A question has come into focus in the past few days, because two people who provide me with a moral compass I value, have both said they are suspicious of the motivations of someone who is republishing my books.
It’s true that he recently kept trying to convince me to expand my investment, even after I had declined several times. It’s true that this began to feel like a salesman trying to make a sale. But we have worked together for months and I trust him to continue carrying out the work we have been doing together.
That seemed to have been the right attitude for me to have taken. Now it’s a new day and he must have gotten something out of his system because I believe he is still in my corner and that he is still working on my behalf as before.
This situation helped me to come to an understanding. We live in an ambiguous society in which many people are driven by a search for a commission or for competitive advantage within a system where employers deliberately make their employee’s remuneration dependent on having to scramble to sell their products.
What came into focus for me is that we are more likely to feel suspicious of others when we feel helpless. That sense of helplessness is often warranted in this society, where our ability to live in harmony with the earth and the network of fellow creatures with whom we share it, is getting run over by the momentum of an economy that we cannot control.
But very few people are just one thing or driven by just one impulse. That kind of dedication to one path apparently does exist in some people and may be what allows morally empty individuals to rise to the top of economic and political structures, which they then harness to serve the goals that haunt them.
The vast majority of people with whom we share this world are not driven by just one impulse. The vast majority of us are animated by many kinds of interests. I’ve yet to meet anyone in my daily life who doesn’t like to do a good job in whatever task they have undertaken; and who doesn’t enjoy working together with others to achieve outcomes they couldn’t accomplish on their own, whenever life makes that possible.
Trust is a good place to meet people, even when it seems they are being occupied, temporarily, by an impulse in which our shared interests may have moved out of focus.
At such times we can take a few beats, while declining an offer being repeatedly made, until a more balanced equilibrium allows both parties to settle back into their mutually beneficial collaboration.