S ir Roger is returned from the Mountain with the Migently Mountain Manifesto.
Here are Tablets One to Five: 

 

1. 

Do what is right.  

 

2. 

 You are safe.

Now, at this instant, you are safe.
You are safe, right here, right now.

This might allow you to calm down and get a grip to deal with stuff.

Nothing is promised for the next instant, however.

But right now at this instant you are safe.  

  

3. 

Most people are about as honest and ethical as they can afford to be.

Yes, some people are less honest than they could be.
Some struggle to be honest at all.
Some are frankly more honest than is necessary or comfortable.

The value of honesty is relative.
People will steal a loaf of bread if they really have to.
They may not want to but if that’s what they must do to feed their children then they will do what they need to.

Some things are more important and more pressing — in the moment in real life — than esoteric debates about morality.

It’s true that some people exhort you to be honest.
Other people want you to be honest. 
They don’t want you to be honest for your benefit. 
They want you to be honest for their benefit, so that they can make informed decisions based on reliable reports.

In reality, though, most people don’t make decisions based on facts anyway.

On the other hand, being honest places less stress on the memory.
And it (sometimes) makes you feel better.

Telling the truth is a different matter.

There is no such as THE Truth.
There’s my truth and your truth, for a start. 
What most people mean by ‘the truth’ is merely opinion and interpretation based on life experience, emotion, limited information, conjecture, flawed logic, magical thinking, and vague probabilities.

There’s the “whole” truth. 

No, just joking. If there is a “whole truth”, it’s impossible to know because — for just one thing — you would have to describe the velocity and position of every fundamental particle in the Universe from the beginning of time.
You
can’t tell both the position and velocity in any case, and if you could even get the information in a whole lifetime you wouldn’t get past describing the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second of the Universe. Let alone interpreting the data. 

The best you can do is describe the best interpretation of the motley collection of tiny random scraps of perception you can grasp as they rush by.

Then there’s the “ABSOLUTE” Truth.

There isn’t one.

So stop killing people because you mistakenly think you have it.  

 

4. 

A Job is trading time for money.

But your time — your life itself — is of immeasurable, incalculable value.

Your Job is something you do because you have to, to survive financially, pay the bills, feed the kids, pay the rent or the mortgage. 

Your Work is something you want to do, something you must do — so it is also something you do because in that sense you have to do. 

It’s something you “have” to do because it’s an expression of who you are.
It’s your contribution to the world. It’s the difference you make because you are you and because you can.

For example, a teacher has two basic jobs:

1) spend time in a room with people and

2) do paperwork.

Being in a classroom is how we know you are doing your job. The paperwork is how we know you did your Job.

A teacher’s Work on the other hand is growing people, inspiring them, helping them learn to learn, to love learning, to appreciate life, to contribute to the world, to experience the most of the world that they can, as richly as they can.

The “Dignity of Labour” is a myth.
It is born of a conspiracy cooked up by capital and colluded with by labour, probably beginning during the Industrial Revolution, if not even earlier in the feudal era.

Capital needed — and still needs — workers to be as close to compliant slaves as possible.
Long hours, dirty work, few rights and low wages stopped people getting notions too far above themselves, or amassing the savings to escape.
It kept them needing the employer and the job.
Labour needed a social mythology to justify its powerless dependency — and the degradation of selling its soul to make others rich.

The solution was to frame labour as bestowing “dignity”. 

And eventually it became a fact instead of a pretence.
And it didn’t hurt to have the (obscenely rich) Church bestowing God’s blessing on the charade.

Blessed are the poor, the meek, the hungry, for they shall eventually get all the good stuff.
Just not in this life. 

As a result “early to bed and early to rise” assumed a moral character to the point where anyone who gets out of bed after 6am or goes to bed later than 10pm is committing a “sin”.

This is all bullshit. Any job in which you give over your labour and your time and your life to make someone else rich is shameful, degrading and humiliating and not dignified at all. It would be a sin if there were such a thing.  

If there were such a thing it would be a sin not to do Your Work, the Work you must do, the Work you love.

Be the person you are who makes a difference in the world.  

 

5. 

Great leaders (and managers) don’t manage people (or boss them).

Leaders manage outcomes.
They do this by facilitating people in doing what they know how to do — which, after all, is why they were employed in the first place — and in developing skills to do it better.

Leaders share a vision which inspires and engages.
They provide meaningful goals and engage their colleagues in the value of the work they do.

People who work for coercive managers do the least they can in order to keep their jobs.
They have low job satisfaction and low productivity because they don’t own the work they do.

People who work for inspiring managers do the most they can because they want to and they want to because they own their work and they know why it matters.

That is why they have such great work satisfaction. And that is why they stay.

 

Most people want to do a good job.

A good manager doesn’t have to force people to do their best.

A good manager knows to get out of the way of people doing their best.

 

Almost everyone wants to do the best work they can. 

Thank you for reading this far!  You might think producing a post like this takes a bit of work. 
It does! If you’ve appreciated it you might consider encouraging me. ( We all like validation! )   

Buy Me A Coffee

All posts

Categories

You might also like:

The Man of Mode

  or Sir Fopling Flutter – “God Almighty’s Fool”    Most modern wits such monstrous fools have shown, They seem’d not of heaven’s making, but their own. Those nauseous harlequins in farce may pass, But there goes more to a substantial ass; Something of man...

Rentier Socialists

  Not Gough in his heyday    J ust (sorry) Sir Roger thinks IT’S TIME to refer back to the recent squabble about certain t-shirts and heap some shit on those who assert ownership of the commonly used English phrase “It’s time”. Universities once — in all the...

The Real Anarchist

"I'm a Leninist" *   Trump has branded democrats and protestors as terrorists and also as anarchists. And because he likes the wacko Q narrative  - or likes to use it to manipulate his stupid base -  he sees the dark agents of doom in every corner. But...

Joan Sutherland and Me

  Vale Saint Joan    ir Roger wishes to make a special personal note of his sadness at the death, of La Stupenda, Dame Joan Sutherland; the loss of one of the truly greats. Her career properly began when “she won a two-year scholarship for...

Millennial Jubilation

   1,000     oday, Sir Roger celebrates his 1,000th post in 1277 days – or exactly 3½ years – since the inaugural, ungainly, embarrassing post – Minister von Rock Opens Australian Refujesus Exhibition – on 15 October 2006. Since then...

Porter Loo

The GuardianWhen Christian Is a Dirty Word   This won't take long. The Department of Home Affairs ("the Potatocracy")  stirringly asserts that people love to come to Australia because:  " ​​​​​​​​Australian values are based on freedom, respect, fairness and...

Sacrifice?

Can we just say to all the politicians who pompously intone the word “sacrifice” over the freshly dead bodies of Australian soldiers:   BULLSHIT! WEASEL! UNSPEAK!   Rudd His sacrifice will not be forgotten.” Turnbull:...

Freedom of Speech and APEC

Do Australians have freedom of speech? o Australians have freedom of speech? And, if so, was that freedom of speech illegally curtailed by the Howard government and the NSW government during APEC? IANAL but it seems so. Freedom of speech is not a...

Don’t you understand, John?

It wasn't about David Hicks: How Howard fucked himself whether Hicks came home or not.   icks might go away out of the political limelight but the way Howard has treated him will be the reason Howard loses the next election. If he does, Howard...

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

  This is not for you   eally. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and...

The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock

An Unfinished Canvas hey had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them… Between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes… And they became forever invisible and they entered...

Such Is Life

"Unemployed at last!"    e think this is the best Australian novel ever written. Yes, we know there are many contenders and perhaps The Tree of Man comes a close second. But to us, at least, Such Is Life by “Tom Collins” (Joseph Furphy),...

You Are a Threat to US Security

Boulleda HadjIf you can use a computer, you are a threat to the United States    elissa Hoffer is one of those lawyers intentionally slandered in January by Charles Stimson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, the subject of our...

Black Breath of the Nazgûl

AKA Phillip Ruddock  AKA 'Dock Vader How dare ordinary 'people' have "views!"    sked on Southern Cross radio whether the case was a mess, he replied: "No, what I think has happened is that people who have views about the nature of the law are...

Let Us Prey

Sunday Sacrilege — Early Edition       Leader of the World’s Largest Organised Paedophile Ring Visits Britain he leader of the world’s largest organised ring of paedophiles has been greeted by Queen Elizabeth with all the courtesy...

Tony Blair: All the Perfumes of Arabia

 Doctor: What is it he does now? Look, how he rubs his hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom’d action with him, to seem thus washing his hands. Foul Whisp'rings Are Abroad   S ir Roger has been listening and reading about Celebrity War Criminal Tony Blair’s 720 page...

Chateau Quelquechose

  Gone out the window   e were on the train this morning and for the first time in a long time noticed the truly stuffed in our society and how comprehensively invisible they are to most of us. “Stuffed” in the bad way, not 'stuffed' like...

Pardon Us – We Missed the Logic

We’re just a bit confused    r Haneef has been charged with recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation (to wit, a sim card). The alleged recklessness occurred in the UK. It did not take place in Australia. There is no...

Big Bang Time Free Willy

Watch Time Disappear  When Sir Roger was a young man (yes), his university offered a soft course for the scientifically inquisitive but mathematically challenged called The History and Philosophy of Science. Naturally this was universally and derogatorily referred to...

Passionate Indifference

Indonesian war crime     SW Deputy Coroner, Dorelle Pinch, this week found that the newsmen known as the Balibo Five were deliberately killed by Indonesian forces 32 years ago to cover up the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.   She has...

Let Them Eat Yellowcake

Carlo Bonini           STATE OF THE UNION 2003: " Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa." Or not ...   Well, as Bill Moyers reminds us, it wasn’t true. It was all a forgery, perpetrated in Rome. And Carlo Bonini, the Italian...

We Came For Peace

“We came for peace,” said the commando, one of the first Israeli soldiers to board the Mavi Marmara. ”They came for war.” ow you can tell "we came for peace" is that we came in the dark of night in warships and armed rigid-hulled inflatable boats,...

Denying Gay Marriage for Power’s Sake

Sir Roger does not wish to marry a man but . . .   o put it another way, while Sir Roger and Dorothy have many good friends in common, Dorothy and Sir Roger are not Facebook buddies. And Sir Roger does not think that his personal preference...

Even Worse Than Terrorism

“The supreme international crime”    efinitions of terrorism in western countries are remarkably similar. According to Chomsky, writing in 2006, official definitions include that terrorism is the calculated use of violence or...

Sex Romp or Sex Scandal?

Matthew Johns   o this time it’s the turn of Matthew Johns, poster boy for Rugby League – the second official poster boy for Rugby League to be shamed within weeks – and regular on the cross-dressing Footy Show. When I was eleven years old my...

Émile Zola

  “ It is a crime to lie to the public ”   o in the Cimitière Montmartre Sir Roger found one of his heroes. Émile Zola That is to say, he found the memorial. He (Zola that is) is interred at the Panthéon. Why a hero? Amongst his many...

Loose Ends, Bad Ends

   Loose ends:   ‘Lying’ Downer, the Minister for opening his mouth and seeing what comes out, denying everything on principal and making it up as he goes ”  has rejected claims of a major connection between opium production in Afghanistan and funding of the...

Scott Morrison’s Ghastly Apparition

  Auschwitz in the morning    ir Roger is having a short break from the hard work of watching his serfs tiling the fields, shaving the sheep and milking the bulls or whatever they do. He has tried to fit in some self-improving rest and recreation...

Pinter

Study of Pinter by Reginald Gray, 2007Vale! you grumpy old genius 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008   An enormous loss to literature, the stage, the arts, to humanity and to breaking all the rules. We think the best way we can to express our gratitude and to...

Spelling It Out

  Okay, no surprise… The Bush White House lied to the American people. …Except that one of the people who knew it at the time, a US Senator, has dropped a “Bombshell on the Senate Floor”. o here it is at last. Not the smoking gun we had before...

0 Comments