smirking Lena Dunham. Do you? And so while my principle might seem hopelessly romantic, childishly naive even, indulge me for a moment. And then you can judge whether it carries any water.

You will probably agree, if only reluctantly, that America has become something like a society impelled by fear. Consider the life of the average American. He looks desperately for work — out of fear of falling into a life of impoverishment. He finds a job — and stays in it, our of fear again. His relationships, too, are coloured by fear — everywhere, he is told he is not rich or pretty or strong or tough enough. He turns against his neighbors, denying them healthcare, education, media, finance — because he is afraid of them, too. Every aspect of his life is competitive, brutal, relentless, and remorseless — because it is governed by fear. Phantasmagoric and paranoid fears have evolved —”the Rapture’s coming!” “get your go bag ready!” — which are caricatures of very real and deep fears.

Fear. Only the strong survive. But what is it like to live in such a society? Here is the crucial point: if we are governed and ruled by fear, we will never realize ourselves. After all, to realize ourselves means to cultivate our highest, noblest, and truest qualities — whether compassion, creativity, curiousity, truth, beauty — but fear only ever fuels our rage, self-pity, vengeance, unhappiness, envy, and blindness. And fear is insatiable, too — so, just as in America, resentment boils over into fury, and envy ignites into spite.

Ah, but without those higher qualities, an organizations can’t solve big, real, or urgent problems, can it? And so progress itself cannot really happen in systems governed by fear — that is the story of the dark ages, of Soviet Russia, of…