Ode to Audacity

“Quantum potes, tantum aude”, As much as you can, so much you should dare. It is a sentence written around 1264 by Thomas Aquinas in his sequence  Lauda Sion Salvatorem. In the next sentence he explains the reason why: “because you can never praise God enough”. Thomas suggests it takes a certain audacity –against God and man- to pay a tribute to God. But he also suggests that God likes those who dare, those who show audacity.

Medieval man was not so different from postmodern man. Perhaps all virtues seemed more divine in those days, but most of them still stand today. We feel intuitively that audacity has a certain value, as it is also related to courage. If we don’t dare, we achieve less than we can, and this feels like a sin, although we don’t call it a sin anymore. Sometimes, audacity requires the fight against fear. Darers deserve praise. Entrepreneurs accept high mental risks and deserve to be praised by society. There is however an unclear boundary between audacity and recklessness. According to Thomas Aquinas, you should only dare as much as you can. Yet audacity is often needed when you can’t know very well what you can, and our aviation pioneers could not have brought us the wonders of flying without a certain recklessness.

Our society has paradoxically become extremely risk-averse in a number of things. We could even discern a certain lethargy in a number of areas, probably because we have become too attached to our image and to a number of realisations of the last century, and we refuse to adapt to new times. We tend to draw all benefits of the modern world to ourselves, yet at the same we push back all risks of modern life to the public authorities, who are always to blame if something bad happens. We fail to see our world will only be safe with world-wide social justice.

Let us therefore show audacity and courage in realising this worldwide social justice. Perhaps our audacity will encounter resistance – also within ourselves – but it will finally deserve praise and God will like it, according to Thomas Aquinas.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Many people know this fairy tale from the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Two swindlers succeed in convincing the emperor, his court and the whole country that they made magic clothes for the emperor, clothes which are invisible for stupid, incompetent people. All countrymen are afraid to be unmasked as stupid and stand in awe for the emperor’s new clothes. Except one little boy who was unaware of the magic property of the clothes and shouts in the crowd that the emperor is not wearing any clothes at all.

We may identify ourselves with the cheering people, who turn with the wind when suddenly everybody else does. This is the so-called mainstream. We should identify ourselves with the emperor. No one really escapes from the position of the emperor. Our idleness and fear of appearing stupid continuously blackmail our reason. This doesn’t happen occasionally, it happens continuously. We are forced to live a life of rational denial and self-deceit as we are blackmailed by others on our intellectual capacities. This, in a certain way, tells us something about society as a whole. Our society is trapped in a number of self-constructed paradigms. Some of these paradigms are absolutely foolish. We don’t question them as we don’t want to be considered a fool. How can we get rid of these paradigms? We need to listen to ignorant little boys and girls.

Let me give some examples of foolish paradigms. We all believe that working from nine to five is actually a smart thing to do. We drive ourselves, always at the same time into massive traffic jams. Is that so smart? All these office jobs, are they really so meaningful that we all have to be there at the same time? Is it really needed that we all drive hundreds of kilometres, daily, alone, crossing thousands of people who do the same in the opposite direction? When vacation time starts, we drive ourselves into traffic jams on the highways to the south, every year again. Is that a smart thing to do? Or we take the plane and spend our precious free time in front of security gates at the airport? I want to be the little boy who says this is not smart.

The Emperor’s New Clothes  was wonderfully narrated and sung by Danny Kay in his movie Hans Christian Andersen and it was recorded for eternity on this wonderful vinyl record, which I remember so well from my childhood. Enjoy the song.

Picture: from the book Andersens Sprookjesschat, Zuid-Nederlandse Uitgeverij – Antwerpen/Amsterdam 1966

Believe in Personal Progress

When we are young, we are usually highly motivated to study new things. This may be applicable to purely scientific knowledge, languages, soft skills, physical performance, power and endurance. When you get somewhat older, say +50 years, you might be tempted to think that such high investment in personal progress makes less sense. Why is that? Because the ROI, the Return on Investment seems to go down with age. The investment tends to go up, as the required effort seems to increase with age. At the same time, the direct benefit tends to go down, as the remaining time to benefit from the acquired skills goes down as well. We tend to think: this is not going to work and if it does, it will not bring anything.

Recently, we had the pleasure of receiving training from a Shaolin monk. At some point in time, we stood in awe for the exceptional skills he had acquired in his life through physical exercise. He pointed out: even if you don’t believe it, if you practice, you will increase in strength, whether you like it or not and whether you believe it or not. Practising increases your strength, independent of your belief whether your strength will finally increase. This is an interesting thought.

So it could be worthwhile to abandon all cynicism and worrying and acquire new capabilities altogether. We will benefit from it, even if we don’t notice at the beginning. We may notice after a month or a year, that we have increased our capabilities, whether we believed we could do it or not.

I refer to my earlier blog: “Belief creates the actual Fact”, “The Virtue of Patience and the 10 000 hour Rule” and "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano".

Picture: Seneca statue in Cordoba, Spain

Hygge or hyperactivity?

The word Hygge became popular in Denmark to indicate a Danish flavour of cosiness and relaxing lifestyle. It can be a social sense of togetherness -spending time together-, or it can be a more solitary version with books, sofas, fireplaces, cats and cups of tea. Hygge expresses a kind of well-being, of harmony with other people without looking at the clock. Hygge may well be the opposite of hastening and hyperactivity.

Hygge was originally a Norwegian word, which meant something like consoling or comforting. It is related to an English word we all like: to hug: to embrace, literally: to build a fence or form a hedge ('haga') around someone. (The word Hygge is therefore etymologically related to my family name Lahaye.)

It is clear that there is a growing market for Hygge. We have all become restless and hyperactive. The reason may be the earlier discussed Beschleunigung of life. Hyperactivity brings us in a vicious circle. It creates restlessness and stress. We long so much for rest that we become restless in trying to achieve it. We can’t even wait for anything anymore. As soon as we are kept waiting, we take our smartphone and make other people wait for us.

Let us be restless in fighting hyperactivity and let us leave no opportunity unused to bring more Hygge in our daily life, be it with colleagues or with family members. Let us get rid of the smartphone and let us hug our dearest and nearest a little more. I refer to my earlier blog Lifestyle.

Crony Capitalism and Comrade Communism

In 1992, Francis Fukayama wrote about the end of history and the last man. His thesis was that liberal democracies and free market capitalism finally proved to be superior to other economic systems like communism and socialism. The background in which his essay was written, was the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, after President Gorbashev had conducted a policy of Glasnost and Perestroika in the moribund communist Soviet Union. Francis Fukayama could be considered the ultimate counterpart of another famous intellectual, Karl Marx, born 200 years ago in the town of Trier.

Francis Fukayama was not all wrong. In Europe, all countries have moved to some form of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, although not all problems are solved. China, which was originally a communist regime, has successfully introduced capitalist principles, but doesn’t embrace democracy yet. In fact, the current Chinese model is so successful, a Chinese man told me, that the people are anxious to embrace democracy.

On the other hand, Francis Fukayama could not be right either. One reason is cultural. We live in an age of postmodernism. Therefore, if someone claims to have found the ultimate economic and political system, he must be wrong. Postmodernism, born from the disappointments of the 20^th century, denies any of us the right to proclaim a superior system. A pessimistic postmodernism resides deeply in all intellectual thinking of our time. In a certain way, postmodernism proved its correctness by noting the American capitalism, the purest of all capitalist systems, has gone astray as well.

On the one hand, the USA suffered a lot from the major financial crises in the economy. On the other hand, now that its economy is slowly recovering, the country is paradoxically opting for a more protectionist policy. But there is much more reason to be concerned about capitalism. Capitalism often evolves in a direction of crony capitalism, with a lot of government involvement and with similar tendencies towards corruption as in the comrade communism, which was so well described in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Capitalism also tends to graze all green pastures, leaving nothing but deserts behind. Capitalism is very bad at protecting general interests like the environment. But this can also be said from communism.

It seems like postmodernism may have some truth in it. All economic systems seem to bite themselves in the tail after a while and for all economic systems,  some form of ‘reset’ is required, usually preceded by social revolt. This is well described in Tomas Sedlacek’s book the Economics of Good and Evil. Other essays about economy  can be found by clicking the economy label below.

Picture: House where Karl Marx was born, exactly 200 years ago, in Trier, Germany.

Visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center

This is a wonderful museum, next to Washington (Dulles) airport, a real child dream come true. I insert my best pictures. I'm well aware that the display of some of these machines may and should raise ambiguous feelings. The Enola Gay (picture 4) threw the first atomic bomb on Japan and it is really one of the major showpieces of this museum. It may inspire me to new blogs later. The song already exists.

I also refer to my blogs Ode to Aviation and Gute Technik ist immer schön.

The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker

The Effective Executive is perhaps the world’s most renowned management book and you will find plenty of references on the Internet. In this blog, I only wanted to share my favourite quotes:

• Establishing priorities, and concentrating your efforts on them, is a skill that requires foresight and courage.
•  There is one exception to the rule of building on strengths and covering weaknesses. Character and integrity do not accomplish anything by themselves. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.

I refer to my earlier blog: “Seven Golden Rules of Management” and “The Knowledge-Creating Company”.