Sufficient affluence/sustainable economy: Economics for everyone (episode eleven)
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Interaction with Others
• Be peaceful: Peace of mind prevents stress and anxiety from taking root in ourselves because this peace makes our minds calm. Furthermore, peace may awaken our inner strength and confidence as it helps us to connect better with those around us.
• Be kind: Kindness provides an attractor by which others seek us. When we show kindness to others, it makes them happy. As a result, the more kindness that we can show to others, the more that happiness will come into our lives.
• Be accepting: Acceptance requires that we become cognizant of a situation without attempting to change it or to protest it. Our self-acceptance allows us to acknowledge and to love ourselves as the people we are. Accepting, appreciating, validating, and supporting who we become in the moment helps to form our inner agreement.
• Forgive: Forgiveness constitutes the intentional, voluntary process by which we change feelings and attitudes concerning an offense. Refusal to forgive does not empower us; rather, it enslaves us. Through the practice of forgiveness, we learn to let go of negative emotions such as vengefulness and to develop an increased ability to wish our offender well.
• Respect everyone: When we treat everyone whom we encounter with respect and courtesy, we help our local, national, and global societies to function smoothly. The act of respect includes being respectful to people whom we perceive as different from us because we do not possess a clear understanding of them.
• Respect the rights of others: Given a belief in the personal and property rights of others, respect constitutes a fundamental attribute for getting along with one another. Through a harmony of positive interaction and respect, all of us may feel valued, safe, and secure.
• Speak positively: When we speak of others, negative attitudes and conversations erupt like diseases, which devour the essence of being in harmony with others as well as in ourselves. When directed within a group, positive-speak helps everyone to unite while negative-speak alienates and destroys the group.
• Speak sincerely: When we know and understand right from wrong, sincere speech helps us to do what we say while avoiding the opposite. Speaking with sincerity constitutes a bold though arduous path to moral perfection.
• Speak with good intent: We live in a communication-saturated world. As a result, the majority of messages that we send personally or through various technologies are misunderstood, misinterpreted, or disregarded. Effective human beings require effective communication. Speaking or writing less but with good intent often results in words that have a greater impact.
• Share fairly: Our planet contains scarce resources that spread across the world in greater or lesser degrees of equanimity. We may mark a fair share through impartiality and honesty that reflects the economics of freedom from prejudice, favoritism, and unfair self-interest.
Interaction within the Social Community
• Offer words of good intent: Given situations involving great struggle, we may offer words that we would want others to say to us in such situations. These words of good intent help us to perceive those whom we are confronting as brave, enduring, honorable, sincere, and loyal to their cause.
• Advance by our abilities: Periodically, we further develop our integrity by contemplating our accomplishments. In doing so, we may review our lives as successful up to that moment. However, if we view our lives as unproductive or unaccomplished in important ways, we may develop a dissatisfaction that leads to depression and hopelessness. We then may choose to develop new goals and behaviors in order to change our lives in a positive way.
• Achieve with integrity: Integrity serves us in our maintenance of self-identity. As such, the virtue of integrity contributes to a moral purpose. Our resulting value systems provide frameworks within ourselves upon which each of us acts expectedly and consistently.
• Give gratitude that affirms: We benefit from gratitude because it provides an affirmation of goodness in the world and the benefits that we have received. In doing so, we acknowledge the higher powers and the other human beings that help us to achieve this goodness.
• Relate to one another in peace: Peaceful actions form the path to freedom and happiness among people. For example, when nations cooperate willingly in a way that prevents warfare, we sense the hope for world peace. Within a small organization such as a Law firm or a Jazz group, we may sense the prospect for its survival and prosperity.
• Invoke laughter: Humor heals. The gesture of human laughter may begin as one of shared relief after the passing of danger. Laughter may indicate trust in our companions. Also, it may diminish the suffering that we experience from traumatic losses.
• Spread joy: Joy fills the hearts of all who encounter it. A smile, a gentle word, or the smallest act of caring can turn around life while creating a greater cycle of goodwill. A few kind words in a line at the bank or to a cashier can create joy that spreads.
• Give blessings: Bestowments of blessings infuse us with a higher will and a universal consciousness. Often, we associate blessings with deific experiences of goodness that flow from a comprehensively universal cosmic wholeness.
• Do good: Ultimately, each of us develops our own code of ethics that extends beyond our dedication to specific ideologies or sets of rules. Doing good thus constitutes all actions that we find as more complicated than just being compassionate. Also, “doing good” involves offering honest and helpful support to other people.
The Higher and Larger Community
• Engage in compassionate communication: When we speak honestly, we may transform criticism and blame into understanding while breaking patterns of thought that lead us to anger and depression. Such communication helps us to create more vibrant relationships in which we base mutual respect and goodwill.
• Be objective to all opinions: When we listen to opposing opinions, we may respond subjectively based upon our own judgments, viewpoints, or statements about the matters in question. We then form our own opinion. Such an opinion supported by facts becomes an argument. However, different individuals may draw opposing opinions from the same set of facts, though these facts may support one opinion better than another. Therefore, we tend to consider collective or professional opinions as those that meet higher standards because they substantiate a viewpoint.
• Preserve freedom of speech: The security of the world depends on the freedom of both speech and the media through which we communicate. When we permit free expression, the truth may resist the force of uninformed public opinion.
• Create harmony: In peace, we find more than the absence of war. Peace constitutes harmony. By focusing on a complete harmony of thought, word, and deed, each of these factors turns to wellness through purification of thought.
• Achieve a focused and transparent unity: Focus, preparation, transparency, and continued determination allow us to achieve our best performance in the world. Meanwhile, we need to remember that political character, which often is secretive, does not affect unity because the nature of unity is transparent.
Therefore, all of us benefit from our willingness to invite others to join us as one.
In Respect to Ecology and the Environment
• Care for the planet on which we live: When we care for our Earth, we need to remember that we have dominion but not control over it. We neither have the moral right nor the technical ability to exercise complete regulation or exploitation of our planetary resources. As the current dominant species, we are stewards of the Earth. By our nature, we have inherited the responsibility to guard and protect our planet.
• Honor animal, vegetable, and mineral: We also need to respect all of the elements of nature because of their inherent value and equality. As humans, we seem to have forgotten our place in the food chain and our responsibility for dominion that we once practiced on this planet. Ethical stewardship involves the protection of our planet from unnecessary exploitation and suffering by both ourselves and others.
The Highest Level of Consciousness
• Respect all sacred sites: We need to recognize that we enjoy many paths to the attainment of higher truth and consciousness. Our ancestors recorded the wisdom of the ages at places where they sensed the interaction of the divine and human. Generally, most humans have respected these sites since antiquity. However, we have witnessed situations in recent times in which these sites have suffered the threats of desecration and destruction. As stewards of the planet, we have the responsibility to respect these places and to keep them intact.
• Praise deity: Whatever we may perceive as “deity” from our varied vantage points of perception and traditions of belief, deity provides recognition of the All that resides within us and beyond us. As described in ancient teachings, the All is more complex than simply the total of the universe. In modern studies, we refer to this mystery as Synergy. Though we experience life on Earth within bounded time and space, our moment and place rest within unbounded eternity and infinity.
• Embrace the all: A Hermetic maxim states, “While All is in the All, it is equally true that the All is in All.” By embracing All, we accept the Absolute, Creator, Deity, and Great Spirit as one.
• Affirm sacredness: Universal life is sacrosanct. Everything within the experience of life interconnects. Spirituality, Law, and Economics intertwine. Indigenous people have long referred to this belief as “the Earth Ethic.” When we recognize that the Earth, Sea, and Air are sacred, we become one with the All.
The wrap
We hope that the above exercise has provided our readership with a deeper understanding of the factors of ethical behavior. This subject is essential since it is at the core of a successful law firm and, on a larger scale, to the sustainment and growth of humanity itself. Therefore, we encourage our readers to refer to the exercises in this episode on a regular basis and to apply them not only to their businesses but to their daily lives. The result could be better businesses and a better world.
—John F. Sase, Ph.D.
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Dr. John F. Sase teaches Economics at Wayne State University and has practiced Forensic and Investigative Economics for twenty years. He earned a combined M.A. in Economics and an MBA at the University of Detroit, followed by a Ph.D. in Economics from Wayne State University. He is a graduate of the University of Detroit Jesuit High School (www.saseassociates.com).
Gerard J. Senick is a freelance writer, editor, and musician. He earned his degree in English at the University of Detroit and was a supervisory editor at Gale Research Company (now Cengage) for over twenty years. Currently, he edits books for publication (www.senick-editing.com).
Julie G. Sase is a copyeditor, parent coach, and empath. She earned her degree in English at Marygrove College and her graduate certificate in Parent Coaching from Seattle Pacific University. Ms. Sase coaches clients, writes articles, and edits copy (royaloakparentcoaching.com).
