Men and Women Must Organise to Defend Their Families – Part 2
With so much at risk, what has stopped us from seeing we need to take family governance as seriously as we would take the governance of any business or corporation?
TED has become famous with the tagline ‘Ideas worth spreading.’ Today I will discuss a concept that could be tagged ‘Bad ideas worth challenging’.
Don’t Let Bad Ideas Destroy Your Home
The unfortunate truth is that for every simple and effective solution, there are usually at least ten bad ideas floating around out there. Even worse, when it comes to love, family, and the politics of governance in general, people tend to become emotionally attached to their bad ideas.
As clearly misguided and illogical as they are, bad ideas like, ‘All you need is love’ and ‘Mother/Father knows best’, are sometimes treated like the very meaning of life.
And when it comes to the politics of governance, how emotional do people get about democracy?
Better than outright tyranny and oppression certainly, but let’s think how democracy might work in a family… of, say, five boys and one girl?
When it comes to love, family, and the politics of governance in general, people tend to become emotionally attached to their bad ideas.
How should we react when decisions made in a family like this, based on majority rules, leave one person’s needs unmet almost every time?
The truth is that organisations comprised of members with differing needs and unequal status cannot be responsibly run on a majority rules basis.
That’s just business.
But many of us feel just as emotional about democracy as we do about love.
They Give Love a Bad Name
Once we talk about love, all sense and reason leave the building.
Let’s look, for instance, at just a sample of the horrific ideas romanticism has unleashed on the world…
Ideas that glorify vices such as self-indulgence and self-pity.
Like there is something sublime or mystical in a couple dying together, or noble in a person pining their way to an early grave because of a broken heart.
Ideas the most famous of the German romantics, Wagner and Goethe themselves, by the end of their lives were mortified to have spawned.
Once we talk about love, all sense and reason leave the building.
The play Romeo and Juliet would have been considered a tragedy, not a romance before Wagner wrote an opera that infected the world with one of these truly bad ideas.
Even when we understand logically that terrible idea like these should not interfere with decision-making we find them hard to let go of because we feel emotional about them.
Defend yourself against bad inner programming
When people become so emotionally attached to bad ideas they won’t allow them to be questioned—they become dangerous and not just bad.
So dangerous I have come to nickname these ‘bad programmes’ or ‘thought viruses’.
Once they begin controlling our actions, bad programmes act like malicious software–raising your inner demons.
Allowed to exist unchallenged, thought viruses create suffering:
- Causing us to lose our natural desire to cooperate
- Causing us to argue and fight
- Causing us to sometimes even sabotage the very things in our life we value more than anything
It is these thought viruses (and the inner demons they raise) that stop us from seeing that quite obviously our families need the same type of well-developed governance structure any organisation of people requires.
Playing Good Fathers and Mothers Means Playing Honest
When we catch ourselves protecting our bad ideas for selfish reasons, this is when we can get a glimpse of our inner demons.
Let’s see if we can give this a try…
I want to help you uncover just one of your inner demons that I am going to call your ‘inner slacker’.
This is the part of you that doesn’t want to do your fair share of the work involved in being part of a well-governed family.
Just talk about putting a fair decision-making process in place and everyone’s ‘inner slacker’ in the family may get noisy. “Talking things through is boring” or “I don’t have time for all this!” will be only a couple of the objections you may have to deal with.
“Just lazy” you might say, and “Not really a demon,” but what is really at stake here and who is your ‘inner slacker’ fighting? Your conscience? Someone else in the family who will be forced to take up the workload?
Because of what is truly at stake, we have done a lot of work figuring out how you can overcome this resistance.
Why Families Should Play Fair
I am going to share with you now two of the simplest reasons families should take this challenge and learn to play fair in sharing the ‘family responsibility’ workload:
- To prevent your home from becoming a dump where everyone fights with one another
- To stop one or more members of your family from feeling tired and hard done by (which, let’s face it, will make them unpleasant to live with)
Some people with really sneaky ‘inner slackers’ are so desperate to avoid taking their share of the load, they will act tired and hard done by even when they are not, just to make it look like they are doing more than they really are.
The truth is that some ‘inner slackers’ will resort to just about anything.
But unless you want to end up living in a dump where everyone fights with one another, the work must get done by someone.
Genuinely tired and hard done by family members get angry, grumpy, make mistakes and are generally no fun to live with.
Rather than one or two members acting as mules in the family, consider what it would be like to live in a family that had a fresh team for every task.
Imagine the work getting done much faster (tired people work slowly) and everyone having a lot more fun.
Then when the work is done and no one feeling over-tired, picture the great atmosphere you will experience between all family members.
……
Utilitarian ideas such as the one I am offering here, are adult ideas. Ideas that require work and taking responsibility for oneself. Ideas that while obvious, are usually passed over in favour of the sugar-coated, dangerous and addictively fuzzy notions romanticism and our ‘inner slacker’ always have on offer.
It is these thought viruses which stop us seeing that quite obviously our families need the same type of well-developed roles and responsibilities (and systems of accountability) that any organisation of people requires.
The second chapter in our new programme, Good Fathers and Mothers, outlines more about these roadblocks to cooperation, with methods for identifying if they are currently causing havoc in your home and how to deal with them if they are.
Well-governed families are the cogs of a free world. We cannot leave them governed by romanticism and other bad programmes.
Like business, families should be run on teamwork
Today I am going to offer your family the opportunity to join us while we continue putting these structures in place in our homes.
We can support and hold each other accountable in the group pages, while also working together to improve our ideas.
Families need structure, not stress
- Detailed work setting up this type of structure? Sure.
- Something you can put in place on your own? Not likely.
- Worth the time and effort? Certainly.
Help We Need
– Families to play the game! Good Mothers and Fathers to be, who are prepared to work with us developing their own Family Operations Manual.
Read Part 3 and Join Our Programme
Other Help We Need
– Business coaches and trainers to add instructional and motivational videos to our member’s area. We will be happy to discuss ideas for the kind of content we need.
– An experienced project development manager who can also act as my PR assistant
– Sponsors
– Donations
If you are interested and can help with any of these, please contact me at kimcooper66@gmail.com and let us know briefly…
a. who you are
b. how you can help
c. why you want to help, and
d. what you hope we might offer in return
Someone will get back to you within 24 hours.
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