Three of the main mistakes made by entrepreneurs in times of economic crises consist of cutting market studies, advertising and contributions to business chambers. These errors are serious because they violate the relations of companies with other actors in their community. The first two, distance us from the business key: the client. And the third, distance us from the cameras, our source of cooperation to be able to have power or influence to negotiate with the most convenient political government. In any field, by violating our relationships, we violate our meaning, which is the key to our existence as people, groups or societies.
By weakening our guilds or associations, we avoid our source of influence and power. The power of any sector (business, labor, professional, civil society, etc.) comes from the agreement between those who have the same interests and aspire to have the same rights and freedoms. Power, freedoms and rights do not exist, come from social conventions.
Although the above sounds shocking to those who believe that we have liberties and inalienable rights and, therefore, power, let’s see it as follows to convince ours Let’s find! These values only exist because we agreed to define them, make them legal and defend them. If that agreement weakens, there will be no strength to make them respect, and this is what happens when businessmen stop supporting our cameras. The same happens when workers stop supporting their unions, and so on in all areas of that body that we call pluralistic democratic society.
We fall into the error of stop supporting the plural entities that represent and underpin our freedoms and rights because we confuse freedoms, rights and the source of value of the individual with individualism. Individualism makes us believe that we have freedoms, rights and influence and power individually and immovable and that we can defend ourselves individually. This is false.
The error of individualism comes not to know the origin of the individual as value. It was Jesus Christ who invented the value of the individual as a human person. Before people were not such. They were dentated wheels within two gears such as field pawns, cannon meat for war or served to build pyramids, etc.; regardless of how many sacrifices or dead cause those tasks. Not even for the Greeks of antiquity the value of the individual was widespread. For them, slaves were things. It was Jesus Christ who said that every person was worth himself, for being a Son and Image of God.
But Jesus Christ never confused individual with individualism. Everything contained, for Jesus Christ, the individual is done as a person through the meaning that his contribution to the community gives. While individualism is an exaggeration of the individual’s value, without reference to their community. This is seen, for example, in René Descartes, when he said “I think, then I exist.” This idea, still so applauded, and that gave rise to liberal currents that confuse freedom and rights with a adjacent individualism with “save who can”, it cannot be more disorienting because it leads to believe that the value or meaning of the individual exists per se. Hence, the question we have always asked ourselves, from Descartes, Who am I?we need to change it for Who do I serve for? This is the question that emerges from the value of the individual that Jesus Christ placed in the Christian charity and Buddha in the compassion. In modern psychology, we can locate the response in the associative bias of emotional intelligence and in which we derive our identity and source of satisfaction of the realization of our vocation or mission, that which leads us to create or do something with a holiday for the own good and of the community. It is the community that serves as a reference or mirror to appreciate us. The meaning or meaning of life, according to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, is found through projecting social values, in particular of giving, receiving and learning from limit situations. So, the definition of who we are is not given by what we are as monads, but as dyads, so others recognize as our contribution and for what each one sees that others appreciate our actions: The self does not exist without the us, and we do not exist without the self. This is not a tongue twenty, but a way of saying that freedom and rights exist, but only to the extent that we choose, by our own will, to add our interests to those of others that have similar or complementary interests. This is the essence of pluralistic democracy. And that implies three fundamental things to understand it: one, that we need to associate with others to implement and defend our freedoms, rights and values. Two, which implies giving part of our individual interests. Three, which, when we associate, do it because we contribute to others and others contribute to us.
The only way to be free, different and, at the same time, one, and not fall into anarchy or collectivism (forced “collaboration”), is the personal decision to cooperate with others that have similar or complementary interests. Therefore, without guilds or associations of the different social groups, based on rules of the game and shared efforts, there is no paradise!; We are nor anyone, because both individuals and groups exist and have value to the extent that they exist as referents of each other, as two poles of a dyad; Not separately.
@joseagilyepes
