The Great Divide - The Power of Balance

The Power of Balance: Episode Summary - "The Great Divide"

Host: Stephen Barden
Release Date: May 5, 2023
Podcast Description:
Stephen Barden challenges the prevalent myth that successful leaders are inherently aggressive and combative. Drawing from his book “How Successful Leaders Do Business With Their World” and insightful conversations with top leaders, Barden posits that true leadership lies in maintaining a balanced power relationship with the world, fostering partnerships rather than dominance.

1. Introduction to Resilience and Leadership

Timestamp: 00:07 - 04:30

Stephen Barden opens the episode by discussing his hiatus from the podcast and his return to a topic deeply resonant with him: resilience and perseverance. He connects these qualities to effective leadership, emphasizing the importance of loving what one is resilient about to sustain long-term commitment and success.

2. The Intersection of Religion and the Will to Power

Timestamp: 04:31 - 15:45

Barden delves into the confluence of major religious celebrations in the Northern hemisphere during spring, pondering the common core values shared among diverse faiths. He references an article by David French from the New York Times, which argues that Easter fundamentally challenges the Christian "will to power." According to French, Jesus's rejection of material power was misunderstood by his followers, leading to his crucifixion and the rise of figures like Barabbas—symbolizing the human desire for confrontational power.

Notable Quote:
"What is it that drives the will to power? What makes the exercise of power against or over such a crucial part of human existence?" (05:50)

3. The Root of Division: Ego and Perceived Threats

Timestamp: 15:46 - 30:00

Barden explores the concept of division beyond mere differences, attributing it to underlying assumptions that other religions, races, or genders pose threats. He posits that the ego—a central theme in many religious and philosophical teachings—is a primary driver of this division. The ego, as an instrument for navigating the world, becomes problematic when mistaken for one's true self, leading to defensiveness and hostility toward perceived threats.

Notable Quote:
"If I hold on to that which identifies me as a standalone, separate entity, then I will inevitably find myself defending myself and my avatar ego against other entities who are also hell bent on preserving their individuality." (22:15)

4. The Illusion of Separate Identity and Its Consequences

Timestamp: 30:01 - 45:30

Barden critiques the construction of a separate identity through the ego, arguing that it fosters a worldview where others are seen as enemies or competitors. This perspective not only perpetuates conflict but also distorts the understanding of divinity, portraying God as a supreme ego with human-like agendas. Such misconceptions lead to wars and divisions rooted in the defense of one's ego and the suppression of others.

Notable Quote:
"We have built ourselves a world under siege in defense of the ego. Defense of the illusion that we are separate from universal being and that this separateness needs to be preserved and protected at all costs." (34:50)

5. Reconceptualizing the Ego as an Instrument

Timestamp: 45:31 - 60:00

Transitioning to solutions, Barden suggests redefining the ego as a tool rather than the self. He draws an analogy to avatars in the metaverse—distinct and adaptable based on context, yet not the essence of the individual. By viewing the ego as an instrument for connection and understanding, individuals can move away from using it as a means of division and instead leverage it to foster collaboration and mutual respect.

Notable Quote:
"Once you've recognized that the ego is an instrument of connection, with its focus interdependent on the context within which it operates, you begin to recognize that you don't have to cling to it." (52:10)

6. Integrating Scientific Perspectives on the Ego

Timestamp: 60:01 - 75:00

Barden references neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's work to support his argument. Damasio's exploration of the evolution of consciousness highlights how the ego serves as a mediator between an organism and its environment. By understanding the ego's role in both external interactions and internal processing, Barden emphasizes the importance of using the ego thoughtfully to enhance connections rather than impede them.

Notable Quote:
"The ego is akin to that avatar you give yourself in the metaverse. Its purpose is so that you can connect both with the metaverse as a whole and the other avatars within it." (63:45)

7. The Path Forward: Power With Instead of Power Over

Timestamp: 75:01 - End

Concluding the episode, Barden reinforces the theme of balanced power relationships. He advocates for "power with"—collaborative and partnership-based leadership—as opposed to "power over," which is rooted in dominance and control. By continuously questioning how one uses the ego and striving to connect rather than divide, leaders can cultivate environments where collective growth and understanding prevail.

Notable Quote:
"We may be able to manage ourselves not by coercion or manipulation, but by the simple question: Am I using the ego to divide, to exclude, or am I using this instrument to connect, to discover and to learn?" (73:20)

Conclusion

In "The Great Divide," Stephen Barden presents a compelling argument against the conventional notion of aggressive leadership driven by the will to power. By dissecting the role of the ego and advocating for its mindful use as a tool for connection, Barden offers a pathway to more balanced and effective leadership. This episode serves as a thought-provoking exploration of how overcoming internal divisions can lead to healthier relationships and more harmonious interactions in both personal and professional spheres.

Connect with Stephen Barden:
If you’re inspired by this discussion and wish to engage in non-divisive conversations, Stephen Barden invites you to reach out and continue the dialogue.

Transcript

Stephen Barden (0:07)

Hello, I'm Stephen Barden, back casting the POD after a very long time. Actually around two years. I'm not sure why the long gap, but I suspect it was something about finding a topic that really touched my heart. Resilience and perseverance I found in my old ages and admirable quality, but loving what you're resilient about makes it just that much easier. So I'm happy to say this episode is something that I do really care about. It may feel a little out of place in a series about the exercise of power, but actually it may go to the root, or at least one root, my view, if you like, of what it's all about, both power over and power with in the spring in the Northern hemisphere, every year, there's a confluence of celebrations of the great religions. There's both orthodox and non orthodox. Easter, the month of Ramadan, Passover, the Hindu celebration of the birth of Lord Vishnu, and New Year as marked by the Theravada Buddhists. This great big estuary of religious observances got me thinking. What do religions have in common at their core? At about the same time, I read an article by David French in the New York Times in which he proposed that Easter rebukes, as he put it, the Christian will to power. French says that although Jesus consistently rejected material power, the people mistook him as their saviour from material oppression, from Roman subjugation, and indeed hailed him as such. On Palm Sunday, when they realized that wasn't his mission at all, they gave him up for crucifixion and saved Barabbas the revolutionary, the insurrectionist against Rome. What the people of Judea were looking for was confrontational power, power to beat their enemies, power against. And as French points out, many of us are still looking for it. Now it's a case of devour my enemies, save me from my enemies, as against the admonition that only God has the right to vengeance. But that brought up another question for me. What is it that drives the will to power? What is it that makes the exercise of power against or power over such a crucial part of human existence? And it is human existence and not just Christian. Well, isn't it division? Not difference, but division. Not the fact that you are Christian and I am Muslim, not the fact that I am white and you are black. But the assumptions that we make, that those differing religions, races, political beliefs or genders are a threat, are superior or inferior, are to be feared, envied or contemptible. A divide, in other words, you on the fear side of the dividend me on the contempt side. So where do these assumptions come from? Yes, they may be socialized by mythology, by a scarring experience, not necessarily ours, but perhaps of a parent or even distant ancestor, by guilt or resentment, or of generations of family and community. But why is the history of the human species characterize much more by divide than by difference? In very simple terms, what is the primary driver for divide? Or what was the initial driver for division? It seems to me that all the great religions and many philosophers and thinkers try in some way to answer the question, or at least delve into it all in some way. Talk of the ego, the lower nafs, ahamkara, self nefesh as the restrainer, the blocker in the relationship both between God and human beings and between human beings and their fellow beings. The ego may be a useful mechanism for consciousness to. To mediate between itself and changing contexts. But it becomes a danger when that mechanism is then mistaken for the reality I am. My ego, rather than the ego is simply the filter, the current lens with which I am viewing the world in order to experience and deal with the world. It's like thinking that your avatar in the metaverse is you in the real world. And when we take that one step further and say the avatar is my only identity, and without it I am lost, I think we set the stage for division for what French calls will to power. The logic, I think, is sound. If I hold on to that which identifies me as a standalone, separate entity, then I will inevitably find myself defending myself and my avatar ego against other entities who are also hell bent on preserving their individuality, their uniqueness. The greater the perceived threat, the greater the competition, the more attention and energy I'll devote to preserving my ego. And I will no doubt use any and all tools and weapons to do so. After all, says the ego, if I am not preserved, I am obliterated in this great big universe. I have nothing with which to identify myself. The point about clinging to or defending oneself, or rather what we identify as self, is that the rest of the world becomes other, and coupled with the anxiety of self preservation, it becomes competition or the enemy. We even identify God as an individual. Ironically, we imbue omniscience, omnipresence, with the narrowness of a supreme human being, a supreme ego. We give omniscience a dimension when it is clearly beyond all dimensions, even definitions. If God is the supreme Being, then he, she, it, note it now has agenda, will act like a human being with supreme power. She will punish me, he will reward me I can make deals with it. If I don't do X, Y or Z, he will obliterate me. So we turn what we believe is the very foundation of existence into a threat. And not just a threat, but the supreme threat. Because we've now expressed omniscience as an individual supreme Being, we have also, by definition, placed that being in competition with other super beings who must be vying to usurp his throne, Satan or other religions gods. Now we're not only here to defend our own egos, but that of the Supreme Ego, who is, after all, our foundation. We go to war in that cause, presumably hoping that as soldiers of the Lord, we will be safe from incurring the supreme wrath and will be amply rewarded in an afterlife. The poor little ego we have created is caught in a web of threats. Not only does it need to be defended against other competing egos, but it has to keep the Supreme Ego happy. Or else. Of course, human beings, being the brilliant creatures that we are, have learned to manage those threats. We, we have built ourselves a world of relationships and tools to keep them at bay. We construct relationships along the spectrum of enemies, competitors and allies. We develop tools of conflict to deal with enemies, of transaction to deal with competitors, and of allegiance to deal with allies. But we have built ourselves a world under siege in defense of the ego. Defense of the illusion that we are separate from universal being and that this separateness needs to be preserved and protected at all costs. Our survival, says the illusion, depends on the degree of separation of our identity, our unique identity from at first that of being in general, and then from human being. We tell ourselves we are the only ones with the soul, that all other beings are there to serve us, and therefore they have less or even no value. And if other beings have less value, then surely certain other human beings who believe in perhaps a false God or threaten our identity have less or no value too. We go to war against our species, and indeed our world, all to preserve our egos. In effect, we go to war against reality to preserve an avatar. Let's turn this upside down. Let's assume that the ego is real, that we are our egos. Who cares? You say whether it's a hologram or not, it's there. We have to deal with it. And it's been so embedded in all human beings, maybe all beings, for such a long time, that it's a reality. Does that change the fact that it is the source of the will to power, abuse, wars, etc. Reality or not? As soon as I say My priority is to preserve my identity. Then you, as having a different identity, different values, or different ways of doing things, become the enemy and the foe inevitably becomes less than, less special than we are. We even convince ourselves that it is less capable of pain and grief. It is less human. So much so that we even treat orphaned children fleeing from disintegrating countries as a threat. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, who have been my neighbors for centuries, become my enemy. When my ego, my created, constructed identity, sees itself as threatened or is persuaded that it is threatened. No wonder all the great religions focus on the ego as the greatest impediment to salvation, to moksha or mirage. Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, quite explicitly urges, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, count others more significant than yourselves. Not as significant, but more. Jesus, he said, emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Jesus himself talked about the impossibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of God, not, I think, simply because of acquiring prosperity, but because clinging on to that wealth means that you are withholding it from others. You are clearly saying that others are less significant than you are. Attachment to wealth or to anything, also signals that any real decline of that wealth, whether by donation or loss, is a threat. A threat to what? To your identity. You're saying to yourself, I am my wealth. Without it, I am nothing. It's an extension of the myth of the ego. I am my ego. Without it, I'm obliterated. The second surah in the Quran recalls Moses as saying, kill your egos to be redeemed. Rumi's quote about dying before you die doesn't mean, in my view, as it is widely interpreted, living life as if it were your last day. It means, as far as I'm concerned, empty yourself of all that shackles you to the tiny little world of your ego and therefore of your terror of being obliterated. And Buddhism roots the cause of all suffering in clinging to the self, the ego. So what's the solution? Is there a solution? After all? The formation of the ego is probably hundreds of thousands of years old. And despite the core message of the great prophets and great thinkers, the religious institutions they left behind have been the source and patrons of countless wars, persecutions and divisions. I think that the most important first step is recognizing and continually remembering that the ego is an instrument, a tool, an avatar to locate yourself and navigate in the world. It is not you, and it is not more precious than your fellow beings, the ocean of which we are each a drop you're not swimming in the sea. You are an essential part of the sea, so you can't drown, and you don't need the ego to save you from drowning. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in his extraordinary book the Strange Order of Things, tracks the evolution of organisms from single cells through to multicellular organisms, through to what he calls general systems, intricate nervous systems. Bacteria preconsciously sensed and responded to the presence of other bacteria. Over billions of years. They evolved into extremely complex nervous systems that could map and produce images both of their own systems and. And their context, the world around them, or the surround, as Damasio terms it. And here he makes a crucial scientific point which philosophers like Heidegger made in their own way. Damasio says the surround of the nervous system also includes the world within the organism in question. And this part of the surround, in other words, the world within, is commonly ignored to the peril of realistic conceptions of general physiology and of cognition in particular. End of quote. To put it another way, the ego is akin to that avatar you give yourself in the metaverse. Its purpose is so that you can connect both with the metaverse as a whole and the other avatars within it. Without it, you couldn't operate in that world. You would be an unrecognizable set of ions. The avatar functions according to the rules and norms of that particular metaverse. You wouldn't be silly enough to use the same avatar in, in a combat game metaverse as you would while conducting surgery in an operating theater metaverse. There are different requirements for each. You know that the avatar is not you and that you can leave both it and the metaverse without threatening your own survival. Similarly, your ego is an instrument of connection, with its focus interdependent on the context within which it operates. It adapts to the requirements of its context. It isn't a fixed object. Once you've recognized that the ego is an instrument for connection with different beings, rather than your core fighting for survival, you begin to recognize that you don't have to cling to it. Perhaps we can then start using it for the purpose for which it was designed. Not to find divisions in the differences of being, but to connect, to understand those differences, to link, to learn about our fellow beings, about ourselves, and about being itself. Seeing it as an instrument rather than the self. We may be able to manage ourselves, not on the one hand, by guilt or the dogmatic imposition of values of good and evil, nor on the other hand, by the aggression, manipulation, or transactional relationships of self preservation. But by the simple question, am I using the avatar Ego, the instrument of connection, of learning and understanding correctly, if I'm bludgeoning you over the head with it, I'm not. Clearly, if I'm using it to coerce you to do something against your will, I am not. If I don't use it to discover what your will is or your reasons for doing something, even if I disapprove of them, I am not. The key question, it would appear. Am I using it to divide, to exclude? Or am I using this instrument to connect, to discover and to learn? We don't need to learn just for ourselves. We learn for the entire nervous system that is our world so as to increase its capabilities and therefore ours. Power over no, power with always. I do hope this has made some sort of sense to you. And by sense I don't mean I'm not hoping that you agree with me. I just hope that it made some sort of sense to you. And if you'd like to make contact for a non divisive discussion, I'd love to hear from you. I'm Stephen Barden. This has been the power of Balance Sa.