(Fifth in a series of articles inspired by the ideas of Frithjof Bergmann. This article synthesizes Bergmann’s ideas with those of Charles Darwin, Emile Durkheim, and Jonathan Haidt).
Reading Time: 4 Minutes
Transcending the Poverty of Desire
“None of us really know what we really, really want to do. To be told this is reassuring. We easily surrender our desires. Outside forces almost always have the last word.”
FritHjof Bergmann1
Bergmann identified a “poverty of desire” that became evident when he asked workers to discern what they “really, really wanted to do”.2 While respondents found the question surprisingly difficult to answer, Bergmann identified several principles to facilitate the process:
- Acknowledge that posing the question is risky. It is risky to ask people what they really want to do because the only way some individuals can continue to work is to deny that they loathe the work they are currently doing.
- The methods used to discover what work people seriously want are direct. While finding what people really, really want to do is difficult – it requires patience and time – it is not complicated.
- Possibilities should be presented in an atmosphere of “cheerfulness”. “There are possibilities all around us…this justifies a different mood from the hopelessness and the depression that is in our culture so widespread.” The sense of possibility is important, “otherwise (we) will not even try; they will not even try to discover what they really, really want.” Bergmann designed a “Room of Possibilities” to embody exploration and openness to the imagination. It was created “as a response to skepticism and indifference and all other shadings of detachment and ennui.”
While Bergmann describes a process that was tailored to the individual, transcending the poverty of desire ultimately requires overcoming the limitations imposed by the individual’s sense of narrow self-interest:
“How does one arouse people from the crater hole of their Poverty of Desire? What is the ladder on which they will climb out of their apathy, their disillusionment, their despair? They must, however slowly, come to the conviction that they are part of something powerful, and impressive; part of a determined effort to make a vastly superior world…that could indeed succeed!” 3
Homo Duplex
“While a great deal of . . . behavior can be understood as thinly veiled ways of pursuing self-interest, it’s also true that people are groupish. We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers toward common goals so enthusiastically that it seems as if our minds were designed for teamwork. Our minds are selfish and groupish.”
Jonathan Haidt 4
In our hyper-individualistic society, it is easy to overlook the fact that the basic organizing unit for homo sapiens has been the family, not the individual. The family has served as a model for institutions (such as church and state) to which the individual has historically bound herself. Absolute freedom of the individual ineluctably leads to a sense of isolation and ennui:
Emile Durkheim 5
“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.”
While our potential to behave selfishly is regularly in evidence, our capacity to subordinate narrow self-interest to the group to which one belongs is equally striking. To overcome the rampant “skepticism, indifference and all other shadings of detachment and ennui” that Bergmann describes, history suggests we must find work that serves not only ourselves but that responds to “the conviction that we are part of something powerful (and) part of a determined effort to make a vastly superior world”. 6
The Origin of Groupishness
“We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.”
Jonathan Haidt7
From where does the need to bind ourselves to something larger and more powerful derive? Although natural selection works at the individual level and conditions us to act like “selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves”, human nature was also shaped by groups competing with other groups. When groups compete with other groups, competition favors groups composed of true team players who are willing to cooperate and work for the good of the group, even when individual members could do better by slacking, cheating, or leaving the group. These two processes – individual selection and group selection – pushed human nature in different directions and gave us the strange mix of selfishness and selflessness that we know today.
Charles Darwin8
“Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in (coherence) would spread and be victorious over other tribes.”
The most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat groups composed of selfish individualists. Hence, we don’t always behave selfishly or hypocritically. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. When these experiences occur, they are often among the most cherished of our lives.9
Notes:
1. Bergmann, Frijof. New Work New Culture. Work We Want and a Culture that Strengthens Us. Zero Books. 2018.
2. For a fuller description of the “Poverty of Desire”, see:
https://workosophy.org/2022/03/15/what-do-you-really-really-want-to-do/
3. Bergmann, Frijof. New Work New Culture. Work We Want and a Culture that Strengthens Us. Zero Books. 2018.
4. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage Books. New York. 2012.
5. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide. Free Press. New York. 1951/1897.
6. Bergmann, Frijof. New Work New Culture. Work We Want and a Culture that Strengthens Us. Zero Books. 2018.
7. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage Books. New York. 2012.
8. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Prometheus Books. Amherst, NY. 1998/1871.
9. The conditions that conduce to the creation of cooperative groups – i.e., that pull the “hive switch” – will be explored in future posts.
Workosophy 