And that’s the whole point that the overprotective program doesn’t care about your principles and your intentions. That when you feel a little something is a little bit at stake, a little bit of threat, it kicks in, it messes with you, drives you to behave in ways that you would probably never recommend to anyone else. And then it creates all of these consequences and it all happens like this. So that’s why I will assert at least that candor, that we all have the right to it, right to freely express ourselves, but also look at the consequences, everyone.
I think I’d also like to assert, I think it’s all of our responsibility to get to candor with each other and help other people do the same. Because look at the, I mean, pretty destructive consequences for us as people and the things that we care about. And the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, perhaps the founders of modern day democracy. We have a republic, if we can keep it, that had a term for this called Parrhesia. It sounds like amnesia, but it means yes, to speak candidly, but it also implies not only the right to speak the truth, but an obligation to do it for the common good.
So these realizations, even realizing this will, I think it can help you to a degree, but any real skill, it takes development. So again, I’ll just remind you of the kind of free resources and just hit us up on the email. We’ll make sure you get them so you can continue developing yourself and please share it with other people. It’s free. I want to put this kind of hopefully valuable things out into the world. A couple of cautions before we close. One, while getting to candor does not guarantee that things will necessarily improve. I can’t promise that all the time. I have some scars in my back to prove it. More like emotional, but not getting to the candor guarantees they won’t.
And I was kind of thinking a lot about, is there one thing that I could say that might help that you could use to bootstrap yourself into kind of overcoming the overprotective pull of our programming? And there was this great guy, I’m going to call him Ed. He was a franchise head in the UK of a large pharmaceutical company that’s one of our clients. And this is what he said to me that really helped him, and I hope it helps you, perhaps the most powerful thing we can do is to treat every conversation we have with each other as a collaborative search for the truth, in order to do good in the world, and to do good for our fellow human beings. And perhaps if we can do that, all of us can make an even greater difference than we ever imagined.
