Vitality

Earlier this week David Brooks, a moderate conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote how the health care debate is about values, namely two specific ones: security versus vitality. He presented those values as mutually exclusive at worst and like a soft balloon at best when it comes to health care specifically and the country in general. I’ll take the soft balloon analogy just to give him the benefit of the doubt. In that analogy, if you squeeze one end, you enhance the other. In any case, he sets up the classic false dichotomy or dialectic between two goods when there truly isn’t any at all. The country does not face a choice between security and vitality.
The premises he operates from are conservative: people are essentially lazy and are motivated by fear or need; necessity is the mother of invention; providing security undermines vitality in the individual and in the country. The philosophy borrows from the first Newtonian law of physics: objects stay at rest unless a force acts upon them to overcome their inertia.
What conservatives seem to forget, including David Brooks, is that an awful lot of accomplishment that occurs is motivated by desire to accomplish, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the need to create. All of those are best nurtured from a place of security where the essentials of life are provided for. In the world of conservatives, the starving artist always produces the best art.
For example, kids learn better when they have been provided breakfast. That’s been established as a fact, not a theory. Athletes perform better when the coach has made a decision that they are the starters. Entrepreneurs are more successful when they are fully capitalized, not when they are scrambling around looking for money.
I spent a part of my professional life coaching. The sport I loved most was rowing. What I observed over the nearly three decades I coached was that all boats went faster once I had determined the line-ups. In other words, once the oarsmen knew what seat they were occupying, the boat settled down and got faster. They became a team, pulling for each other and themselves, and the whole nearly always became greater than the sum of its parts. If I kept seat-racing well into the racing season (pitting one oarsman against another by having them switch seats from boat to boat and race over a fixed distance for time) both boats more often than not got slower rather than faster. The team psyche and commitment to each other was more important to outcome than whether or not I had actually assembled the individually strongest oarsmen in one boat. Chemistry seemed to transcend logic, and the chemistry came out of and produced the trust and commitment which teamwork becomes and is in a beautiful example of micro- evolution.
I would contend that providing health care for all Americans would produce a more vital and vibrant work force, a more focused managerial workforce, and a more vital, dynamic economy. Taking that one ball (health care) out of the juggling act for everyone would allow all of us to focus more on the love of work for the sake of accomplishment rather than choosing a company for employment because it has good health benefits. How many disgruntled workers are doing a job they hate only because it offers a good health care program? Is that any way to manage or motivate a work force? Talk about productivity. Have you ever seem a winning team that hates what it does but does it anyway for the money? I think not. If they don’t love the sport first and the money second, they don’t win.
Most of whatever has been accomplished or invented has been done so out of love, not need. If necessity is the mother of invention, the father is love of inventing (What a role reversal that is!). A certain amount of security is necessary for productivity to occur. Encouraging teamwork in the workplace can only enhance productivity, not detract from it. And people can feel a part of a team only if there is a certain amount of security in place: sinecure, no; but security, yes. The guy who invented Microsoft did so out of his parents’ garage; the guys who invented Google did so out of their dorm rooms at Stanford. They didn’t have to scrounge for their own health benefits or put food on their tables; they came from families with means. They had more than a basic sense of security.
And that brings me to dispel the still existent myth of the self-made man, the myth that conservatives will seemingly believe in as long as the last one is standing. Guess what: there is no such thing. Every man who ever made it big has a lot of folks to thank, like it or not. The myth of the self-made man is easily dismissed by John Donne’s famous line, “No man is an island” no matter how hard conservatives work to leave you “on your own.”
Security is the basis for vitality, and security is a social concept, not an individual one. We can only be secure in relation to others. Once that is established, we can then be full of vitality and energy because we have nothing vital to lose. We can go on offense rather than remain stuck in a defensive mode of thinking. In short, security provides the defense from which we can launch our offense. The Japanese figured that out a long time ago, and their factories are the model of efficiency, vitality, teamwork, and security. A new idea or improvement can come from anywhere in the workforce, not just from the top down.
Conservatives would do well to begin looking at what actually works, rather than rely on old aphorisms that have been handed down from generation to generation like the neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” who won’t go behind the saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”