Right Livelihood
“Monks, these two people are hard to find in the world. Which two? The one who is first to do a kindness, and the one who is grateful for a kindness done and feels obligated to repay it. These two people are hard to find in the world.” ~ AN 2:118
Right Action connects directly with Right Livelihood, and lot of our actions are necessary ones for our survival. In many ways this is one of the most difficult to achieve in the Eightfold Path. Certainly living as a monk off of donations makes it easier to gain a sense of merit and a clear conscience, but what about all those people donating who are householders? Certainly, monks with a conscience will have to think of how the money of those philanthropists was earned. It’s all interdependent. Sadly, there is no pure religious community. This is another area where it’s next to impossible to avoid hypocrisy and contradiction. The difficulty is that in order for any business to do well, products have to be addictive in some way. They either provide pleasure or reduce pain. People can’t just shop once. Businesses need returning customers. Restaurants need regulars. Lenders need borrowers. Even if one is not a drug dealer or a sex worker, there’s still a sense of pimping, whoring, and stringing out with any financial endeavor. You need that other person to make the exchange, which is why exchanges are never really impersonal, they just seem that way, until they stop buying from you. People have limited energy and they have to trade energy with each other, including more skillful and less skillful energies trading efforts with each other. There’s exploitation, burnout, envy, resentment, and many hindrances to concentration and peacefulness. For many people, the problems of Wrong Livelihood lead them to pursue spirituality in the first place, including the Buddhist option. The late Rob Burbea as a teacher found that people “oftentimes…come to spiritual practice because, in our lives, we feel the pain of striving, of ambition, of driven-ness, of always trying to manipulate everything.”
Equanimity – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/12307/
Any economy is a labyrinth of complexity and by replacing barter with currency, there’s a relativity in how one treats money. It’s much more efficient than bartering, but there’s a blindness when qualitative aspects are effaced by bland monetary exchange. For many people, money is the end justifying the means so the mind will entertain short-cuts to ethics to make bank. Another difficulty is that supply is based on demand, so if a culture is rotten to the core, many of the jobs that are available support low vibration activities. A good example is a teetotaler who works out regularly at a gym, eats healthy, and finds that earning money as a bartender is much more accessible to him or her than many other jobs. This can be seen everywhere. In Western society, low vibration activities are considered okay as long as they don’t turn into addictions and they are dealt with moderately, but for people who have limited skill in gaining pleasure to regulate emotion, what is most accessible becomes a crutch.
Where Buddhism tries to steer people in a better path is to extend Right Action into Right Livelihood to clarify professions. One way to look at it is to look at the end goal of bliss and peace with thoughts of appreciation. “[Thinking,] ‘I have wealth earned through my efforts & enterprise, amassed through the strength of my arms and piled up through the sweat of my brow, righteous wealth righteously gained,’ he experiences bliss, experiences joy. This is called the bliss of having… [Thinking,] ‘Using the wealth earned through my efforts & enterprise, amassed through the strength of my arms and piled up through the sweat of my brow—righteous wealth righteously gained—I partake of my wealth & make merit.’ This is called the bliss of partaking…[Thinking,] ‘I owe nothing—large or small—to anyone at all.’ This is called the bliss of debtlessness…[Thinking,] ‘I am endowed with blameless bodily action, blameless verbal action, blameless mental action,’ he experiences bliss, experiences joy. This is called the bliss of blamelessness.”
One is to compare the money one gets with how honest the money was earned, how it was spent in a way that doesn’t tarnish merit, involves as little borrowing as possible, to reduce the weight of obligation, and that co-workers, employees, and employers where not exploited or cheated in anyway. Of course much of this is qualitative and both employee and employer will often disagree because the employer needs to make profit to pay for their risk-taking of their assets and debts they accumulated in order to take that risk, and employees want to be compensated in a competitive way but also to move beyond slave wages where one can save for a retirement, and to enjoy opportunities for rest and recreation. Co-workers also have to compete in a way that is based on skill and merit and not on cronyism, nepotism, race, gender, sexual orientation, and many lists of bigotry. I’m sure readers and listeners are chuckling at how naïve this is, but Buddhism is a religion and religions are all about different forms of emotional purification and they tend towards the ideal. Worldly atheistic types are more cynical and find the world absurd and meaningless. Religious types like idealism more because it’s a goal to aim at. They are attracted to the transcendent.
Bhikkhu Bodhi interprets that “The Buddha teaches that wealth should be gained in accordance with certain standards. One should acquire it only by legal means, not illegally; one should acquire it peacefully, without coercion or violence; one should acquire it honestly, not by trickery or deceit; and one should acquire it in ways which do not entail harm and suffering for others. The Buddha mentions five specific kinds of livelihood which bring harm to others and are therefore to be avoided: dealing in weapons, in living beings (including raising animals for slaughter as well as slave trade and prostitution), in meat production and butchery, in poisons, and in intoxicants. He further names several dishonest means of gaining wealth which fall under wrong livelihood: practicing deceit, treachery, soothsaying, trickery, and usury. Obviously any occupation that requires violation of right speech and right action is a wrong form of livelihood, but other occupations, such as selling weapons or intoxicants, may not violate those factors and yet be wrong because of their consequences for others.”
Right here, usury is lending. Lending is a big part of any economy and without the ability to borrow there would be less risk taking and less dynamism as people try to increase their wealth and standing in society within crucial time spans to allow parenting and graceful aging. Butchery and meat production exist because humans are omnivorous animals, but it’s true that in the modern world there are many vegetarian options. With alcohol, many partake in moderation, but on the other hand there is a lot of alcoholism where lives are completely destroyed with total dependency. The slave trade and prostitution still continue to this day and are actually a thriving business with desperate immigrants being a target, and selling weapons will always have customers when there are wars and there is a reality that property has to be defended from theft. Sales jobs often involve pushing the edge of legitimate sales to increasing impulse buying, a kind of deceit. Any so called professionals are closer to soothsayers if they provide very little or no value for the money they charge. There are also government entities involved in all these activities and partake of these activities in a covert “non-profit style” that disguises qualitative forms of profit in generous benefits and quantitative advantages in remuneration in the form of higher than market rate salaries and pension annuities that most people in the marketplace could hardly save in a lifetime to earn in dividends and interest payments. There is also excessive taxation, double taxation, and the ability to use state powers to engage in kleptomania as could be seen with NAZISM and Communism. Governments can also engage in wars where the powerless and desperate are on the frontline and the leaders command from a safe distance.
Regardless of left-wing and right-wing politics, one can engage in Wrong Livelihood quite easily and very unconsciously, especially with advanced technology the Buddha never experienced. Mass production is a great example. The lesson is that Right Livelihood in the modern world, where technology makes things cheaper and moves products ever closer to the free column, which creates a demand for them to be accessible for free or near free, the line of property and collectivism blurs with the increasing efficiency. The righteous work and merit dilutes in the modern world. Even the “sweat” is replaced by mental burnout. It’s not a coincidence that socialism is more entrenched as technology advances and Capitalism and Socialism are more intertwined than politicians betray. As technology advances, human livelihood also gets replaced where the balance of renting and collecting in economics and in psychology shifts towards renting because consumers need to be producers to earn. In order for individuals to continue to consume in an environment where technology replaces the human, they have to have government distribution programs and renting to offset their under employment and lower wages. The difficulty of this Great Reset, as it is often called, is the fact that renters STILL OWN what they are renting, and the freedom of ownership gives them leverage to control renters, meaning they can condition people by withholding goods and partake in their own power to exploit people through onerous regulations. This means government rule by fiat with big corporations, that also fund politicians, and the professional classes, have the leverage to enslave the renters. This increases the sense of entitlement and amplifies desperate desires to be a kleptomaniac and join extreme politics to bridge the gap. Any solution from any political party would have to again, provide freedom for people from restrictions and regulations to make their own choices and mistakes or else their sense of agency, or True Self in psychoanalysis, will be constricted and miserable. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about this in my episode of Ikigai, and what happens to people when they are overly regulated and can’t experience Flow states. In the end, the rulers will look at the powerless in a dehumanized way and treat them as slaves or expendable. Their energy will be limited on how much abundance they will allow renters vs. what they accumulate for themselves. Whether I’m renting or buying I need to have SOME CHOICES over property in order to get repeated SATISFACTION out of it. There also has to be restrictions on the power of owners because all the psychology I’ve read shows that human nature is unempathetic towards the less powerful regardless of political stripe.
How the Left was Lost – Bill Maher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdJOLMgY4p0
San Francisco has become a Shoplifter’s Paradise – WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-shoplifters-theft-walgreens-decriminalized-11634678239
In Power and the Objectification of Social Targets by Gruenfeld, Inesi, Magee, & Galinsky, “the process of objectification is thought to involve a kind of instrumental fragmentation in social perception, the splitting of a whole person into parts that serve specific goals and functions for
the observer…Marx argued, for example, that under capitalism, workers are valued by their employers, and even come to see themselves, in terms of what they produce and the value of those products to others. The goal in capitalism is to produce wealth, and workers are valued in this system in terms of those attributes (e.g., skill, productivity) that contribute directly to the creation of wealth more than the qualities that are valued more generally in social life and that define a person’s humanity, such as his or her kindness and morality…Approach within social relationships is also goal contingent…Feelings of closeness and attraction toward friends [are] based on the extent to which the friends facilitated achieving an active goal. Building on these ideas, we argue that not only can goals affect how social targets are evaluated in the context of ongoing relationships, but goals can influence the appraisal and choice of new relationship partners as well.” This is partly why it’s important to understand this through and through so that if a Marxist gains power a realistic expectation will be that the behavior will be the same as anyone else in power, and maybe worse if they are not used to power and rely on tyranny due to a lack of social skill. What matters is the power differential, not the promise of different behavior. People have similar brain chemistry and energy deflates when a person has a goal and the people around them don’t contribute to it. “Nussbaum asserted from a philosophical perspective that objectification is essentially defined by the assumption of instrumentality: The target is a tool for one’s own purpose. Although there are other assumptions associated with objectification—denial of autonomy (the target lacks self-determination), inertness (the target lacks agency), fungibility (the target is interchangeable with others of the same category or type), violability (the target lacks boundary integrity can be broken up or broken into), ownership (the target is owned, can be bought or sold), and denial of subjectivity (the target’s experiences are not a concern).”
There has to be a certain flexibility between employer and worker. Employers are taking risks, but they are open to greater rewards. Employees are taking less risk but they are earning much less. Both sides have to negotiate and compromise to a certain extent, but there will always be a point where there isn’t a meeting of the minds. That should be okay and accepted as a normal part of business. In reality, the person with less power is obsequious and gives Prestige to the powerful because they know that their goals can be squashed easily by them. The powerful look at the powerless as a container with useful parts that needs to be used until discarded. Like in Schindler’s List the worker is either “Essential” or to be discarded. Their independence affects the goal and self-esteem tied to power so independence is treated as betrayal. All kinds of Wrong Livelihood and Wrong Action can manifest to chastise independent behavior despite having blameless organizational goals. Just look at how people treat you if you do nothing for them. Even more disheartening is that when anyone criticizing objectification begins to go into a power position that MODE switches on and people who may have been friends, now with less power, they are objectified into things pretty quickly. Unless there’s vigilance to see that new subordinates want what you wanted when you were a subordinate, hypocrisy is inevitable.
In this objectification mode self-esteem is wired to be regulated/satisfied on achieving those organizational goals. Even worse is the sense that “people who aren’t useful to me” should be made fun of, denigrated, and that attitude can inflate to a feeling that maybe those who are inessential should be annihilated and the narcissistic smiles of bared teeth and sadism betray that feeling even when it’s denied. This is part of the reason why a middle class is important. It’s not that it’s bad that people have less money but the powerful secretly would like to dispatch you just for fun, but if not it’s for relief of contempt. “Be useful to me or else!” The irony of course is that those with more power may be in middle management and they would also like to be independent of their masters. They can understand it for themselves but not for anyone else. This is why people who try to partially drop out of society, or to avoid it’s obvious trappings, feel that they are hounded to conform and sense that employment exchanges involve a lot more intrusion into one’s personal life. Doing the job is not enough. One has to live a certain kind of lifestyle to be considered acceptable to the employer.
Group Psychology – Freud & Beyond: https://youtu.be/Glw3sOeQEng
Schindler’s List: Essential Workers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo6eHyeI8E
In The Use and Abuse of Power, Lee-Chai and Bargh connect the sense of self and choice with power. “…Because power is, at essence, the ability to attain one’s desired outcomes, at some level the goal of all members of an organization is the attainment of power. Thus, conflict between those with power and those without power is a direct consequence of the basic human motivation to achieve control over one’s own outcomes. There is evidence, in fact, that having power within a hierarchy and using that power are pleasurable at a physiological level in humans as well as other primates. Moreover, as argued by philosophers and psychologists such as Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Adler, one’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem is intimately connected to the ability to achieve power.” When a bunch of individuals get into a group those personal goals collide into shifting ill formed collective goals. In the exchange of resources, those with more power gain Prestige for those who need them more. Burnout can exist on both sides. Those who are helpers and find no appreciation, or get mixed messages through political correctness where people say “I appreciate you” completely devoid of emotional agreement, are more likely to feel frustration that builds to burnout. Leaders also feel burnout when there’s a lack of cooperation and their goals are frustrated. This often surprises people in helping professions like nursing, therapy, teaching, and social work. Not everyone appreciates the help or they may feel insulted by it. Therapists for example, tire of their incurable patients. There’s no sense of satisfaction with browbeating scientific procedures, that often need retooling and development. The mind needs that feeling of a PERSONAL STAMP that is EFFECTIVE and therefore PERSONALLY SATISFYING, to enjoy a job. If therapists can find wealthy people with mild depression where they get paid and they also make a perceivable impact, then satisfaction returns. For intractable problems to solve, there is a need for personal goals that are about personal behavior, and how you face things, something you have more control over, rather than perfect results with patients, or co-workers. This Stoic method is the only way to keep that personal stamp in a highly regulated environment. Even then a lot of highly regulated jobs in science require adherence to procedures all the way through the work activity, and those can be goals as long as there’s a sense of WHY. Daydreaming about WHY can be a powerful motivator. This is kind of like the office worker with a picture of their family on the desk. “I do this for them.” If meaning is what’s effective, then as long as procedures and regulations have a good effective outcome one can bring up imagery of WHY to regenerate motivation in difficult jobs. The limits of this of course are regulations and procedures that HAVE NO MEANING, are SUPERSTITIOUS RITUALS, and therefore one runs into meaninglessness once again. Those activities would be premium burnout and they would have to end at that point to preserve sanity. You might even have meaningless rituals that give you a sense of WHY but at some point the lack of results will drain the meaning. WHY only works as a motivation if the WHY is MEANINGFUL, and EFFECTIVE. Goals based on what we control and how we face things is all that’s left and mirrors the impermanent aspect of outward people and things.
Parmenides and Heidegger: https://youtu.be/dWdVTN5LQKs
One of the most clear warnings about the abuse of power and how it can sneak up on any endeavour is this lack of concern for people where the end justifies the means. Usually to be safe, the means and the end have to be considered equally, but those in power have trouble mustering the energy for this, as can be seen above. German politician Christine Anderson spoke about this specifically with vaccine mandates, but it could apply to ANY endeavour, no matter how heroic. Corporations, Governments, Non-profit institutions, Religions, and any human power differential can be blind in this corner. Inflexible regulations can be dangerous because of unintended consequences, and when they happen, there’s usually a political move to obfuscate, confuse, and shift blame to others. No matter how modern we seem to be, this error seems intransigent and is mainly where citizen journalism comes from in response to news outlets that simply sit down with the powers that be and craft “narratives,” while providing mutual employment opportunities between government, business, and media. “It’s not the goal that renders a system oppressive. It’s always the methods. Whenever a government claims to have the people’s interest at heart, you need to think again. In the entire history of mankind there has never been a political elite sincerely concerned about the well-being of regular people. What makes anyone think it is different now? If the age of Enlightenment brought forward anything, then certainly this: Never take anything any government tells you at face value. Always question everything any government does or does not do. Always look for ulterior motives and always ask ‘who benefits?’ Whenever a political elite pushes an agenda this hard and resorts to extortion and manipulation to get their way, you can almost always be sure your benefit was definitely not what they had in heart…Nobody grants me freedom for I am a free person.”
Clear examples for Christine’s view include the now in the spotlight scandal of The Great Reset, where Trudeau said “this pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset,” and Hillary Clinton, where she was suggesting to the then candidate Biden that “this would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes.” Prince Charles viewed the pandemic a “golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis. It’s unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change.” The problem of using a crisis to achieve unrelated social goals is that the people that are to follow these changes are in a weak position in a crisis and have very little power to negotiate fair terms. That’s a red flag that the powerful KNOW that the general public would resist their plans. The powerful are, like described above, dismissive of the powerless and those dismissed are devalued into utility “essential workers” and non-utility “inessential workers,” or in reality: political opponents, and they end up having no say on how the means should manifest for the “heroic” ends. The fact that people would look at a crisis as a way to get one over on the population “for their own good,” means they lack sincerity, since they wouldn’t be afraid of disagreement from people who love what they offer. The entire purpose of checks and balances is to offset undue influence and exploitation, like can happen in a pandemic, because history has shown that self-interest has trouble including others in a wholistic way. They ignore the interdependence of everything. For example, as I’m writing his, and hoping that it won’t be the last thing, the U.S. is at DEFCON 3 which hasn’t happened since Sept 11, 2001. How enlightened are these leaders really, and do they have a wholistic point of view? Obviously not.
German MEP on the Vaccine Passport: https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/modern-day-censorship/german-mep-on-vaccine-passports-mandates-never-take-anything-any-government-tells-you-at-face-value/
Dr. Naomi Wolf on Pfizer Vaccine info dump – The War Room: https://rumble.com/vwxmvz-dr.-naomi-wolf-updates-on-pfizer-document-dump.html
Trudeau “Opportunity for a reset”: https://rumble.com/vvexwd-february-20-2022.html
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf4G5qNCLgM
Prince Charles “Time to think big”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BucTwPegW5k
Like Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring, or Galadriel, too much power will corrupt the most noble aims and in the pandemic the power differentials involving martial law made that problem acute. Top down decision making just yanks the populations attention here and there while they get their agenda passed in areas where you’re not looking. Even writing this and editing it, things change so quickly. The pandemic is now on the backburner in the news cycle. It goes from Wag The Dog to Wag The Free World. What will the news cycle look like if or when Taiwan is attacked?
“Don’t Tempt Me Frodo!” – The Fellowship Of The Ring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Jjj6oI5fg
Frodo offers the One Ring to Lady Galadriel – The Fellowship of the Ring: https://youtu.be/WeQDTj1UllA
LOTR The Fellowship of the Ring – The Ring takes Boromir: https://youtu.be/ARprA2cPYgI
The reality is that we haven’t automated decision making and having as many of the population involved in social change means they will be able to include their self-interest, which is the entire purpose of self-government. It’s the blindness and lack of empathy that even normal people suffer from when they have too much power. This is partly because when people lack power they are used to that sense of lack, which motivates individuals to seek more of it, and for right or wrong, power is connected with better quality consumption: better properties, better education, better healthcare, better sexual partners, better food and drink, better clothing, better entertainment, better drugs, more travel, and the list goes on. Power = Consumption and makes the powerful into a rapacious Pac-Man when they have outsized leverage. They have to hold onto that for dear life in order to regulate their mental states. Like in Wag The Dog, “if you were forced to choose between the security of your job and the security of your country, which would you choose? While you hesitate, will you permit me to suggest that they are one and the same.” Vocation and consumption connect with politics whether we like it or not. This is why many people want to drop out of life and be a monastic, though there is politics there related to dogma, but that motivation is to escape being cogs in the machine. If you change your paycheck you change your politics. How much independent thinking are you allowed?
Wag The Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmM8rE_LdFA
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” — Albert Einstein.
In Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi connects that sense of Jhana and concentration with personally chosen goals in difficult conditions and circumstances of certain failure. “It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on…The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.” This can be a goal in of itself, because goals based on social rewards and punishments are emotionally enslaving. It’s important to find personal satisfaction in the maze of duty, sacrifice, grinding, and striving. “The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.” That’s your main goal of success or failure for oneself, not the external goal only. One has to see lost causes in social goals to know that one can’t rely on social goals only. This allows for flexibility that is in the realm of reality because a powerless person who is pinning goals on the powerful is also invading their boundaries and they will also feel hemmed in. That’s how the meeting of the minds can merge with common goals and break off when those goals naturally move elsewhere. “It is this serious playfulness, this combination of concern and humility, that makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time. With this attitude one does not need to win to feel content; helping to maintain order in the universe becomes its own reward, regardless of consequences. Then it is possible to find joy even when fighting a losing battle in a good cause…Act always as if the future of the Universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” External conditioning will still operate, but the mind can cross off their own private list of goals as completed when the goal is about learning something or completing a new activity. Self-created goals for self-satisfaction. It doesn’t have to be endless success that satisfies, but a personal satisfaction that one is doing what one can and merging personal and collective goals when possible. The self-esteem rises from the activity, with intrinsically motivated personal goals, and not from social goals. “…It is better to invest psychic energy in goals and relationships that bring harmony to the self indirectly.”
For society to lean more towards Right Livelihood you would have to have a public that moves money ever more consciously towards healthier satisfactions, and that would naturally move businesses to supply that demand, creating more blameless jobs and campaign donations would have to move in the same direction so as to make governments more blameless. With technology and automation, the employers will have to look at employees as consumers as well, because they are both, and happy employees are ones that are consumers at different businesses, and consumers you want to buy from you need to be happy and have enough money to do so. Without that you have people falling through the cracks, and with hyper advanced Artificial Intelligence in the future, those cracks will turn into canyons.
AN 2:118: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN2_118.html
AN 4:62: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.062.than.html
The Noble Eightfold Path – Bhikkhu Bodhi: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/noble8path6.pdf
The Use and Abuse of Power – John Bargh, A. Lee-Chai: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781317710363/
Gruenfeld, Deborah & Inesi, Ena & Magee, Joe & Galinsky, Adam. (2008). Power and the Objectification of Social Targets. Journal of personality and social psychology. 95. 111-27
Finding Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465024117/
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/