Ralph Nader and I are on it about enoughness
That there should be some limit on avarice and accumulation
As I await the votes on the essay contest for a mailing I’ll send on Thursday with results, I’m in my regular Tuesday slot I was going to skip until I got this from James Fallows, who writes a Substack and is the real deal. He says this about a new book by Ralph Nader, a colleague of his from way back:
The Rebellious CEO: 12 LEADERS WHO DID IT RIGHT consists of 12 brief portraits of leaders from the business world who have used their influence for good. They have done so in environmental policy, and in fair treatment of unions and workers, and in making commerce fairer for the customer, and in exemplifying the idea of enough-ness: That there should be some limit on avarice and accumulation.
Lately the idea of enoughness has been coming up. The only time I’d heard it before was when I did some automatic writing in the ‘80s, that I called Inside the Intelligence, and thought I’d made that funny word up. When I looked up the section about enoughness to remind myself what I’d said, as always happens when I review this communication, I can’t believe I wrote down because it is so wise, I was impressed:
All of creation must rest in some single mechanism. All must be allowed to abide, the difficult embraced by the larger wholeness that allows it to work itself into the greater pattern of harmony and abundance.
May you so act -- not out of faith, but as the action of logic, of contribution to the design that can sustain and prosper a glorious creation. How dare your small ego name an ignoble game from what some force has unleashed that is everywhere such a miracle? Look at flowers, look at birds, at oceans, at trees, at pinky fingers. Miracles everywhere. Look at the human mind and its awesome capacity to understand and to erect. Look at love, at the welling from the unknown of the gift of a sweetness beyond your power to name. Shame on any creatures that defy their creation.
And even beyond the miracle, beyond any indication of direction, with no wisp or shred to guide or cling to, there is still you, choosing. So choose life. Choose the best idea. Act as if. Bury the argument in your creation. Make it an irrelevancy. Let us see the world that such individuated units of energy would create out of pure possibility.
At that fulcrum, that eye from which pure creation emanates, is enoughness. It is the same for every individual and also for the collective. Only as life is experienced as enough, can it be invented instead of coped with.
All here and nowness as breaths of the Tao are an emanation of that deepest resting of the soul in its own sufficiency, from which it came and from which it separates via desires, fears, angers, and other emotions contrary to the sufficiency of itself.
Think of humanity as a collective, forever grabbing, striking out, hiding. This comes from lack. If humanity came from enoughness, it would be in a mode of co-creation.
Suzanne, work this point. Learn all you can about it. It is a key to the organizing idea. Your world must understand that its goal must be to experience enoughness.
Enoughness lives in absolute acceptance. There must be a willingness to occupy all of self; self must keep fleshing out rather than reacting, incorporating rather than separating. Life is let in rather than yearned for. When you stand as all, more will come. Relax. Allow. Everything.
It will be necessary in your world for those whose physical survival needs are met to lead the way. Although positioning in enoughness is a function of the power of the mind, you cannot expect this awareness to birth in those who are preoccupied with physical survival.
So that as you accurately comprehend that this sufficiency consciousness is within the grasp of the mind itself, regardless of the conditions of one's physical life, do not expect this to be a formula that the world should or could employ at this time. Instead, advocate the transformation of the elite, where the understanding of enoughness makes them instruments of social justice, helping the have-nots come to a physical sufficiency that must underlie the greater consciousness in which they might next participate, a consciousness that the world must come to enjoy if your civilization is to survive.
This is not only a matter of humanitarian concern on the part of the haves, but goes to the core of their survival, as well. In fact, a world in breakdown threatens them greatly -- they will lose what they already have.
It is of central, vital necessity for the haves to take on this work. All is futile, for them and for everyone, if they do not. This understanding must be arrived at. Put full energy into bringing this about.
This is from the interview Fallows did with Nader. Nader says:
John Bogle started the mutual fund Vanguard, which broke the model of high fee mutual funds and saved hundreds of billions of dollars for investors. His last speech before he passed away, I think in 2019, was to say, “Look, Vanguard and Fidelity and a couple other mutual funds are too big. They're dominating the market. They are an antitrust danger.” Imagine that, his own creation, he said, is too big: BlackRock, $8 trillion, Vanguard, $7 trillion in assets and growing. And his last book was called Enough.
He paid himself modestly, and said, “You’ve got to set limits to your greed, to your avarice, because it'll devour you. It will bring the worst out of you, not the best out of you.” And where did he get the message? At a party in Long Island that a famous author attended someone came up to him and said, “See that guy over there. He makes so much money he could have made all the royalties you ever got in a couple days,” and the author said, “But I have something he'll never have, enough.”
That was the book he gave a copy of to every employee of Vanguard. He quotes the classics, he quotes the philosophers. I think it's one of the greatest business books ever written.
Not only is Fallows wonderful, so is The Rebellious CEO. What a swansong for Nader to give such an inspiration to the corporate world that locks us into what late-stage capitalism, that runs to the advantage of those already advantaged, mires us in. The examples in the book, that show it doesn’t have to be that way, could give corporate leaders an aha that would initiate the massive turnaround we need, not only for our prosperity but for our very survival, and could see Nader redeeming himself from having lost us a good President to having gained us a workable world.
And, in the spirit of our essay contest, my essay about how the world changed could start this way:
Looking back from 2050, when everyone is getting a fair shake, the serious impetus came from when, in 2024, I read a piece by longtime Ralph Nader collaborator, James Fallows, to whom I subscribed on Substack, about Nader’s new book telling how some rare corporate leaders had revolutionized their companies to become helpful to the world instead of exploiting it. That got me writing a Substack about what Fallows wrote that got him to recommend me to the Substack world. There are so many influential writers on Substack that when they spread what I wrote to the world at large, it was a subject the media picked up on and everyone became aware of, to where it got so many corporate leaders to make their companies instruments for the good, like the examples Nader gave, that most corporations are beloved now by a populace that has all the food, shelter, education, and health care they were so deprived of when companies had that old perspective of just serving investors’ bottom lines.
Hmmmm, I wonder, if I would have been in contention for a prize with this, if I could have won my own money????
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