Inner and Outer Life

How Do You Tell If a System is Sick?

How do you tell if an organisation is sick?

It treats the people who delivers the service solely as a means as to an end.

It fails to notice that those who give care, also needs to be part of a community of care.

It dispenses wellbeing gift wrapped and surrounded with the rah-rah cheerleading of “Self-Care,” and not address the need for communal caring.

Ultimately, the greatest violation is the violation of the dignity of the human spirit.

An organisation that is sick is not able to heal those they seek to heal. Rather, they perpetuate a disease.

An organisation that is designed to help others needs to make sure that people who are in the caring profession are cared for.

The moment we push for more, as if we are productive bots, we engage in a form of violence.

Here’s Thomas Merton talking about this exact issue more than 50 years ago.

 

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

~Thomas Merton

 

1 Comment

  1. Vicky Kwan

    Please share more about “communal care” and how that looks like in organizations. Thanks!

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