Well, you'd expect a bit of 'the journey is the destination' from this old hippy, but if I can refine that a little...

• Everything you do should be self-measured in as wide a social/moral/ value system context as your intellect and your time allow. That means self-question everything you do, as much as you question anyone else.

• Life can be viewed at many magnifcations - your own, your social structure, your wider society/tribe, mankind, all carbon skeins. And each can be viewed at many time scales: today, tomorrow, next year, 10 years, 100 years etc. The moral metrics of context have to be compared over all these time scales. It's  a hell of a lot of work ;-)

• Conscience is the best guide. Does what I am doing intuitively feel right to me? Because this has major impact on personal happiness. Of course it is easy to fool your own conscience by habituation. If you've been watching TV every night for the last 10 years, for example, your conscience has been changed in ways that you are not aware.

• If your goal is simply to be a creative, informed, helpful, tolerant and respectful person (which I think all of us here try to be) then I think you can have success every day, and you can 'achieve what you set out to do', every day. And if everyone in the world had those aims (which partly lie at the core of most religions), then in a lovely utopian SOS kind of way - we would have no problems ;-)

• Winning involves losers. Competition creates losers. What we need is more cooperation, more sharing, and more thinking.

You can't be me, I'm taken

European Tribune - LQD: Is that It, then?

Is the solution to set ourselves unattainable goals, towards which we can only strive?

I agree only partially. I disagree with the word unattainable. If it is unattainable, why should we make an effort. I do believe, however, that we should have goals, some of them should be challenging to achieve, so that we have to grow and stretch on a personal level.

I often observe with clients, when they are depressed they can not see or imagine a future. Future is mostly goals and wishes. The moment they can see or imagine something that would be, on a personal level, worthwhile to achieve, they start to get motivated to make changes to achieve their goals. Most people who have no goals tend to move away from what they do not want - often in an chaotic and unsatisfying way.

I still like the metaphore of the donkey, which I think I mentioned before.
You can make the donkey move in two ways: 1. you beat it with a stick from behind and it will start moving or even running away from the stick. Or, 2. we can offer the donkey a carrot or piece of sugar and it will move toward it. In my opinion it feels better moving towards something, than moving away from something. :-)

great question...

i think its about two levels of narrative....to keep it cartoon-simple.

unless we manifested something better, we all are taught as youngsters the narrative that success determines social respect, and then vice-versa. success is most easily measured as financial success, natch.

some people work out a decent enough life on this level and see no need to scratch deeper, to have more Meaning etc, believing that if they can be respected and hold their heads up in the community, and be part of a working system that supports their family's well-being, there's no need for further ramifications.

some find this attitude leads to crisis, or perhaps some life-event rocks their world, and all of a sudden their previous attitude seems too self-serving, and they begin to look horizontally out to wider awareness, and vertically in terms of trying to achieve something extraordinary, something that would individuate them more, and give them more influence over events and people, than sitting in the relatively conventional safe zone for the rest of their lives, assuming they have that choice.

this is what i'd call a deeper narrative, one they need to become part of, in order not to feel frustrated at the life seen with new eyes as trite.

it ties in a lot with joseph cambell and the hero's myth.

no-one wants to lay dying, thinking of all the time they wasted...

of course there are a bunch of self-aggrandizing charlatans who will take full advantage of this, like most of the so-called 'self-help' industry, doing very well...

perhaps the profligacy and banality of these offerings are in direct ratio with how ungrounded a society has become.

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin

Count me on the wagon of those who do not understand why would someone want to be president for the sake of it.....

I can understnad it in small coutnires .. or in not completelyd eveloped countires where office means good life which is ahrd to get... but in GB...I always thought that if you are there it is because youw nat to change things...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

I think that Gordon's problem is that the concept of a Prime Minister he has is modelled on the era before the mass media. He is not comfortable on camera, he sounds false when answering questions, which makes him an unconvincing leader.

His model is Clement Attlee, who never explained, never appeared on telly, never said sorry. Just sat in number 10 with a talented team around him and re-configured Britain.

But we need different styles now and Gordon doesn't understand that. He also doesn't understand the job, the business of a leader is to lead. To get people to give him ideas and then put together teams to implement the best and most coherent of them. If he has a contribution, it is to create foundational purposes for the government.

Unfortunately he believes he must be on top of every minute aspect of policy. this was just about achievable as chancellor, it is impossible as PM

also, I think that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between his moral compass, which I genuinely believe is about helping the least advantaged, and his ideological drive which is as close to Friedman wealth capturing neo-liberalism as makes no difference. I don't think he understands there is no bridge between these two positions and trying to straddle them makes him look ridiculous and hypocritical.

keep to the Fen Causeway

There are two reasons Brown in particular and the New Labour project in general are in trouble.

First it is always difficult for the person who replaces a long term leader, when his party is still in office. There is a real risk of inheriting all the accumulated unresolved resentments at and problems of the previous leader, but not being perceived as a real change from him.

Secondly New Labour always had an emptiness at its core. It was about acquiring and retaining office by any means necessary, but it had no particular goal with what to do with power when it was obtained.

That is why Blair and now Brown like to promote tactics over strategy. Why they push so many fashionable right wing ideas. Why Blair compensated for his lack of domestic vision, by "liberal imperialism" abroad (especially when enabled by George W. Bush).

Gordon Brown having no real convictions in either domestic or foreign policy, is floundering in the top job. He announces goals such as ending child poverty or helping Africa. These are large, unspecific and unachievable aspirations, which are not really driving core policy.

There is a lack of a theme, more profound than elect us (since our aristocrats and middle class professionals are on the side of the people) rather than the Tory toffs (since their group of aristocrats and middle class professionals are opposed to ordinary, hardworking people). This sort of re-heated class warfare is ludicrous, especially since both parties have as their highest aspiration appealing to exactly the same group of swing voters with not very different policy agendas.

His biggest problem is that he's a political coward

Independent - Matthew Norman - Courage is knowing when to stand down

It was on 6 May 2007 that the world of letters greeted the official publication of Courage by Gordon Brown

Seldom since Sanity by the Emperor Caligula, Clemency by Judge Jeffreys, Chastity by Tallulah Bankhead, Desert Orienteering by Sir Mark Thatcher, Cleanliness by Swampy, Charm by Sir Alan Sugar and Perfect Pitch by Victoria Beckham has any title been so clumpingly obvious an invitation to this sort of witless satire. In a display of self-unawareness to leave you gasping for air, a man personified by his spinelessness chose to dwell in print on the personal heroes who allegedly shaped his world view and political perspective.

"What is it that makes some men and women take difficult decisions and do the right thing against the odds when easier and far less dangerous alternatives are open to them?" enticed the manufacturer's product description. "Why is it that some have the courage to dare?"

In the quest to unravel the mystery, Gordon examined eight 20th-century paradigms of moral bravery. Among the octet's dead were Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the 40th anniversaries of whose assassinations fell last month and fall next month respectively. The living included Nelson Mandela, who won the war to liberate his people, and Aung San Suu Kyi, still waging hers against that unspeakable Burmese regime.

 But the core quality that binds these four titanic figures, costing two their lives and obliging the other two to endure mental and physical torture, is their absolute refusal to compromise cherished principles by appeasing potentially lethal opposing interests..........

I wish I could say that this expression of rank cowardice (refusal to mmet Dalai Lama in Downing St) has the power to disgust, but it doesn't. There have been so many before, over such an extended period, that we are too inured to this Prime Minister's fatal flaw to react with more than a morose shrug. The first column I wrote for this newspaper, three and a half years ago, dwelt on his penchant for chickening out when offered the chance to finish off his predecessor, and the silly clucker has franked the form in sensational style since moving next door last June.

There is a world of difference between the stoical acceptance of personal tragedy - towering human quality though that is - and the ability to risk oblivion in the cause of sacred beliefs; between a passive form of valour and an active one. He has the former in spades, and not an iota of the latter.

keep to the Fen Causeway