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The Great Transition/9 - Encounters that "light up" spiritual and civil vocations
by Luigino Bruni
published in 


    

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on 01/03/2015
To hide from you I turned off my light, 
but you surprised me with the stars.
Rabindranath Tagore
Generative communities and movements have always been those that put their members in a position to repeat the founder's experience in various forms. The same miracles, the same freedom, the same fruits. The history of Christianity is an eloquent demonstration of this: the fruitfulness of the Christian experience can be found in the thousands of communities and movements generated by the same origin that repeated the same experiences of the early days in time and space and have seen bread being multiplied, the lame walk and crucifixes raised. The charismatic experiences capable of a future have always been plural, pluralistic, orchards with many trees, gardens populated by hundreds and thousands of flowers, all equal and all different, growing from the same humus, with colours and scents that are similar or very different. The seed that takes the forms of the land where it grows, creating new personalities that enrich the earth.

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Each member of an authentic charismatic community has, in fact, his or her own features that radically differentiate him or her from other more common characters of our time (the employee, the fan of a writer, the activist of a humanitarian association). All these characters are often also present in communities and charismatic movements, but in addition to them there are some very different ones, too. They are embodied by people who, getting in contact with an ideal-charisma do not encounter something external to them, because they meet themselves. This experience is very common in spiritual movements, but we can also find it – in varying degrees - in some civil, political and cultural organisations. There are, in fact, men and women who, once they get in contact with a spirituality or an ideal, immediately feel a deep harmony between their more real, inner reality and the one they encounter. They are people in whom something of the same charisma approaching them is already alive, but they remain its "immune carriers" until they come in contact with the community where that charisma is at work and alive. When a young man begins to study chemistry and then starts to work in a company, through his studies and work he learns a profession that makes him something that he wasn't before. When, however, a young man encounters the charisma of Francis and feels a vocation, he does not become a Franciscan, because he is already one; in other words, he becomes what he already was. You can learn and acquire a profession, but you cannot learn a vocation: Van Gogh learned the techniques of painting, but he was already Van Gogh at the time.
This is the great mystery of the charismas and all human vocations (the world is full of vocations). In the decisive encounter of their lives, these people have an "ontological" experience, one that happens on the level of existence, which is much deeper than the mere psychological and emotional dimensions. This means that a Jesuit does not receive the charisma of Ignatius or the other Jesuits, but, mysteriously and really, he finds it in himself, he finds it alive and asleep in the "wine cellar" of the soul, where it has been waiting to be called by name. The encounter with a charisma lights up a latent but real dimension, and generates a process of recognition: the person re-familiarizes with him/herself, and a new awareness and an unveiling of the self and the world emerges from that decisive encounter. If it weren't so all the mystery and charm of vocations would disappear, we would all be destined to be followers of other people and external incentives, and true freedom and true donation would be precluded, as they arise only when one feels that following a charisma is following the best part of one's self, even if together with others and in a fundamental, defining relationship with the founder. Looking carefully at it, this game of becoming what one already is, the meeting between what's external and what's internal, can be found in every true love relationship, when upon meeting the other we realize to have recognized someone who, mysteriously, has already been present somewhere in our lives, where he/she waited silently to be "seen". All this, and in an even more radical way, happens when it comes to collective authentic experiences of the ideal.
Two consequences can be derived from here. There have been, and there are many people on earth who do not "light up" only because they have not had the opportunity to meet a person or a community capable of activating the deepest part in them. Secondly, there are always several encounters of a vocational dimension between people. Although for some (like a nun or an artist, for example) there may be a decisive encounter, this is never the only one, and the sure way to turn off the light on the main encounter is to put people in a position where they are not able to have further encounters of identity. The first and most important meeting does not become a prison if it does not become the only one.
This helps understand that the experience of following a charisma (whether religious or civil) is a very delicate affair. There is always the risk that this ideal recognition between the person and the community may produce a mutually narcissistic neurosis.
A crucial element is the management of disappointment. For those who encounter a charisma and set off on a journey, the experience of disappointment is inevitable because no historical reality can be level with the ideal. The ideal of the community and the ideal within us had to be bigger than life; otherwise they would have not "lit up" anything. Every good maturity is also a disappointment of the promises of youth.
If a disappointment is poorly managed and is not accepted, it produces two possible scenarios. Both of them are very dangerous: (a) the reduction of the ideal to reality, (b) the ideological interpretation of reality to make it coincide with the ideal. The first error is committed by the communities and people that, upon facing the first disappointments (especially collective delusions) reduce the ideal scope of the charisma, and turn it into something more manageable and easy: YHWH gets reduced to the golden calf. The unavoidable outcome of this first error is the failure of this "new", resized ideal to attract high quality people because when ideals are reduced, the excellent people can no longer be recognized. The second scenario is no less dangerous or harmful. It occurs when trying to prevent that people attracted by the great and necessarily non-real ideals come to the stage of disappointment, by building a real ideology. Instead of a common effort to accept and inhabit the "gap" between the promises of the ideal and the possibilities of the real, they turn reality, any reality into an ideal, reinterpreting it every time, blaming the mismatch of the individual as responsible for the "gap". Disappointment as a natural and necessary part of the process of personal growth is therefore denied and drowned in the ideology, preventing the full growth of the members who continue to be comforted and entertained, kept in an infantile condition. They are not disappointed since they are deceived. In the first scenario the difference between ideal and reality vanishes by reduction (of the ideal); in the second one it is eliminated for the sake of increase (of reality). However, what is not offered is the only real possibility for a positive overshoot of this decisive stage of all existence, and that is an education or training preparing people for a coexistence with the gap, tending and processing the inevitable disappointments of adulthood, without erasing either the truth the ideal or that of the reality.
It is understandable, then, that the ability of having a future of a collective reality born from an ideal-charisma depends fundamentally on how the relationship between the founder, the community and the interpretation of the charisma and the individual "vocations" develop over time. The charismatic profile of a society is an expression and a continuation of the prophetic vocation, for which the Bible offers an ultimate type of grammar. The prophecy of the communities and charismatic movements, however, does not belong only to the founder or the community as a whole: each person who received the same charisma embodies it, lives it and develops it by offering their own flesh. In each Franciscan, Gandhian, Dominican, Salesian there is Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea revived, their words and their outrage are resurrected, as well as their criticism of the powers of every age, including our own. Moses, the greatest prophet lives again, and his typical vocation of the liberator of an enslaved people of the pharaoh and his idols. Furthermore, the experience of prophecy is not reserved for the elite of intellectuals or professionals: among the "prophets" that have loved and "lit me up", there are workers, peasants, and women with only five grades of elementary school.
An ideal-driven organisation lives well and makes its members and the world live well if it generates hundreds and thousands of Moses'. But when communities and movements allow these moments of liberation only to their leaders, while all members are assigned the role of the people liberated and guided through the desert, it happens that vocations are turned off, the flowers wither, the prophetic power of the charisma is resized very much, or even too much. And the land of all loses brightness. There are few people on this earth who are more beautiful than young people with a vocation; but there are very few experiences that are sadder than seeing those vocations fade with adulthood.
The charismas will stay alive as long as they generate free people who, having met a voice speaking from a burning bush while they were grazing their sheep, recognize it as a profound voice that has always inhabited them (if it weren't so, we would not know how to recognize it as a good voice and obey it). They depart for Egypt and they see the plagues, the sea opening up, the manna fall from heaven and Miriam dance. And they keep showing us a promised land that is beyond our horizon.
 
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    [text] => 
The Great Transition/9 - Encounters that "light up" spiritual and civil vocations
by Luigino Bruni
published in 


    

pdf


Avvenire 

(54 KB)


on 01/03/2015
To hide from you I turned off my light, 
but you surprised me with the stars.
Rabindranath Tagore
Generative communities and movements have always been those that put their members in a position to repeat the founder's experience in various forms. The same miracles, the same freedom, the same fruits. The history of Christianity is an eloquent demonstration of this: the fruitfulness of the Christian experience can be found in the thousands of communities and movements generated by the same origin that repeated the same experiences of the early days in time and space and have seen bread being multiplied, the lame walk and crucifixes raised. The charismatic experiences capable of a future have always been plural, pluralistic, orchards with many trees, gardens populated by hundreds and thousands of flowers, all equal and all different, growing from the same humus, with colours and scents that are similar or very different. The seed that takes the forms of the land where it grows, creating new personalities that enrich the earth.

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The Great Transition/7 The autoimmune disease of organisations can be cured
by Luigino Bruni
published in  


    

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 on 15/02/2015
“Know well, then, that the god orders this. And I suppose that until now no greater good has arisen for you in the city than my service to the god.” (30a; English translation: Thomas G. West)
Plato, Apology of Socrates
Many companies and organizations are created in order to seize a market opportunity, to respond to a need, to provide a service. Others, however, are the emanation of personality, passions, ideals of one or more persons, who put and embody the most solemn words and the largest projects of their lives in their organization.

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The earth is full of these "other" type of organizations and communities and many of the finer and higher things of life take place within these organizations and communities, where people's motivations become projects, the projects make history, a history embellished with many colours and flavours. These entities, if they want to last beyond the life of the founder, have a vital need for creative and innovative members. But once these organizations and communities start growing and developing, those who generated them eventually create governance structures that prevent the emergence of new creativity, and so they give life to their own decline. This is a fundamental law of motion of history: the first creativity that generates organizations and communities at some point starts producing inside the antibodies to protect itself against new creativity and innovations that would be essential for them to survive longer. It is a severe autoimmune disease affecting many organizations and communities.
Its root lies in the mismanagement of the fear of losing the originality and the specific identity of the founder's "charisma". For fear of dilution, contamination or degradation the original purity of the mission of the organization-community, people with greater creativity are discouraged because they are perceived as a threat to the identity. And so instead of emulating the founder in their creativity the forms in which it was realized and manifested are imitated. The immutable core of the original inspiration is confused with the historical organizational form that it took in the early stages of foundation, and it is not clear that the salvation of the original inspiration in changing the forms in order to remain faithful to the essence of the original nucleus. And so everything ends up trying to become immutable, to remain unchanged and to wither.
There are many symptoms of this disease. The most visible one is the emergence of a general inability of attracting new generative and valuable people. The most profound one is the famine of eros, of passion and desire, which manifests itself in a collective organizational sloth. If the desires and passions of the new members are oriented towards the historical forms in which the founder has embodied their desires and passions, you end up wanting the fruits of the tree, not the tree that generated them. Those who govern an organization and want it to survive over time should say to their creative and young people: "Do not desire the fruits generated yesterday that are fascinating you today. Be a new tree."
The only real chance for a tree that has borne fruit (a VDO, that is, a value-driven organization) to continue to live and bear fruit is to become an orchard, a wood, a forest. Exposing itself to the wind, and accommodating bees among its branches that may spread its seeds and its pollen in the soil, generating new life. Saint Francis is still alive after centuries because his charisma was generative of hundreds and thousands of new Franciscan communities, all equal and all different, all of Francis' and all expressions of the genius of the many reformers who, through their creativity, have made that first tree become a fruitful forest.
There are no guarantees that the creativity of the new arrivals will bring the same fruits as that of the founder, and that anyone who tastes them recognizes the same taste of the first fruits, or find them even better - "you will do things bigger than me." Certainty, however, is death, unless you have the courage to face this vital risk. A VDO can die because of infertility, but it can also die because of becoming something that has nothing of the VDO and the ideals of the founder - as is happening, for example, in far too many works of religious orders taken over by companies whose sole purpose is profit or income, and have no relationship whatsoever with the first charismatic DNA. In every field, there exists a road to be able to continue the dream of the founders in faithful creativity, but it is in that mestizo territory of venture, trust, wisdom of governance, an alchemy always unpredictable in its results.
The culture and the choices of governance have a specific responsibility in these crucial stages, and most certainly in that of the transition from the founding generation to the next, but also when the time calls for profound and brave changes. At the origin of the autoimmune disease there is almost always the fault of the leaders using the most innovative members only for executive and functional tasks, not allowing them to flourish and develop their talents. Indeed, it is here where the heart of the disease (and its cure) is. In the early days of the foundation, the days of pure creativity that may last for decades, the VDO-s attract excellent people, bearers of talents and "charisma" in synergy with that of the founder. The governing wisdom of the founder and / or his first employees lies in ensuring that creative people can develop themselves in their diversity, in not turning them into maids in the only service of the charisma of the leader. If, in fact, diversity is not appreciated and all the best talents are oriented towards a monistic culture aimed completely at the development of the organization, the VDO ends up losing its biodiversity and fertility, and starts to decline.
Preventing and then treating this form of autoimmune disease is particularly difficult, because it is a pathological development of a process that was initially virtuous and indispensable for the birth, growth and success of the organization.
In the first phase of life of the founder, in fact, many VDO-s experience what is perhaps the highest form of creativity that the human realm knows (the only one that can approach it is that of the artists, which, by the way, is very similar). It is the season of pure, absolute, explosive and disruptive creativity. In order for this great creativity to be embodied in an institution, there is an essential need of people who realize, disseminate, consolidate and implement that creative energy, to channel the water of a new spring. All members are required some creativity, but we could call that of the second level. It is the creativity expressed in the search of forms, modes, means of implementation and embodying of the initial and original creativity in new geographic areas, in new and unprecedented economic sectors and areas. But the first and in many cases only virtue requested of the members of the VDO during this first phase is the absolute and unconditional fidelity to the original inspiration, and all creativity and life force is subject to loyalty and put to its service as a subsidiary. Without this game of absolute loyalty and subsidiary creativity many spiritual movements would not be born, nor the many communities that have made the world more beautiful and continue to improve it every day; just as many associations and social enterprises generated and grown from the daimon of the "prophets" of our time would not have appeared and grown.
Therefore, during this first phase, the creativity of the best members is directed by the governance of the organization towards their functions and for a "faithful" accountability. At the same time, as time passes more and more new members are attracted whose preferences are called "conformist" by the economic literature calls. These persons derive happiness from aligning themselves with the dominant tastes, values and the culture in the group, because these are the values required and necessary at this stage of development. But when the founder or the founding generation leaves, these organizations and communities find themselves with members educated only to loyalty and creativity of the second level, while the organization in this new stage would need creativity of the first level, the same as the nature of the founder and the one that had attracted them - no creative person is attracted to conformist imitators. This is how they fall into 'poverty traps' that feed on themselves. On the one hand, in fact, for the members of the organization it would be essential to have that generative and free creativity (of the first level) that had long been discouraged and therefore they now do not have it. On the other hand, those "negative virtues" that were fundamental in the first phase of the organization now create a culture that isn't really vivid or dynamic enough to attract new creative people who would actually be rather essential to hope for a new spring. This is the main reason why the historical arc of the great majority of idealistic organizations follows the parable of their founders, and the generational change marks in fact the beginning of decline.
However, decline is not their only option, because the organizational autoimmune disease can be prevented, or at least taken care of, even though the only real medicine is to become aware of it when the process is still just starting Our history and the present tell us that sometimes the movements flourish after the death of the founder, communities are raised up by a generational shift and the tree does not die but multiplies in the orchard.
Organizations, like all true life, can live more seasons if they die and rise again many times. However, to learn how to be resurrected, one must first learn how to die. Those who want to save their life will lose it. It is the law of life, and also that of the organizations that are born from our greatest ideals.
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    [text] => 
The Great Transition/7 The autoimmune disease of organisations can be cured
by Luigino Bruni
published in  


    

pdf


Avvenire

(62 KB)


 on 15/02/2015
“Know well, then, that the god orders this. And I suppose that until now no greater good has arisen for you in the city than my service to the god.” (30a; English translation: Thomas G. West)
Plato, Apology of Socrates
Many companies and organizations are created in order to seize a market opportunity, to respond to a need, to provide a service. Others, however, are the emanation of personality, passions, ideals of one or more persons, who put and embody the most solemn words and the largest projects of their lives in their organization.

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The Great Transition/5  Making new alternatives to the logic of the castes grow
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/02/2015
‘Communitas is a set of people united not by a “property”, but by a duty or a debt. Not by a “more”, but a “less”, by a lack, a limit that is set up as a burden, or even as an obligation or even as a defective way for the person who is “affected” by it, unlike the one who is “exempt” or “exempted.”
(Roberto Esposito, Communitas).
Communities and organizations that have preserved their creative and fruitful character over time have been able to live with their vulnerability; they have not eliminated it entirely from their territories but they took care of it. 
Vulnerability (from vulnus: wound), like many true words of the human realm, is ambivalent, because good vulnerability coexists with bad vulnerability, and often the two are intertwined. Good vulnerability is inscribed in all generative human relationships, where if I do not give the other the possibility of “hurting me”, the relationship does not reach the depth to be fruitful.

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Good vulnerability is what we experience in loving relationships with our children, in friendship, in the primary communities of our lives. Today we know that the most creative work teams are those where people receive an authentic – therefore risky – openness for credit. Generativity in all areas has a vital need for freedom, trust, risk, all of which make the person who grants these vulnerable. Life is generated by relationships open to the possibility of relational injury. 
 We would not help any child in becoming a free person without granting them a vulnerable trust inside families, in schools and in the many places of education. 
 And as adults we cannot flourish at the workplace without receiving and giving risky and vulnerable confidence.
But the culture of the big global companies today looks for the impossible: it wants creativity from their employees without accepting the vulnerability of relationships. Think of the growing phenomenon of the so-called “managerial subsidiarity”, according to which the manager has to intervene in the decisions of a group, taking up the coordination only for those activities that would be worse without his “subsidiary” intervention. Large companies are, in fact, realizing that in order to get the best from their employees they must grant the proper conditions for them to feel free and as protagonists of their own work. No creativity is given except out of freedom, but for subsidiarity to function it is essential that workers and work groups experience genuine confidence – but then they can also abuse it. There are few things on earth that give as much of joy as the participation in free collective action in the company of equals.
In order for this beautiful and ancient idea of subsidiarity not to remain just a principle to be written in social budgets, it is essential that the management should really trust the work group, and it shouldn't want to control the entire process to prevent abuse of trust and receiving “wounds”. If, however, those who are given “delegation” perceive that in fact this “trust” is only instrumental, a technique to make more profits, subsidiarity stops producing its effects. That's why subsidiarity in companies would need the owners' and not capitalists' assets, where the delegation does not proceed from the top down to the workers, but in the opposite direction (as in politics, where the principle of subsidiarity was born). When, however, subsidiarity descends from above it becomes something else that only works when and if the owners decide they should, and it is therefore not very resilient to failures of subsidiarity. Only intrinsic motivation associated with the appropriate institutions allows for subsidiarity and for the participatory forms of surviving after crises due to serious abuses of trust. In reality, the naturally subsidiary institutions would be the democratic and participative businesses (just like cooperatives), where “sovereignty belongs to the people” indeed, i.e. the workers-members that grant it upwards to their managers and directors.
In other words, subsidiarity and confidence can really work when they are risky and vulnerable. If we were to design a coin of human relations, one side would represent the joys of the free encounter between acts of gratuitousness, and the other would show the many images of our wounds that those joys generated.
But – and here is another paradox of our capitalist system – the culture taught in all business schools hates vulnerability and considers it the greatest enemy. And for many reasons. Throughout the centuries, western civilization has formed a clear separation between the places of the good and the bad vulnerabilities. It has not accepted the ambivalence and thus created a dichotomy. Good vulnerability, capable of generating blessing has been instead associated with private life, the family and the woman, who is the first image of the generative wound. In the public sphere, which is based entirely on the male register, vulnerability is always bad. Therefore economic and organizational life was also based on invulnerability. Showing wounds and fragility in the workplace is only and always a negative value, inefficiency, demerit. The past decades of financial capitalism have amplified the invulnerable nature of work culture in the large global enterprises, where every vulnerability must be ejected.
The best way to eliminate vulnerability inside the community has always been immunity. Immunity is the main feature of the large capitalist enterprises today. Every invulnerable culture is also an immune culture: if I don't want to be hurt in my relationship with you, I have to stop you touching me by building a system of relations that avoids any form of contamination. Immunity is the lack of exposure to the other person's touch. Immunitas is the negation of communitas: the soul of communitas is munus (gift and duty) in reciprocity, while that of immunitas is reciprocal ingratitude, the absence and the opposite of gift (in-munus, immune).
All immune companies are radically hierarchical, because they increase the vertical and horizontal distances between people to prevent them from touching each other, and so manage them and direct them according to the company's purposes. The first function of the hierarchy is not to let people mingle with each other (this is the origin of the Portuguese word casta: not contaminated), not to let them touch whoever is different among them, only those that are similar. In all immune-caste societies it is strictly forbidden to touch those that are different because only members of the same caste can and must touch each other. For this reason, caste -driven companies know little about creativity and innovation, because only biodiversity is always generative.
This lack of contact between those who are different is a root cause of the decay of the elites inside caste societies, including our global enterprises. The beggars' movements of the 13th-14th centuries were the forgers of great innovation and economic, social, political and spiritual generativity, disrupting the early mediaeval order of castes and immunity characterising their society, because they welcomed the rich and the poor, and people coming from any region or township in the same monasteries. Those new communities were capable of bringing forth some huge innovations because they put merchants and the poor, bankers and craftsmen, artists and mystics together. That biodiversity turned into creativity and innovation, an innovation that was born from not being afraid of wounds or the stigmata of fraternity. Fraternity is anti-immune, as Francis of Assisi tells us by embracing and kissing the leper – solidarity-philanthropy is almost always immune, fraternity never.
The root of every immune-caste civilization is the installation of the fundamental distinction between pure and impure: there are activities, people, things that are pure and can be touched, and others that are impure and can only be touched by the lower castes. But in all immune-caste societies there is also a deep interdependence between the castes. Even Brahmins need the pariahs (and vice versa), because as a consequence of immunity in these societies the division of labour is radical. This is why the presence of mediators is indispensable, as they have the special function of putting in contact those who cannot touch each other.
This way it is understandable why the big capitalist enterprises are now the sharpest images of an immune-caste society, and that managers are the mediators connecting the various 'castes' of the company without anyone touching the others, the impure ones. Touching is only possible between equals (sometimes there is too much of it among colleagues and it can even hurt). The members of the “lower” ranks can be touched by superiors only with tools and techniques, not directly. Large companies are less and less mixed, even when people work in open space offices (where they remain well separated in terms of power and wages).
We cease to be generative in all areas as soon as we stop meeting and embracing each other, especially the poor. People lose creativity when over the years they reduce contact with those who are different. Something similar is happening to the elites of the organizations, institutions, and therefore also to companies: the culture of immunity that leads them not to get contaminated pre-determines their sterility and decadence. Much of our generativity, energy and strength depend on being in contact with other humanities, cultures, lives and bodies. Hope and excellence are born and reborn from the promiscuous places of living, from the meeting of the entire humanity, from being fed by the many foods of the village.
A deep crisis of capitalism is on the horizon, generated by the decay of the impoverished elites and by their immunity and being unfertilized by good vulnerability of entirely human relations. The fear of relational wounds is creating a global culture of immunity, of which large companies are the major global carriers. For this reason, a major challenge of the coming years will be the very survival of organizations. The apotheosis of the immune-invulnerable culture will in fact be the elimination of organizations, the disappearance of the places where people co-habit and co-operate (live and work together), in order to create decentralized production in their place where everyone works at home thanks to the ever more sophisticated technologies. Consumers without shops, banking without banks, online schools without teachers and students, and perhaps even hospitals without doctors and nurses, populated by highly efficient robots and cameras. The final elimination of vulnerability will eventually be reached this way, we will finally have found the tree of life, but it will be a tree without fruits, or with flavourless fruits. And it will be the hunger for tasty fruits to make us still meet, embrace and live.
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    [text] => 
The Great Transition/5  Making new alternatives to the logic of the castes grow
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/02/2015
‘Communitas is a set of people united not by a “property”, but by a duty or a debt. Not by a “more”, but a “less”, by a lack, a limit that is set up as a burden, or even as an obligation or even as a defective way for the person who is “affected” by it, unlike the one who is “exempt” or “exempted.”
(Roberto Esposito, Communitas).
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The Great Transition/3 Young executives sacrificed, just like in the armies and pagan cults
by Luigino Bruni
published inAvvenire on 18/01/2015
One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion.
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, 1921 (translated by Chad Kautzer)
At this stage in our – sometimes in-depth – thinking about the non-sustainability of economic and financial models that we have set up in recent decades, there is one aspect that seems to be rather overlooked if we put it in relation with the weight it has in our political life, in democracy, in our well-being and ill state. It is the management culture of the organizations, which is becoming a true global ideology, developed and taught at major universities and widely implemented by multinational corporations and in global consulting associations. It is an ideology that is entering in many areas of social life, because it appears as a value-free technique, which has been able to recycle many of the symbolic codes that Western civilization has associated with good life and wealth for millennia.

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And so, without batting an eye, we accept that our relations are increasingly surrounded and controlled by these new global players. Social media and networks in which “live” and where a good part of our relational life now takes place, are governed by profit seeking companies of this new culture.
But there are some cracks appearing in the walls of these companies now that should be taken very seriously if we are to avoid the implosion of the edifice. We are seeing a growing relational and emotional fragility of the employees and managers of companies, especially large and global ones. There is a strong growth in the use of psychotropic medications among managers, which is growing together with their anxiety, depression, stress and insomnia. Brilliant and successful executives wake up one morning you and find themselves with no more energy to get out of bed. It is the syndrome that is known worldwide by the English term burn-out, which has a very literal meaning. Many multinational companies now insert a burn-out phase into the normal development of a manager's career, because it is a stage that is becoming very frequent for the way this type of work is conceived, planned and promoted. And at the first burn-out is followed by another, and then more, because after a successful treatment one has to return to the same relationships, the same culture that produces pathological malaise. The preferred victims of this new epidemic of the rich are the consultants in multinational companies, the financial analysts, accountants and lawyers of the large and professional law firms and above all a great number of managers and executives of large companies, banks, funds, insurance; but there are also worrying signs in public administration, in NGOs, in the social economy, and in some works created by religious charismas because of the pervasiveness of this managerial ideology that is now taught at all universities and business schools and in the MBA courses of all the world.
At the root of this new working malaise there is a real paradox. A golden rule of this organizational and managerial culture is the prohibition to mix languages and emotions of private life with those that belong to business life. Words such as gift, gratitude, friendship, forgiveness and gratuitousness that we all recognize to be fundamental in family, social and community relationships must be kept absolutely outside the workplace, because they are deemed as improper, inefficient, and above all, dangerous. If we go beyond the rhetoric of the teams and team work and take a look inside the real dynamics of these new capitalist enterprises, we will find that managers are increasingly lonely, interacting with other individuals alone, they have functional and fragmented relationships with many partners and supervisors that vary depending on the task (the task assigned) and the contract. In these organizations there is more hierarchy than in traditional ones, even if they have a participatory look.
But while these new businesses on the one hand cultivate behaviours of separation (such as managers who do not "mingle" with their subordinates in canteens or recreational and sports clubs), on the other hand when they have to select and then motivate executives they use the typical words taken from the contexts of family, friends, ideals, ethics and spirituality. There is talk of esteem, merit, respect, passion, loyalty, faithfulness, recognition, community – words and codes that activate the same dynamics inside the person that he or she has learned and practiced in private and family life. The same commitment is required and the same passions are in play.
If we take a small step back in history, we find that the relational metaphor that inspired the first companies in modernity has been that of the community. The first workshops and then the family businesses of the century were organizations built on the relational paradigm of families and communities, also because of the great social and economic weight of the monastic communities and convents in the Middle Ages. Although these were hierarchical (and paternalistic) communities, they were still communities. Then, still in Europe, in the second half of the twentieth century there appeared their “political” metaphors: companies, especially large ones, that were reproducing the class struggle typical of that time, and the factory was an image of political society, of its conflicts and cooperation.
In the large companies of the Third Millennium something unprecedented is happening that closely resembles religious culture, and, in some other respects, military culture, too. In the traditional companies of the first and second capitalism, they asked a lot from both workers and managers, but never too much and, above all, not everything. That left other areas (family, community, religion, party ...) in which the other, no less important chapters of life could take place. A lot – and in some cases everything – was asked of people, however, in the religious sphere (convents, abbeys and monasteries) and, to varying and usually lesser degrees, in the military (the nation and the land). There you could give everything because the promise was worth it (God, Heaven, the Fatherland).
The great and dangerous bluff of the modern organizations of capitalism is hidden in their use of the symbolic and motivational registers of the same type as they were used in the past by the faiths but – and here's the point – distorting and resizing them radically.
The new capitalism has noticed that without activating their most profound human motivations and symbols, people do not do their best. So they ask for much, (almost) everything from their new employees, they ask for a commitment of time, priorities, passions, emotions, which cannot be justified by resorting only to their contracts and pay (even if it is a lot). Only the gift of self can explain what is being asked and given up in these work relationships. But if the company would really recognize all of the “gift” that it asks of its employees then it would create community bonds (cum-munus), which is something the company doesn't really want because those relationships wouldn't be as manageable and controllable anymore. So it stops at the recognition of the less deep or true dimensions than the gift of self, and it does everything to channel back any form of behaviour within the realm of duty and contract.
In the early years, while the executive-workers are still young, the game of promises, expectations and refunds of mutual recognition and attention between the enterprise and the worker works well and produces a spiral of increasing engagement, results and rewards. But as time passes, these unrecognized affective and relational investments accumulate and become emotional credits, until one day you realize that they will never be paid in full. At this point the original “narcissistic contract” enters into crisis, and the rewards of the early days turn into disappointment and frustration. The phase of insecurity, unworthiness, of feeling a “loser” begins, and soon the image of the "ideal worker" that has been built over time collapses, too. We understand that the game was not worth the candle of our life that in the meantime has been consumed, sometimes exhausted and even put out. And the game continues with other young people, who will soon be replaced by others – the “consumption” (or “sacrifice”) of the youth in these organizations is impressive, just as it is in armies and some pagan cults.
The great words of life bear fruit only if they are not manipulated. They need large spaces, to be accepted in their complexity and, above all, in their ambivalence that makes them generative, alive, and true. And – because of their own intrinsic nature – they do not let themselves be used for profit, certainly not for a long time. Human history offers us an immense collection of attempts to use the great words of humanity for private benefits. Magic and idolatry are nothing but this. But every ideology is essentially an attempt to manipulate one or more great words of humanity (liberty, fraternity, equality), reducing their complexity and ambivalence to be able to control them, thereby controlling persons and consciences, too. Managerial ideology is manipulating esteem, recognition and community, because it uses them without gratuitousness, and therefore no liability for costs and emotional wounds that the relational ambivalence of these great words inevitably produce.
We all want Heaven, we all would like to live our lives in a heroic way, but businesses and their objectives cannot be the places where these promises can be kept and realised. The sky above their land is too low, their horizon is too narrow to be really that of the promised land.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial 
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The Great Transition/3 Young executives sacrificed, just like in the armies and pagan cults
by Luigino Bruni
published inAvvenire on 18/01/2015
One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion.
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, 1921 (translated by Chad Kautzer)
At this stage in our – sometimes in-depth – thinking about the non-sustainability of economic and financial models that we have set up in recent decades, there is one aspect that seems to be rather overlooked if we put it in relation with the weight it has in our political life, in democracy, in our well-being and ill state. It is the management culture of the organizations, which is becoming a true global ideology, developed and taught at major universities and widely implemented by multinational corporations and in global consulting associations. It is an ideology that is entering in many areas of social life, because it appears as a value-free technique, which has been able to recycle many of the symbolic codes that Western civilization has associated with good life and wealth for millennia.

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The Great Transition/1 - Four (and more) different economies; new alliances
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 4/01/2015
How are you going to save the world? How find a straight road to progress, you men of science, of industry, of cooperation, of trade unions and all the rest? How are you going to save it, I say? By what? By credit? What is credit? To what will credit lead you?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Idiot)
While we suffer from a crisis that seems (and is) too long, in order to cultivate hope that is not vain we should be able to see the bustling crowds of new life, businesses, work and innovation in the undergrowth of our economy. Because it is there, really. However, the quality of the new phase of our capitalism will depend on which contemporary economy is able to "attract", absorb and exploit all the young, intellectual and technological energy that is being released in and outside of the "canvas" (web).

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To date, financial and globalised capitalism seems to be far more equipped to bring the most creative part of our society to its side. It is so because of its powerful financial means, but also because it casts a spell through its symbols on the bests of the youth. It has been able to incorporate and recycle the most creative part of every generation that has up till now held up the success of capitalism in the twentieth century – just as Eve Chiapello and  Luc Boltanski show in their book "The New Spirit of Capitalism", recently published in Italian, too (Mimesis).
We need to become more aware of the fact that our economy is made up of at least four different economies (although those designing taxation, incentives and industrial policies continue to think that capitalism is only one). The first – that we can still call "capitalism" – is made up of businesses, banks, insurance companies and investment funds that are only born only to seize opportunities for profit or, more frequently, income. 
These are almost always large organizations with widely scattered owners, run by managers who are paid beyond any common sense. They operate globally and carefully pick the right places for their tax offices and production units for the sole purpose of minimizing taxation and maximizing earnings – and they succeed because they have enough money to pay excellent tax advisers, authentic "saints" of tax havens and union havens. This capitalism creates efficient philanthropic organizations and sponsors with scientific and social research through homeopathic doses of profits. But its purpose, the only real purpose that makes it move is to make the most money in the shortest time possible. Gaming multinationals are the prime examples of this capitalism, which now includes many companies bought at a great price by private equity funds that in the recent years of severe lack of funding and liquidity are growing and gaining...also from the thousands of firms in difficulty they are buying up. At times these are "saved", financially, but jobs may not be saved, and almost always the founder's original project burns out, even when the old name and the old brands are kept – for profit. It is a process that is taking place on a large scale and is often intertwined with the illegal economy that is also in search of companies going through a crisis of capital. It is a phenomenon of vast and profound incorporation that is distorting much of our "made in Italy", and that is happening under a general inattention. The capital that are attracted in during times of crisis are (almost) never good. ‘How many companies of the "first capitalism" type are there in Italy?’ I asked a friend of mine who is a great connoisseur of the Italian economy a few months ago. ‘90% of the big anonymous companies that are not related to an owner family,’ he said.
There is, then, a second economy, made up of companies that resemble those of the first type of capitalism only in form. We realize that as soon as we set foot in their facilities and talk with the entrepreneurs, managers and workers. The culture that makes them move is another one, their horizon is deeper and wider. This is the "capitalism" of family firms. Behind the business plan here is the presence of a concrete person and a family, marking a first radical difference. The family capitalism is not in itself a guarantee of fairness, good management and ethics (we see that every day). The presence of a family at the helm of a company, however, is often a guarantee that the owners are interested in the long term and not in maximising profits of a very short period. Without the axis of time and the horizon of the future clearly visible in the company, work is not a friend of capital or of the "owners". This second economy is still one of the main walls of our economic and civil system.
There is a third economy, and it is precisely what some call the “third sector”. It is that of the social and cooperative economy, non-profit organizations, territorial and ethical financing and "value driven" businesses, and all that swarm of economic activities germinated from the heart of the Christian community and organised civil society. It is the economy that flourishes by ideals that are greater than economics. In times of crisis this third economy is continuing to grow, but is also experiencing an epochal crisis that turns primarily on the depletion of ethical humus from its soil. The second and third economy are the ones, in fact, that are suffering most because of the deterioration of the capital of the civil virtues that gave birth to their companies in the past decades. The first capitalism, however, grows very well in soils depleted of civil humus – just think, once again, of the gaming (gamble) multinationals that proliferate in the deserts of institutions and families.
But there is also a fourth economy (and we stop here, even if we could continue with public economy, with the criminal or the submerged ones...). It is creating jobs and is performing innovation in the field of the so-called sharing economy that seeks funding for new businesses outside the traditional circuits, through networking (crowd-funding), and is growing exponentially. It is work arising from the diverse world of critical consumption, from many last generation organic farms, where the farmer is more and more likely to be a young woman, a graduate who speaks four languages and divides her time between the care for her business and international travel. Many of the new jobs can be found here that are blooming around the care for cultural, artistic, musical goods, or the old water mills restored to produce energy, work and energy sovereignty. And it has so much beauty, a beauty that can really save us all. This is another, not so obvious type of economy, made up of activities that are very different but have their common denominator in an idea of fundamentally collaborative economy, where work and wealth do not arise primarily from competition, but from cooperation and the seeking of mutual benefit. It is a very intensive economy of the young, many of them immigrants, where the search for maximum profit is not the first motive, because the priorities are environmental sustainability, aesthetics, the taste of collective creativity, the joy of seeing sick and poisoned territories flourish, inventing apps (applications) that would work, and so - it's not just a random example - the "fresh produce" of the supermarket that is about to expire is transforming the waste into the cornerstone of the homes of many poor people. It is a new economy where gratuitousness and (a certain type of) market coexist and grow together.
Speculative-financial capitalism is pulling in heavily not only into the second economy of family firms, but, with its powerful media and great rhetoric it is also invading the third sector. The only possibility that these economies that are still different can be saved and grow is if a great alliance is created with the fourth largest economy that is young and creative, the one that is moving into new "environments", speaks other "languages", thinks, acts and prints in three dimensions.
The economies that are other than the first capitalism today must be able to bring the fourth largest economy over into their territories. And in the meantime they should also act on the border areas with first capitalism, the mestizo border areas. Within certain limits, that are variable and mobile in every age, even the first capitalism can produce good fruit. Every era has seen it do so. It is when, just as now, it overflows its banks and floods houses and fields that capitalism becomes the first enemy of the economy, work, and the common good. The unlikely and unexpected encounters are the most generative ones. It's biodiversity, in all its natural and civil forms, that feeds us and makes us all rich.
To meet this challenge which now seems impossible, a symbolic, linguistic and communicative change is also essential. Civil economy (the second and third economy) no longer has to resort to just vocabularies of ethics, virtues, altruism, of giving and solidarity. We must use the semantic register of sharing, excellence and creativity and apply them for larger goals than mere profits. It is through asking difficult things and presenting demanding challenges that we may attract the excellent people, especially when they are young. The world of civil economy still does not attract enough creative and innovative youth because it has not been able to renew its symbolic code appropriately, to translate its great words (gratuitousness, brotherhood, common good) in other words and new signs capable of arousing the enthusiasm of the best people in the best stages of their life, and then transforming their enthusiasm into work and life projects. We still have time, at least to give it a try.
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    [text] => 
The Great Transition/1 - Four (and more) different economies; new alliances
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 4/01/2015
How are you going to save the world? How find a straight road to progress, you men of science, of industry, of cooperation, of trade unions and all the rest? How are you going to save it, I say? By what? By credit? What is credit? To what will credit lead you?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Idiot)
While we suffer from a crisis that seems (and is) too long, in order to cultivate hope that is not vain we should be able to see the bustling crowds of new life, businesses, work and innovation in the undergrowth of our economy. Because it is there, really. However, the quality of the new phase of our capitalism will depend on which contemporary economy is able to "attract", absorb and exploit all the young, intellectual and technological energy that is being released in and outside of the "canvas" (web).

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