What I Have Come to Believe

From The Lake Hotel, Killarney, County Kerry, Republic of Ireland.

As this 9/11 approached, the start of my 90^th lap around the sun, I have been ruminating on what I have come to believe. Years ago, at General Mills, Bob Blake, our Director of Advertising, and Larry Gibson, our Director of Consumer Research, taught me that acts, i.e., one’s behaviors, result from one’s beliefs. Our questions then were what do they – our prospects – now believe and what do we want them to come to believe so that they will act as we wish? This pertained then and subsequently to purchases of packaged foods, toys and games; to selection of restaurants and to choice of hotels and resorts.

Now, the questions pertain to me.  

Well, what have I come to believe?  

I have come to believe 

• in ambiguity and uncertainty; that I can hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously.
• in a spirit that animates all forms of life in a web of inter-connections.
• that there are no intervening “Gods”; that I am responsible for intervening in the fates and forces, the karma, that appear to direct my life.
• that some life forms being more complicated, genetically and structurally, than others does not mean one form is any “higher” or superior.
• that a person is more than a bundle of cells; that perceptions, memories, likes and fears, and  relationships with others make a person.
• that other life forms can also achieve personhood.
• that it is wise to suspend disbelief.
• that conversation is a universal solvent.
• in community: I may not go as fast, but I go further.
• that empathy is the necessary “glue” of community.
• that my freedom of choice is not unconditionally free; it comes with obligations to my community and to my fellow man.
• that I should embrace diversity even to the detriment of efficiency.
• that we humans are wired to discriminate differences, to identify and classify; that my challenge is to learn to act despite my tendency to discriminate.
• that I should support reduction of inequality; extreme inequality breeds dysfunctional societies. 
• in equity: not necessarily equality, but fairness and accommodation to needs and talents so that access to education and economic opportunity is available to all.
• that governments can accomplish desirable things in concert with individuals and communities.  
• that corporations are accountable to more constituents than just shareholders. 
• in competitive capitalism with ground rules and constraints on concentration of wealth and  market power.
• that democracy means everyone has a voice, none more than another’s.
• that the real value of our Constitution and our rule of law is to protect minorities from diktats of the majority.
• that I must strive to do onto other persons as I would have them do onto me.
• in acknowledging, apologizing, and making amends for mistakes and wrongs done to others.
• that every enterprise and person should have a mission; that articulation of my mission provides   a guiding rudder to me.
• that affirmative evil exists and must be confronted by a community.
• in incrementalism; that radical change carries within it seeds of misjudgment, unintended             consequences, and resistance and rejection.
• that pragmatism trumps ideology or theory; I believe in what demonstrably works, step by step.
• in children: that we are guardians of their future opportunities; that we have borrowed this earth from them.
• in love.