Narrative Capitals

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Narrative Capitals/10 - The challenge to prevent the transformation of the ideal into ideology

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 14/01/2018

180114 Capitali narrativi 10 rid“And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners (the people bound inside the cave) are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light... ...do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them (among the prisoners - the tr.)? ...I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. ...would he not be ridiculous? ...and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

Plato The Republic (English translation by Benjamin Jowett)

It is typical of ideological thinking - of every ideology but above all those of a religious nature - to create a dichotomic or gnostic type of representation of the world. Happiness, beauty, truth, and the special light of those who are inside that experience are exalted, and the ordinary happiness and beauty of those who are outside are devalued. Friendship, work, play, art and everyone's life are not enough anymore. There is a need to load these realities with additional, extraordinary and diverse meanings. And soon we end up no longer being able to rejoice in seeing a "friend and nothing more", of "just working and nothing more", of "just praying and that’s all", of "just painting and that’s all". We begin to believe that simple life is not enough to live. And while we are convinced that we live more than others, we risk ceasing to really live.

[fulltext] =>

This process of reducing the value of ordinary things in life is particularly important and relevant when dealing with people who have creative talents: artists, intellectuals, poets, philosophers, theologians... They are innovators, capable of primary and original creativity, which allows the charisma to remain generative. They are the charisma of the charisma. Ideal and charismatic communities, especially in the founding phase, attract people with special and artistic talents. There is a profound affinity between spiritual and artistic charismas, because both are voices that call, speak and guide from inside. At the same time, it is equally common that after the foundation phases many of the people with the greatest talents leave or burn out - and sometimes the artistic vocation is lost or extinguished with the loss of the ideal vocation, because over time the two voices have (almost) become one.

These unfortunate outcomes depend profoundly on the ability of the community (and its founders/leaders) to care for and respect the original talents of their people, not to sacrifice them on the altar of the institution's growth demands. They also depend from succeeding in winning over the natural avarice to use those talents and those fascinating people primarily for the ideal goals of the community. In communities, those who have received a gift of creativity and a spiritual vocation at the same time have the precious task of preventing the transformation of the ideal into ideology. Because the primary and direct contact with life that is typical (although not exclusive) of artists and intellectuals allows for that plurality and biodiversity which is the salvation of communities from the ideological drift. They are people who manage to say different things in different ways, and this original and primal diversity allows the ideals to remain genuine and alive. Artistic vocation, like the spiritual and charismatic one, is in fact an original, primitive and non-derived vocation. But it is not easy, albeit decisive, to understand that people can have more vocations, original and primary ones, without one of them necessarily having to die in order to make the other live. Identity grows well if one dimension of life does not become a monopoly. But all this is very risky, and so one ends up preferring people who are "reduced" but certain to those who are "whole" but uncertain.

Communities, especially spiritual and charismatic ones, usually do not want "artists and nobody else", they want and form artists and intellectuals totally dedicated to the service of the message. They do not believe that it is from "art and nothing else" that the special charismatic art that they feel the need for may flourish. And so they think of obtaining a different art by orienting the first natural vocation to the second ideal one. They do so in various ways. Sometimes simply by preventing them from cultivating the violin, literature, dance or their studies, so that they can dedicate all their vital and spiritual energies to the new "vocation". At other times, and these are the most interesting cases to be analysed, they ask them to subordinate their talent and creativity to the aims of the community and its message. Previously they sculpted flowers and reliefs; now only crucifixes and angels.

They take them away from normal environments belonging to everyone that are mixed and diverse, where real life grows, and they put them on a vacuum-sealed pedestal to give glory to the community and its charisma, maybe to God, through their works. Art and culture thus become ideological production, where the message "devours" art and thought (and God), for lack of gratuitousness and freedom - history offers us abundant evidence of this. From being primary, the artistic-intellectual vocation becomes secondary and ancillary.

Artists can serve their communities if they are able to remain directly connected to the deep layers of the earth that are different from those on which the charisma of the community draws. It is this different type of water that enriches everyone's water (and their own). If, on the other hand, one day the community decides to obstruct direct access to the different underground vein, and connects the artist to the only spring of all with a connecting tube, the whole common field loses nourishment and fertility. Artistic and originally creative vocations are a common good if they manage to bring waters that are different from that which flows abundantly from the fountain of the founders. And when the ideological virus takes hold, all the fountains of the community are connected to the only main aqueduct.

The narrative poverty of many ideal-driven organisations (IDO) does not depend only on the scarcity of narrative talents - and therefore of artists and intellectuals. It is not so much the lack of talent that blocks the development and attractiveness of ideal-driven communities in the generations that follow their foundation. The crisis is the result of the famine of "whole”, free and original artistic and intellectual vocations.

In these processes and scenarios, an important role is also played by the management and maintenance that the individual person makes of their artistic-intellectual vocation. After the first happy times (years) when the new "second call" absorbs any previous desire and fantasy, if growth is good there is a point when the conflict builds up between the individual voice and that of the community (which we analysed last Sunday, in the previous article). When (and if) the day of the "awakening" arrives, even the bearer of an artistic vocation is called to make a choice, just like and differently from all the other members. But the artist-intellectual has specific and very relevant responsibilities. If you choose the false type of authenticity, the damage it causes is profound and serious. All fictions are harmful in life and especially in the IDO-s; but few things are more harmful than fake artists and intellectuals. If, once freed from ideological chains, and having seen reality distinguishing it from its shadow, an artist returns to his chained comrades and instead of freeing them, chooses to bind himself again and then begins to speak of shadows as if they were reality, he begins to lose his soul and seriously compromises the good growth of the spirit of his community. Remaining in the ideology is an evil for everyone, but it is a mortal and death bringing evil for those who have had the gift of recognizing ideology but speak of it as if it were reality.

This is one of the many expressions of the phenomenon of false prophecy, very old and very serious, and for this reason it is described extensively by the biblical prophets. We find it again when the "prophet" decides (for weakness or for interests) to silence the voice that continues to inhabit him and instead begins to say the things the community and leaders want them to tell. And they become a false prophet (and soon the voice inside is extinguished). The community loses quality, biodiversity and generativity. And their charisma burns out. Alongside the false prophets who know that they are, there are others who are in good faith, either because they are still too "young" and therefore do not experience any tension in the soul between the two voices, or because they sincerely believe that they live their authenticity by voluntarily sacrificing their first vocation to the new (many of them, in reality, did not have an authentic vocation in the first place, but only assumed an artistic-intellectual job for themselves).

The quality of the present and future of these communities depends above all on the dynamics and evolution of the choices made by those artists-intellectuals who seek to remain faithful to the two primary vocations of their lives. They are in a particularly uncomfortable and painful position. They must be guardians of the "second vocation of the community" as well as the "first artistic vocation". But the custody of the first vocation is an individual and often solitary enterprise: there are no community instruments that protect it and very few helpers and counsellors who understand it. As time goes by, here too, the tension between the two voices grows, and the temptation to sacrifice the first to the second vocation becomes strong; a sacrifice that many would like and greet with a roaring applause. There is a need for infinite meekness so that plural vocations can continue to live and make people live.

The existence and resilience of a small number of people capable of being faithful to their two vocations is essential for the salvation of ideal-driven communities. Because the IDO that in its development consumes the most creative people that providence sent to write its new and beautiful pages does not generate any good new narrative capital. The biblical logic of the faithful "remnant" is at the root of the salvation of ideal-driven communities in times of exiles and of the destruction of temples. They will write and rewrite the first stories of the fathers, compose new spiritual songs and hymns, remember and preserve the first covenant and the first promise. To prepare the non-vain expectation of a new, marvellous alliance.
***
Today, our immersion in the narrative capitals of IDO-s and communities ends. There would be many other things to say, and perhaps we will say them in a forthcoming series of articles. From next Sunday we will return to immerse our hearts and thoughts in the Bible, with the commentary on the Books of Samuel and their infinite stories. Thanks, again, to those who have followed me through these ten episodes, to the many readers who have sent me valuable comments, criticisms and suggestions, to the generous trust granted to me by director Marco Tarquinio and Avvenire, allowing me to continue my humble and tenacious search for new, living words to love our time.

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But these same communities find it very difficult not to consume those very people of whom they have a vital need. 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Narrative Capitals/10 - The challenge to prevent the transformation of the ideal into ideology

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 14/01/2018

180114 Capitali narrativi 10 rid“And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners (the people bound inside the cave) are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light... ...do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them (among the prisoners - the tr.)? ...I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. ...would he not be ridiculous? ...and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

Plato The Republic (English translation by Benjamin Jowett)

It is typical of ideological thinking - of every ideology but above all those of a religious nature - to create a dichotomic or gnostic type of representation of the world. Happiness, beauty, truth, and the special light of those who are inside that experience are exalted, and the ordinary happiness and beauty of those who are outside are devalued. Friendship, work, play, art and everyone's life are not enough anymore. There is a need to load these realities with additional, extraordinary and diverse meanings. And soon we end up no longer being able to rejoice in seeing a "friend and nothing more", of "just working and nothing more", of "just praying and that’s all", of "just painting and that’s all". We begin to believe that simple life is not enough to live. And while we are convinced that we live more than others, we risk ceasing to really live.

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The Infinite Meekness that Saves Us

Narrative Capitals/10 - The challenge to prevent the transformation of the ideal into ideology by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 14/01/2018 “And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners (the people bound inside the cave) are released and disabused of their e...
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Narrative Capitals/9 Childlike spirit is the summit of adult life

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 07/01/2018

180107 Capitali narrativi 09 rid“But one had to be talented to be able to age without becoming an adult ".

Jacques Brel-Franco BattiatoThe Song of Old Lovers (La canzone dei vecchi amanti)

Every organization and every community would like to have members who authentically identify with their institutional mission, genuinely love its narratives and truly believe in what they say and do. This difficult operation of sincere individual identification with the institutional mission succeeds very well in the context of ideal-driven communities and organizations (IDO), especially when ideals are so high that they puncture the sky and let us glimpse paradise. This creates a perfect synergy between the individual and the community. Everyone believes, hopes, loves and desires the things of all others, without this "socialization of the heart" being experienced as the alienation and expropriation of the hearts of individuals.

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In fact, visiting such communities one is struck by this dilated inner life that can be breathed and touched. What we see is a human group, but the impression we have is that of meeting one person who subsists in the many people. An unmistakable community style is created, a collective personality that communicates itself in language, interior design, collective rituals, artistic expressions and even somatic traits. Everyone tells the same story, honestly.

There is a phase of life, usually the first and second youth, when the individual person experiences the same me/us (i.e. the unity of the personal/collective levels – the tr.) with immense enthusiasm and a feeling of great fullness, without any problematic notes. They don’t notice anything non-authentic in feeling, thinking and speaking with the thoughts and words of the community, because they sincerely feel all of it their own and live them as a very intimate experience. No ideal path would begin without this kind of spiritual and anthropological transubstantiation, a form of "mystical union" between the individual and the collective soul. The ideal us naturally and joyfully becomes the ideal me. You feel at home only when you align your feelings with those of everyone, when the mutual inhabitation of emotions touches perfection. One suffers and rejoices for the same things and in the same way, everyone prays with the same words, reads (almost) the same words of the Bible, the same words as the founders. It is the presence of this phase of a totally free, intimate, sincere and very generous adherence of the soul to its own community that tells the essence of that mysterious reality that we call "vocation".

When a community or organization is born, its greatest heritage is precisely the presence of many people who, sincerely and authentically, live this coincidence between me and us. They are convincing and win many others because they truly and totally believe in the message they announce. The exponential growth that many ideal communities experience in the early days depends very much on the perfect identification of the me of individuals with the communitarian us - one of the most exciting experiences of the human repertoire.

This phase is never short, it can last many years. However, it must not last forever. Because if at some point it does not end, from being a “blessing” it turns into a “curse”. The splendid youth of vocations gives the gift of its pearl only if it is able to die. However, many, too many times, the experience of youth does not end, it lasts for life and generates one of the most serious and frequent collective diseases.

Becoming an adult is difficult for everyone, but it is really difficult (and wonderful) when we spend a wonderful vocational youth with our me truly becoming us. Many times, in fact, we get crushed by the enormous richness of the first beautiful phase of the new life - another expression of the now known "curse of abundance". Those who manage the communities fall in love and then become too accustomed to the infinite availability of the moral energy of youth, and, more or less unconsciously, do everything so that it lasts as long as possible. Furthermore, individuals do not have "incentives" to get out of this form of childhood, where they feel just fine. The balance is therefore perfect and stable. And so too many people remain adolescents throughout their lives, believing, perhaps, that they have reached the peaks of spiritual life, because they are confused by the plastic toy peaks. Childlike spirit is not anthropological and psychological childhood, but the summit of an adult life that returns to being a child in a different way, not on purpose. The main problem of many communities is that they have too many quiet people who can't even reach the anthropological stage of the conflict between the me and the us (not to mention overcoming it). The first indicator of the maturity and freedom of an ideal-driven community and of the quality of its people is the presence of people in crisis for this same reason, struggling for a new kind of maturity. Again, the seriousness of the disease lies in confusing health with illness.

Sometimes, it happens that some people manage to reach the phase of crisis, and the me-us (individual-collective – the tr.) harmony begins to waver. These people have preserved some living desire, they have been able to cultivate readings that are different from those of everyone, they have not lost contact with the real wounds of the real poor, they have not broken up with yesterday's friends, they have continued to pray with the old prayers of their grandmothers and not only with the new and special ones. These people can receive the great blessing of being able to become adults.

But, even in these happy cases, the management of these blessing-crises is rarely good. The highest obstacles are found inside the person, who when perceiving the first cracks of the inviolable block of the first intimacy and identity, denies and rejects them. People don't want to see these because, paradoxically, instead of interpreting these divergent symptoms as the beginning of a new authenticity, they experience them as non-authenticity and no-truth. It frightens them very much, and they halt. Moreover, in addition to the subjective feeling of inauthenticity and betrayal that holds the person back, there is the other, very high obstacle represented by those responsible who, in good faith, often recommend the return to the previous phase of harmony and peace. They fail to recognize the blessing in the first symptoms of this type of crisis, and they fight them.

The vast majority of possible crises abort before they are born, they are rejected and declined as temptation or betrayal. An infinite and immeasurable waste of human values, oceans of pain.

Also because - and here is a decisive point - from the day after the arrival of the first cracks, returning to the first peaceful and sincere authenticity is impossible. The first crisis is a point of no return, one can, one must, go only ahead. Every return becomes, this time really, inauthentic. People are no longer able to laugh, rejoice or pray like they did in the early days. They are laughs and prayers similar to those of yesterday, but they are no longer the same. And so to try to bridge the gap between what you really hear and say and what you almost really hear and say, you start to simulate some of your emotions and feelings. The phase of false authenticity has begun.

Sometimes the growing of this gap produces a new crisis, which generally ends like the first one, with a new reversal that is done in a less and less convinced and more and more sorrowful way. People who are really convinced of the us live together in the communities alongside those who are less and less convinced but behave as if they were really convinced. But when the share of the "as if" exceeds that of the really convinced, the decline is rapid, because the spiritual and moral energies of partial authenticity are much smaller, and their ability to attract new members is even less. Simulated authenticity does not last long, and it consumes people's soul, to the point of extinguishing them. Many people leave communities (even when they formally remain there) because they are exhausted by these simulation exercises. Because if the part of false authenticity does not evolve by elaborating a new synthesis of the first us, it ends up infecting the part of sincere faith in the original message that had remained, to the point of not believing in it any more (many people deny ideals of their youth to which they have not given the possibility of growing up, and so they have become trivial). Many spiritual communities and IDO-s do not reach a second generation after their foundation because, collectively, they cannot overcome this first infinite youth, and the us of childhood - the genuine and the simulated version of it - devours the possible and beautiful us of adult life.

Some rare times, however, a second (or umpteenth) crisis manages to finally generate a new life, a new individual and collective spirit. And when it happens, the most beautiful years of life begin. If it is true that there are few things sadder than a beautiful youthful vocation that has withered being unable to mature, it is even truer that very few things are more beautiful than a person who has managed to generate a new us by bringing their first me and first us with them. But there would be a need for responsible leaders who have experienced this alchemy themselves, and are therefore able to create the conditions for people to reach at least the phase of tension between me and us, that is to say, the phase of cracks in the wall. To help their people to get out of the safe land of the first collective authenticity, accepting and loving the inevitable and concrete risk that their exit will land them in distant places, that some of them will never return home. To understand that in order to have adult people, able to continue and enrich the collective history one day, they must put them in a position to make their us today die so that perhaps a new us may rise up tomorrow. To allow people to develop their talents, ambitions, desires, relationships and dreams that are different from those of everyone. To give them the chance to grow up differently, to imagine paths of being adult that are different from those imagined and dreamed of by young people and by everyone. The us’ of adult life are always plural and diverse, but no less real and faithful. However, in ideal communities the radical need to control the inner life of people out of (a more radical) fear of "losing" them once they become adults makes youth eternal and therefore degenerates it. And so they can't even generate that "faithful remnant", the only ones capable of saving all the people tomorrow, who, in order to be generated, need freedom, open air and the biodiversity of fertile land - "whoever would save his life will lose it".

An entire community can be saved by a single person who has found a new adult authenticity. Someone who believed in a dream, found a wonderful Child, felt "a great joy". A new and different joy that they would never have known if they had stopped walking in pursuit of a star.

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Also because those responsible generally fail to recognize the blessing in the first symptoms of crises and so they fight them. 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Narrative Capitals/9 Childlike spirit is the summit of adult life

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 07/01/2018

180107 Capitali narrativi 09 rid“But one had to be talented to be able to age without becoming an adult ".

Jacques Brel-Franco BattiatoThe Song of Old Lovers (La canzone dei vecchi amanti)

Every organization and every community would like to have members who authentically identify with their institutional mission, genuinely love its narratives and truly believe in what they say and do. This difficult operation of sincere individual identification with the institutional mission succeeds very well in the context of ideal-driven communities and organizations (IDO), especially when ideals are so high that they puncture the sky and let us glimpse paradise. This creates a perfect synergy between the individual and the community. Everyone believes, hopes, loves and desires the things of all others, without this "socialization of the heart" being experienced as the alienation and expropriation of the hearts of individuals.

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Authenticity Cannot Be Simulated

Narrative Capitals/9 Childlike spirit is the summit of adult life by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 07/01/2018 “But one had to be talented to be able to age without becoming an adult ". Jacques Brel-Franco BattiatoThe Song of Old Lovers (La canzone dei vecchi amanti) Every organizati...
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Narrative Capitals/8 - Founding and continuing without haste, just like equilibrists

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 31/12/2017

171230 Capitali narrativi 08 ridWhen a truly original genius makes its appearance in the world, people make haste to get rid of it. To achieve this goal they have two methods. The first is elimination. In the event of failure, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and hideous): exaltation, putting it on a pedestal and transforming it into a "god".

Lu Xun, An Introduction to a The sayings of Confucius

At the origins of many communities and movements there is an experience of intense and deep closeness, among all of the members and - in the first place - with the founders. It is an extended kind of intimacy that exalts and develops the intimacy of each person. This particular "relational good" attracts, fills and fascinates no less than the ideal message received and announced. The contact of hearts and bodies, the sharing of the same table where meals prepared together are eaten, the real hugs to the "lepers" that immediately become true and different hugs exchanged with each other upon returning home. These are radically anti-immunitarian experiences, precisely because the many forms of mediation that we have invented in order not to touch the "wound of the other” are not there yet.

[fulltext] =>

But this simple and universal proximity-fraternity is the first to risk disappearing when communities create a structure for themselves and become increasingly complex organizations. In this transformation of the nature of relationships, some of the most devious and bad viruses are nestled.

The evolution of relationships with the founders plays a key role. Soon after the first phase of fraternity and horizontality an increasing distance is created between the founders and other members, and the intimate proximity of the origin is progressively reduced. It becomes more and more difficult to see the founders simply in the midst of the community, to meet them in the street, to share ordinary life with them. And so, paradoxically, it is precisely the founders who are the first to emerge from the reciprocity-fraternity that is sincerely believed and proclaimed. Their different and unique role, which everyone recognizes, generates an invisible but very real and ever more impenetrable curtain around them, which produces a real and actual isolation that grows together and thanks to admiration, sincere love and the exaltation of their person.

And many ideal communities are intentionally transformed into immunitarian organizations, because with distance the experience of corporeality, contact, full human encounter and intimacy in relationships also disappears. We can speak and announce fraternity and equality, but if we do not embrace, quarrel and forgive each other mixing the flow of our tears, we are in the ideology of fraternity without entering into the experience of fraternity. The body, as Biblical humanism tells us, expresses concreteness, fragility, the entirety of life, it allows us to know the mystery of the person I am facing here and now. If I don't meet the other in their body, I see only an indistinct crowd, categories and classes of people, without being able to "see" Giovanna, Ivan, Luca. I “meet" but a ghost, even when it is a beautiful ghost. To recognize him I must be able to touch his wounds with my hands. Here lies the immense meaning of a word that becomes flesh.

This is why a first sign that a fraternal community is transforming itself into an immune organization is the decrease in the exposure of those responsible for it to the wounds (and blessings) of the simple fraternity of all.

This is how one affirms, day after day, one of the oldest and most universal taboos: “You can’t touch the king”. A taboo that comes from a powerful desire for the forbidden thing. The taboo is affirmed together with the growing of the distance from the founder, it is all the more difficult to "touch him". The growth of the myth is proportional to the decrease in encounters, hugs and kisses given to the lepers throughout the community - which, in rare cases of pathology, can also be accompanied by the abuse of bodies, a sick expression of the actual eclipse of the real body. The real antidote to this taboo would therefore be to maintain the intimacy and ordinary closeness between the founders and the whole community. But this is precisely the most difficult thing to avoid, because myths are nourished precisely by their being far from reality - an encounter and a look at the leader is as valuable as distant and unattainable he is (we also see this in case of the ‘myths’ of cinema and music).

These growing processes of isolation and untouchability have some inevitable and also some avoidable components, but the management of their avoidable part is decisive, also because some avoidable dimensions are interpreted as unavoidable. Among these, thinking that the distance and loss of intimacy with the founders depends on the quantitative growth of the community, without realizing that the first ones to become distant are those closest to the founder, because the "distance" is above all sacred and symbolic, not geographical. The "neighbour" is not the "next-door neighbour" - as the good Samaritan taught us.

The inevitable part is a consequence of the success of communities. The awareness of the uniqueness and value of the founder's person pushes members to do everything possible to protect them so as to save them from being "consumed” by the people around them. Furthermore, growth and development necessarily produce some form of structures and hierarchy, which by their nature and function combine poorly with what is needed for fraternity. This inevitably implies the emergence of a culture of distance that becomes immunity. This is a paradox as well known as it is neglected by the founders of charismatic communities and movements, who generally make great haste to start the phase of institutionalizing their groups (and even when they are abstractly aware of it they believe, deceiving themselves, that their story will be special and different and therefore will not run into the problems of others). A good warning to community founders could then be summed up as follows: instead of accelerating it, as you spontaneously do, try to do everything you can to slow down the process of transforming your community into an organization. Move yourself like the equilibrist (tightrope walker - the tr.), without haste. Do not get caught up by the call of the other end of the rope.

The avoidable factors concern the founder directly. First of all, it should resist with all its virtues the tenacious temptation of isolation, especially when it is about to start and is more easily visible. It should not stop being present by the tables where all people eat, in the masses, continuing to embrace and kiss the real poor, not only those of the stories. It shouldn't fall into the invisible trap of (always less and small) privileges, exemptions from the work and duties of everyone - like washing dishes, shopping, ironing shirts. Fraternity begins to become an ideology when it loses contact with chopping the onions and cleaning the toilets; when the desire to "give life" to the brothers does not become "swiping the floor” with a cloth.

It is very difficult for the founders not to fall into these forms of exemptions, which are the result of very good intentions, a great deal of love and an ignorance that is not guilty of the consequences. It is in fact the community that, in good faith, does everything to isolate its leader. It is Peter who does not want Jesus to wash his feet. But when another Peter succeeds in convincing his master and thus impedes the fraternity of hands and feet, the great and ancient taboo of the king's untouchability becomes, day after day, the real new tacit rule of the community. Few things isolate more from friends and companions than those that, instead of helping the founders/leaders to remain equal to all, make them increasingly different. Those, however, who have received a charisma of founding a community would have a vital need of honest friends who like them so much as to treat them as equals, because they understand that the best way to help them play their different and special role is to keep them in ordinary and normal relationships, to contradict them, correct them, not to say “yes” to them at all times, not to rob them of the proximity of fraternity.

Unlike all empires and today's capitalist enterprises (where the untouchability of leaders is a common rule, and where one arrives at self-destruction because of the excess of immunity), communities and ideal movements cannot afford this taboo. Because an "untouchable king" inevitably produces crisis and, if untreated, the death of the organization-community.

Because though at first this immunity-related disease acts on the relationship between members and their "head", it soon becomes the paradigm of every relationship. That partial and distant relationality, without intimacy and emotions, extends and reproduces itself on all hierarchical levels, and infects all private relationships. And so the exemptions and privileges extend to all the various "leaders", and the apathetic and bodiless relationality takes root throughout the community and becomes a general and widespread culture. One begins not by "touching" the founder, but by not touching any leaders, and ends up not touching anybody - not even one's own interiority, which becomes increasingly distant and poor. Because when you lose contact with the other's body - since all distances increase - you become less and less able to feel life, to take your own and others’ limits, or the imperfections and sins of history seriously, to cultivate emotions and desires, to develop that human pietas that can only grow in the impurity of concrete life. And you finds yourself in an atrophy of real human emotions and feelings, replaced by artificial emotions and feelings because they are all "bodiless". It is not at all rare to meet communities, especially in the generations after the foundation, which speak of an abstract solidarity and reciprocity, because the real ones have been "devoured" over time by the sacred culture of immunity and non-contact. The "heart of flesh" needs bodies that grow in the only good life possible: that of all women and men "under the sun". I have been to funerals where the priests and nuns present who were relatives of the deceased, were the least able to cry and feel a sincere pietas.

It is very difficult to defeat this community disease, not least because it is often mistaken for health. But it is not impossible. Sometimes you can find a way out of the myth and realise that you are ill. However, the cure is far from easy. We would need the courage to identify the disease of immunitas in the original nucleus of the first narrative capital, because the virus begins to work in the lives of the founders very soon, and therefore it is also found in the stories that constitute the first inheritance. But the "untouchability of the king" over time has become a tacit norm so deeply rooted that it also impedes the touchability of his narrative capital. And so we work on the peripheral aspects of ‘charisma' and tradition, without touching their heart; and the virus continues to act and to reproduce.

The cure would consist in the ability to re-found a new capital by drawing on the pre-immune phase of the experience, when everyone was still free and simple. And from there, to re-read all the other stories, which should not be discarded but only understood and loved in their embodied corporeality (taking the body seriously means understanding and loving the diseases of our history as well). And so the true miracle of reciprocity in time and between generations would be fulfilled: to restore to our founders the fraternity that we stole from them yesterday.

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But it is possible, even if not easy, to avoid this real and actual syndrome. 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Narrative Capitals/8 - Founding and continuing without haste, just like equilibrists

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 31/12/2017

171230 Capitali narrativi 08 ridWhen a truly original genius makes its appearance in the world, people make haste to get rid of it. To achieve this goal they have two methods. The first is elimination. In the event of failure, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and hideous): exaltation, putting it on a pedestal and transforming it into a "god".

Lu Xun, An Introduction to a The sayings of Confucius

At the origins of many communities and movements there is an experience of intense and deep closeness, among all of the members and - in the first place - with the founders. It is an extended kind of intimacy that exalts and develops the intimacy of each person. This particular "relational good" attracts, fills and fascinates no less than the ideal message received and announced. The contact of hearts and bodies, the sharing of the same table where meals prepared together are eaten, the real hugs to the "lepers" that immediately become true and different hugs exchanged with each other upon returning home. These are radically anti-immunitarian experiences, precisely because the many forms of mediation that we have invented in order not to touch the "wound of the other” are not there yet.

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Fraternity Has Hands and Feet

Narrative Capitals/8 - Founding and continuing without haste, just like equilibrists by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 31/12/2017 When a truly original genius makes its appearance in the world, people make haste to get rid of it. To achieve this goal they have two methods. The first is elim...
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Narrative Capitals/7 - Bad culture chases good existence away

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 24/12/2017

171223 Capitali narrativi 07 ridBut when Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. (...) But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

Paul , Letter to the Galatians (2:11; 14)

Life has its fullness that in itself has the power to satisfy and satiate. The moon, the dawn, the sunset, pain, love, a gaze, a child, are more concrete and true incarnate words than the words we use to describe them. If this were not so, we would not understand why most people, yesterday and today, do not know how to compose poems or theological essays, yet they can touch life at the same depth as the poet or the philosopher. It is this direct access to the mystery of existence that really makes us all equal under the sun, before the many differences and inequalities, whether they are good or bad. And that, perhaps, makes us occasionally able to feel a true universal fraternity with animals, plants, and the earth, that we feel alive, just like ourselves. But, as it often happens, this infinite richness can also be transformed, in some cases, into a form of poverty.

[fulltext] =>

The primacy of life assumes a special force and scope in collective organisations generated by ideals and/or charismas. Life always comes first, but when that life fills itself with spirit and gives rise to community of meaning, the experience can become so satisfying that we believe that there is no need for more than the life we are already living.

“Beautiful things should first be done, then thought about” (Don Oreste Benzi). It’s a wonderful and true phrase. When later life continues and communities grow thanks to that first beauty, there comes a time when we should start thinking about the beautiful things we're doing, and to do them well we need ‘beautiful’ cultural categories like the life we are living. But often, dazed by the fullness of present life, one easily passes from the right and natural primacy of life to the absolutisation of its experiential dimension and ends up preventing that same life from being expressed in all its beauty, strength and duration. The fullness of the present empties the future.

And it is precisely in this dynamic between life-and-that’s it and life that is so alive that it should flourish in culture, and encounter important and often decisive challenges and pitfalls. Life suffices, it is true; but in collective ideal experiences life really suffices only if that life becomes culture, too. History tells us that in order for a collective novelty to continue beyond the season of its foundation, it is not enough to continue living the novelty. It is also necessary to know how to think about it in order to be able to tell it with the right categories and words, which should contain the same degree of novelty as the actual experiences.

In the early days, the personality of the founders, the almost infinite vital energy and the blinding light of novelty manage to cover the need for suitable categories and language; for a long time we live and grow convinced that there is no need for any cultural or theoretical work. But in reality, and from the outset, communities have to use categories and languages to live and speak. And so either they decide to try to 'manufacture' the instruments they do not yet have, or they simply buy or borrow them. But the more original an experience is, the less good instruments already existing on the market will be found. Also because when a community novelty is born, that novelty is a novelty of life and culture, too. But unlike life-and-that’s it, cultural novelties do not ripen spontaneously: there is a need for intentional and specific work to bring them to existence - and that rarely happens.

It should not be surprising then that the re-absorption of innovations generated by communities and ideal-driven movements in tradition is the most common outcome that historical evidence shows us. Because the use of wrong and/or old categories found on the market simply results in the downsizing of the novelty experienced and lived. Bad culture chases good life away.

Today many spiritual communities (but also some beautiful civil enterprises and cooperatives) risk extinguishing themselves because they have not done a specific cultural work on their identity in the appropriate time, and, as they keep telling about their newness in a culturally bad way they are gradually losing strength on the level of life. The wrong cultural categories are transformed into a bed of Procrustes (a rogue smith from ancient Greek mythology who forced people to fit the size of an iron bed by stretching or cutting off their feet - the tr.), where those novelties that do not fall within the overly narrow measures are amputated. And what's left out is necessarily the surplus between the old and the new, i. e. the greatest and most original innovations of which they were the bearers. For these (and other) reasons in ideal community experiences, the new wine of life ends up in old narrative wineskins and disperses. They are beautiful experiences - told with inappropriate languages.

Furthermore, there are some typical errors committed by those IDO-s that have understood the importance of building new cultural categories. The first consists in confusing cultural categories and language with spiritual categories and language. A first work is started but it stops too soon at the language and spiritual or religious principles, which are generally the first languages that are born together with the experience. However, cultural work would consist in the transformation and universalisation of both the experience and its spiritual/religious language, which in these cases does not happen because the input is confused with the output of the process. And so the novelty does not grow because it is confined in places and languages that are too narrow for it.

Culture needs spirit and flesh, the wholeness of life, if that life is to grow and bear fruit. In this type of work, guessing the appropriate time is crucial, because it is much more difficult to correct fake cultural categories, than to start from scratch. And if a lot of time goes by, the borrowed categories are introduced into the flesh of the ‘charisma’, and everything becomes too difficult.

A second mistake is to think that this cultural work should be entrusted to an elite of intellectuals or professors. This way it is forgotten that culture is much more than intellectual work, because it needs the life and thought of every component of the community, including the life and thought of the people, work or the poor. Categories and language that do not serve life are elaborated, and they end up only removing and discarding intellectually less well-equipped people, and encouraging the creation of new castes.

Finally, there are communities that begin their work by defining a priori what the experts will have to study in order to confirm and strengthen them culturally, but without calling it all into question. This work, therefore is not done with the freedom of spirit that any true cultural work would require, and we end up reiterating only the pre-cultural beliefs that were already known, convinced that we have carried out a cultural work - that has never actually begun. In the history of Christianity, truths and dogmas have emerged at the end of a free and non-dogmatic cultural work place that has lasted for centuries, from dialogue and harsh confrontation with heretics and schismaticists, from the crucible of dialectics between very different visions. The accounts of the truths of the Christian faith have been many and varied since the beginning. Four gospels, Paul's letters together with those of James and Peter, in continuity with a Jewish Bible where Job and the Song of Songs, Daniel and Qoheleth coexisted. The Old and New Testament have not become a sterile ideology because they were multifold and pluralistic, because, using different voices and the tension among themselves; they have said truths that are greater and more complex than those possible for a single story. Without the conflicts between Paul and Peter, which took place before the composition of the Gospels, those Gospels would have been much poorer and perhaps lost among the many ideological, apocalyptic and Gnostic texts of Palestine and Syria.

In many IDO-s, on the other hand, we work on the cultural mediation of the ideal message with a mandate of orthodoxy for non-negotiable truths, and so the essential elaboration of language and categories ends up becoming an poor exercise because it is homophonic, producing a shrinking of life instead of representing its universalisation and blossoming. It becomes a leash that prevents the free flight of the charisma, or confines it within the perimeter of its cage. One gospel alone is not enough for the IDO to tell its miracle.

Good cultural work is never a simple translation of an already existing reality into an essentially identical reality, told in another language. This is typical of ideological operations and their ‘organic intellectuals’. Cultural work is not a technique, but it is the unveiling of novelties that were not seen before and that would not be seen in its absence, it is discovering that the organisations that seem brand new were already present in tradition, it is the unmasking of the highly abundant ideological infiltrations in IDO-s and that ideals and life end up suffocating without a systematic and free cultural exercise. Paul not only translated the first Christian proclamation, and similarly, Bonaventure and Thomas (Aquinas - the tr.) did not simply translate the charismas of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic: they innovated and created realities that we would not have without their ‘charismas’. They allowed the ideals of their founders to have larger wings so that they could fly higher upwards and so reach to us. In every real cultural operation, there always hides the risk of heresy and betrayal, a risk that often stops the real and necessary cultural work from being born.

To be able to try to say the infinite novelty of the first Christmas night, it was not enough to tell the stories of the shepherds or those of Mary and the first disciples. Without new charismas, without time and much work, no one could have written that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. The gospel has been able to enchant and change the world because it is a wonderful story. The first new wineskin in the gospel is the gospel itself.

The desire for Christmas has never disappeared on earth. It is we who have stopped telling its story for some time now, with the beauty necessary to enchant our colleagues, friends and children today. All they are waiting for is to be told, with new words, that God became a baby in a woman, that he was born poor in a cave, and was reborn from his tomb. Merry Christmas!

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In addition to living, we need to learn to think and tell about the life we are living using the right categories. 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Narrative Capitals/7 - Bad culture chases good existence away

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 24/12/2017

171223 Capitali narrativi 07 ridBut when Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. (...) But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

Paul , Letter to the Galatians (2:11; 14)

Life has its fullness that in itself has the power to satisfy and satiate. The moon, the dawn, the sunset, pain, love, a gaze, a child, are more concrete and true incarnate words than the words we use to describe them. If this were not so, we would not understand why most people, yesterday and today, do not know how to compose poems or theological essays, yet they can touch life at the same depth as the poet or the philosopher. It is this direct access to the mystery of existence that really makes us all equal under the sun, before the many differences and inequalities, whether they are good or bad. And that, perhaps, makes us occasionally able to feel a true universal fraternity with animals, plants, and the earth, that we feel alive, just like ourselves. But, as it often happens, this infinite richness can also be transformed, in some cases, into a form of poverty.

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The Great Wings of Life

Narrative Capitals/7 - Bad culture chases good existence away by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 24/12/2017 But when Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. (...) But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I s...
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    [title] => The Naked Freedom of the Eyes
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Narrative Capitals/6 - What matters is to recognise deceitful prophets and storytellers

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/12/2017

171217 Capitali narrativi 6 ridPoverty is the first virtue to be discovered by all founders, and the first one to be forgotten by their successors.

Carlo Maria Martini, Per amore, per voi, per sempre (“For love, for you, forever” - the tr.)

Ideology is a very common and serious illness in ideal-driven organizations (IDO), and it develops especially during the crisis of narrative capital, when amidst the shortage of true stories to tell the offer of new artificial stories that seem to respond to the hunger for sense and future that is hitting the community becomes very seductive. Ideology is the neurosis of the ideal - just as idolatry is the neurosis of faith. Among the many forms that ideologies take, a particularly frequent and dangerous form is the one suggested by Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel’s novel entitled El Conde Lucanor (Tales of Count Lucanor), which is the medieval source of the fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. But, unlike its various modern rewritings, in the original novel we find precious elements to add new words to our discourse on movements and communities that originate from ideals, charismas and motivations that are different and larger than the economic ones.

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The story begins with a bizarre deception suffered by a king. Three rogues come to court and promise him special clothes which can only be seen by legitimate children while remaining invisible to those who are illegitimate. The king takes the bait because he believes he has found a good mechanism to prevent the inheritance of someone who would prove to be a non-natural son. So the three cheater tailors get to work. The king, still doubtful, sends two servants to see the first new clothes, without revealing anything about their supposed magical properties to them. The servants see nothing in the spinning mills, but they don't have the courage to contradict the tailors, and they tell the king that they saw wonderful fabrics. Finally, when the king also goes to the tailors to see their work and can’t see anything, first he is upset but then thinks, “If I say I can't see the clothes, everyone will know that I'm not the king's son, and I will lose my kingdom.” So he believes the trick and he too begins to weave his praises of the new garments. Then he sends his governor, who, having heard about the features of those clothes from the king, even though he cannot see anything praises them with even more enthusiastic words, in order not to lose his position. After the governor, the other court officials also do the same. And when the feast day finally arrives and the king, completely naked, rides through the streets of the city on horseback, all the people praise the king's beautiful clothes. The spell is broken by a stableman of the king who says: “My Lord, for me it is the same thing to be the son of my father or another, and for this reason I say to you: either I am blind or you are naked.”

In this type of ideological production, first there are cheating false prophets that seduce the boss - the founder(s) or leader(s) of a community. It is not him to call them, but he receives them, and in doing so he commits the first and decisive mistake. From the cheater false prophets we should defend ourselves first of all by not receiving them at home and by making sure that they do not pass the controls that we normally do before receiving guests. During the storytelling crises, when numerous storytellers are asking to be received, it is essential to choose the "doorkeepers” carefully, that is to say those who welcome visitors, the staff of the executive or bureau secretariat. They play a very important role, because they must have the rare ability to spot false prophets immediately and block them. Because, in crises affecting the deep meaning of the community, those responsible are particularly manipulable by storyteller false prophets, by ideological snake charmers. Many crises are not overcome because the secretariat allows the wrong storytellers to pass through or because it blocks the good ones - or because it does both.

It was not by chance that at the head of the guest quarters of the abbeys and monasteries there were very wise and expert monks and friars: “Moreover, let also a God-fearing brother have assigned to him the apartment of the guests"(Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter LIII). In delicate moments of transition, wise communities must understand which the decisive offices and functions are. These almost never follow the formal order of the organization chart. In a good organization, the morphology of power does not coincide with the morphology of wisdom; and if wiser people are all placed in the senior positions, the others find themselves in the suburbs, which are the places of "weak powers" where the most serious diseases penetrate. Peripheral wisdom is always decisive, but especially when you are surrounded by false storytellers in search of "kings" to enchant. Also because the leaders of spiritual and religious IDO’s who are faced with very delicate crises of stories to tell, essential in order to be able to enchant the present and future members once again, are particularly exposed to the narrative manipulation of false prophets. And the more serious, widespread and profound narrative crisis that one goes through, the easier it is for founders and decision-makers to believe in the fantastic promises of the deceitful storytellers. “Kings" are always very sensitive to the inheritance of their kingdom. They have a vital need to understand who the legitimate children of their "charisma” are. And when, in times of crisis, they can no longer simply recognize them with their gaze, they are extremely vulnerable to those who promise them techniques that replace their eyes - communities are lost when false prophets prevent their founders/leaders from understanding who the authentic followers of their real history are.

Furthermore, it is important to note that in the story the deception could have been discovered immediately if one of the servants whom the (still doubtful) king sent for a first verification of the clothes had the freedom and courage to simply say what he saw, without fearing the costs and punishment for the freedom of his eyes. But it is precisely this kind of brave and free members who are scarce in the "secretariats" and around the founders and leaders. Almost always, in fact, they end up surrounded by "servants” who are very faithful but without the freedom and courage to simply say the things they see. They are even good persons, but they are moved and manipulated by their fear, even when it is disguised as respect or even veneration for their leaders. It is precisely in the first relationship between the servants sent out and the king where ideology is formed and begins to work. It is not enough to deceive the head. Ideology is a relationship, it is a "relational evil” that requires two or more people who begin to believe together in the same illusion and say that they believe in it. Ideology is a false individual belief that succeeds in becoming a collective belief, said loudly and in public - it is not enough to believe in ideologies, in order for them to get established they must also be proclaimed and repeated publicly and reciprocally.

Another, decisive role is played by governors and ministers. These are initially not so much driven by fear (perhaps partly), but by interests. They, too, do not tell the truth, although they know that they are saying a lie - however, quite simply, they have the incentive to lie. At this point the ideological apparatus is already working, and it spreads in the population simply by replicating the same fear and the same interests. In true stories, however, there is a fundamental difference comparing to the story narrated by the fairy tale. In real community affairs there are many people who are able to really see the clothes that do not exist. Ideology can become so powerful that we see a naked king as if he were dressed. And when the proportion of blind people in good faith exceeds that of those who lie (out of fear and interest), the ideological trap becomes (almost) perfect. We lose contact with reality because we can no longer distinguish what we really see from what we see thanks to the ideology. We live, even for a long time, in a false reality that some people - naively and sincerely - can really see and that others - out of interest - say they see knowing that they do not see it. The perfect producer-consumers of ideology are those who believe that the artificial world they see is really the true one - like Truman Show, it is the perfect reality show that every TV would like, where the protagonist lives his false life convinced that it is his real life.

In Juan Manuel's story, there is a servant to break the spell who, says the fairy tale, "had nothing to lose". Having nothing to lose, and perhaps inspired by a little bit of good will for the deceived king, that stableman found himself in the conditions of freedom to be able to simply tell the truth. In the fairy tale the king "cursed that servant" who revealed the truth, but the other fellow citizens of the kingdom one after the other came out of the spell and deception, triggered an opposite chain reaction, and the swindlers fled, betaking themselves to their heels. But why, unlike in fairy tales, does human history show us very few cases of ideal-driven communities that manage to get out of the ideological spell? Those who really saw wonderful clothes thanks to their ideology-influenced eyes don't want to go back to a reality which is true but much less colourful than what they "saw" for a long time and to which they were addicted - in fact, ideology is a form of doping which guarantees exceptional performance and removes the incentive to return to the fatigue and sweat of practice in the uphill roads and of uncertain results. Furthermore, over the years, many of those who initially saw the invisible because of interest have gradually transformed themselves into honest seers, and the share of people who see non-existing things in good faith can become an almost totality. Finally, the very few who have remained conscious of the ideological bluff are also those who are earning most from that collective comedy. Ideology is also very dangerous because once activated it feeds on itself, in different but convergent ways.

However, the happy ending of the fairy tale contains a message of non-vain hope. It is not impossible that - even outside the world of fairy tales - a single person saves everyone. One of the "remnant", a person who saved the freedom of their heart and eyes during the time of illusions. Like Noah. There are certain crucial moments when the ‘critical mass’ is ‘1’. A single person who "has nothing to lose", because, perhaps, they have already given everything, or because they have managed to shield their poverty. The many forms of poverty usually reduce our freedom, but sometimes poverty alone can generate a different freedom that is capable of liberating others. And if we then realise that in our desolate land of these poor people there is not even one left, we can always hope to become that one ourselves.

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We can hope to get out of the ideological traps if there is at least one poor person among us who is able to simply say what they see [access] => 1 [hits] => 2117 [xreference] => [featured] => 0 [language] => en-GB [on_img_default] => [readmore] => 10446 [ordering] => 1 [category_title] => EN - Narrative Capitals [category_route] => organizzazioni-e-ideali/it-capitali-narrativi [category_access] => 1 [category_alias] => en-narrative-capitals [published] => 1 [parents_published] => 1 [lft] => 150 [author] => Luigino Bruni [author_email] => ferrucci.anto@gmail.com [parent_title] => Organizzazioni e Ideali [parent_id] => 1028 [parent_route] => organizzazioni-e-ideali [parent_alias] => organizzazioni-e-ideali [rating] => 0 [rating_count] => 0 [alternative_readmore] => [layout] => [params] => Joomla\Registry\Registry Object ( [data:protected] => stdClass Object ( [article_layout] => _:default [show_title] => 1 [link_titles] => 1 [show_intro] => 1 [info_block_position] => 0 [info_block_show_title] => 1 [show_category] => 1 [link_category] => 1 [show_parent_category] => 1 [link_parent_category] => 1 [show_associations] => 0 [flags] => 1 [show_author] => 0 [link_author] => 0 [show_create_date] => 1 [show_modify_date] => 0 [show_publish_date] => 1 [show_item_navigation] => 1 [show_vote] => 0 [show_readmore] => 0 [show_readmore_title] => 0 [readmore_limit] => 100 [show_tags] => 1 [show_icons] => 1 [show_print_icon] => 1 [show_email_icon] => 1 [show_hits] => 0 [record_hits] => 1 [show_noauth] => 0 [urls_position] => 1 [captcha] => [show_publishing_options] => 1 [show_article_options] => 1 [save_history] => 1 [history_limit] => 10 [show_urls_images_frontend] => 0 [show_urls_images_backend] => 1 [targeta] => 0 [targetb] => 0 [targetc] => 0 [float_intro] => left [float_fulltext] => left [category_layout] => _:blog [show_category_heading_title_text] => 0 [show_category_title] => 0 [show_description] => 0 [show_description_image] => 0 [maxLevel] => 0 [show_empty_categories] => 0 [show_no_articles] => 1 [show_subcat_desc] => 0 [show_cat_num_articles] => 0 [show_cat_tags] => 1 [show_base_description] => 1 [maxLevelcat] => -1 [show_empty_categories_cat] => 0 [show_subcat_desc_cat] => 0 [show_cat_num_articles_cat] => 0 [num_leading_articles] => 0 [num_intro_articles] => 14 [num_columns] => 2 [num_links] => 0 [multi_column_order] => 1 [show_subcategory_content] => -1 [show_pagination_limit] => 1 [filter_field] => hide [show_headings] => 1 [list_show_date] => 0 [date_format] => [list_show_hits] => 1 [list_show_author] => 1 [list_show_votes] => 0 [list_show_ratings] => 0 [orderby_pri] => none [orderby_sec] => rdate [order_date] => published [show_pagination] => 2 [show_pagination_results] => 1 [show_featured] => show [show_feed_link] => 1 [feed_summary] => 0 [feed_show_readmore] => 0 [sef_advanced] => 1 [sef_ids] => 1 [custom_fields_enable] => 1 [show_page_heading] => 0 [layout_type] => blog [menu_text] => 1 [menu_show] => 1 [secure] => 0 [helixultimatemenulayout] => {"width":600,"menualign":"right","megamenu":0,"showtitle":1,"faicon":"","customclass":"","dropdown":"right","badge":"","badge_position":"","badge_bg_color":"","badge_text_color":"","layout":[]} [helixultimate_enable_page_title] => 1 [helixultimate_page_title_alt] => Capitali narrativi [helixultimate_page_subtitle] => Organizzazioni e Ideali [helixultimate_page_title_heading] => h2 [page_title] => Narrative Capitals [page_description] => [page_rights] => [robots] => [access-view] => 1 ) [initialized:protected] => 1 [separator] => . ) [displayDate] => 2017-12-16 19:27:00 [tags] => Joomla\CMS\Helper\TagsHelper Object ( [tagsChanged:protected] => [replaceTags:protected] => [typeAlias] => [itemTags] => Array ( ) ) [slug] => 16274:the-naked-freedom-of-the-eyes [parent_slug] => 1028:organizzazioni-e-ideali [catslug] => 843:en-narrative-capitals [event] => stdClass Object ( [afterDisplayTitle] => [beforeDisplayContent] => [afterDisplayContent] => ) [text] =>

Narrative Capitals/6 - What matters is to recognise deceitful prophets and storytellers

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/12/2017

171217 Capitali narrativi 6 ridPoverty is the first virtue to be discovered by all founders, and the first one to be forgotten by their successors.

Carlo Maria Martini, Per amore, per voi, per sempre (“For love, for you, forever” - the tr.)

Ideology is a very common and serious illness in ideal-driven organizations (IDO), and it develops especially during the crisis of narrative capital, when amidst the shortage of true stories to tell the offer of new artificial stories that seem to respond to the hunger for sense and future that is hitting the community becomes very seductive. Ideology is the neurosis of the ideal - just as idolatry is the neurosis of faith. Among the many forms that ideologies take, a particularly frequent and dangerous form is the one suggested by Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel’s novel entitled El Conde Lucanor (Tales of Count Lucanor), which is the medieval source of the fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. But, unlike its various modern rewritings, in the original novel we find precious elements to add new words to our discourse on movements and communities that originate from ideals, charismas and motivations that are different and larger than the economic ones.

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The Naked Freedom of the Eyes

Narrative Capitals/6 - What matters is to recognise deceitful prophets and storytellers by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 17/12/2017 “Poverty is the first virtue to be discovered by all founders, and the first one to be forgotten by their successors."  Carlo Maria Martini, Per am...
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Narrative Capitals/5 - There is no more vital guarantee than “freedom-without-guarantees”

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/12/2017

171203 Capitali narrativi 5 rid«Human desire will forever remain only in its irreducible character (resistant to) any reduction and adaptation. »

Jacques Lacan The Seminar of; Book V (English translation by Cormac Gallagher)

It is not uncommon for experiences born in the name of gratuitousness to end up coming into conflict with the very gratuitousness that generated them. In many companies, the ‘simple’ goal of maximizing profit already produces organizations that do everything they can to try to direct all the available energies of their workers towards this end. But if the mission of an ideal-driven organization (IDO) is the definitive redemption of the poor or, perhaps, the conversion of the world, the members are asked to direct all available and even unavailable energies, possibly their entire life towards such a high cause. And so it often happens that in the practice of the IDO there is less freedom and gratuitousness than in the companies and organizations that the IDO criticizes precisely because of the lack of gift and freedom.

[fulltext] =>

In fact, it is in the relationship between the organization and the people where the essential dimension of gratuitousness can easily be missing, because (without wanting to) the IDO ends up living and growing by consuming the gratuitousness of its own members. This paradox is one of the main causes of the great crises of ideal-driven organisations and, not infrequently, of their end.

The keyword for trying to understand the grammar of these phenomena is desire. There is no gratuitousness without freedom, and there is no freedom without the ability to desire freely - the first freedom is the freedom of desire. Desire is not something romantic and sentimental, or even frivolous and trivial to which our culture has reduced it. The ability to desire is one of the fundamental capabilities of the person, which becomes almost everything when dealing with people who spend their lives adopting high moral or spiritual ideals.

The first gratuitousness experienced by those who follow a vocation is the gift of their own desires. This gift, however, produces diametrically opposite outcomes - in the donor person and in the institution/community that receives it - depending on whether the gift of desires is kept alive or is sacrificed. Abraham gives his only son Isaac as a free gift, because he had a call and responded - in true vocations we cannot fail to give everything. Abraham gives everything freely, but if God had really wanted the sacrifice of the son donated to him, the children of the first promise would not have been as numerous as the stars of heaven. In historical experiences, however, especially in religious and spiritual communities, the ram almost never arrives, the angel does not stop the hand raised to kill and the IDO sacrifices the gift of desire. And life gets stuck. Why?

When a person encounters an ideal-related experience wherein they recognize themselves, they glimpse the possibility of endlessly expanding their desires, to the point of touching their own dreams. So they freely choose to invest everything in this new promise, which speaks only of gratuitousness and gift. They do not live their response as sacrifice, or (least of all) as a loss. In renouncing individual projects and desires, they only see an immensely greater freedom and gift, an infinite possibility of blossoming differently in a wonderful new garden. Thus, the new desire that appears infinite absorbs in itself all the other desires, until it gradually becomes the only desire. It happens too easily that the desire of the community sacrifices the desires of its people. The other stories of our own and of the world lose fascination and interest, we stop desiring them because they seem too little and trivial to us. To the point of not appreciating and discrediting those who live and tell only their little everyday stories, those who speak to us banally about their family, their ordinary work, those who pray with their simple prayers they learned in their childhood. The biodiversity of feelings, words, desires, interests, stories and of life itself is dramatically reduced, but we are so abducted by the new astonishing desire that we fail to perceive this shortage.

In this process, which can be very long, the degrees of freedom experienced in the encounter with the first voice are drastically reduced, and more and more people want only the things that the new community wants and tells us to desire. But desiring a set of things that are made finite and defined by others simply produces the death of desire, which can live and grow only in mixed territories, in the surprises and unpredictability of life as a whole and, above all, in freedom. The only way to hope that a child will grow up as a free person is to help them to desire things that are different from what we wanted - and sometimes to be surprised that one of their free desires was also our own, equal yet entirely different. However, human communities born from ideals, especially those born of great ideals, almost always do the opposite: they take the gift of people’s desires and sacrifice it on the altar of the desire of the community. They encourage their members to desire the same things that the founders wanted and that they all want. And so they sacrifice the desires of their members by trapping them inside a closed list of desirable things. Good desires stand out from bad desires which inevitably end up killing all desires. There is an actual and real substitution: the place of individual desires sacrificed and so killed is taken by the only collective desire, the same for everyone else. The good way would instead be grafting the new desire into the individual desires, giving life to a new reality where the first desires of people are exalted by the great narrative of the ideal that acts as a ‘multiplier’ of the desires of everyone and of each one. But this happy outcome is not the most common or likely one. Because grafting is much more risky and unpredictable than replacement, which works well and better than grafting as long as people and the community are young, but generates great problems in adult life when the great desire comes into crisis.

But why do ideal communities substitute desires? They do so because, on the one hand, they think that the only way to realize the great desire of the community and its founders is to succeed in having the heart of their people, and therefore the gift of their desires. The whole mind and all the forces are not enough. For their great purpose, all desires are also needed, because it is there that the infinite energy they need to fulfil the infinite desire of the IDO’s mission is found. We can already see it in companies which are increasingly trying to ‘buy’ the wishes of their employees. It happens even more often in ideal-driven communities. This process is generally covered by a genuine good faith of the founders/leaders, who are sincerely convinced that there is no greater happiness for their members than learning to desire only that one desirable thing. Then there is a second reason for sacrifice and substitution. It is the more or less conscious intuition that if people’s desires remain free, loose and not channelled, they carry with them the risk of the end of the community, which can live only if totally desired by their members and desired in the same ways and forms. Writing very detailed rules and statutes is often also the unconscious manifestation of this need to sacrifice, control and direct the desires of present and future members, hoping to guarantee the continuity of the original experience. For these two reasons, the sacrifice of desires is therefore an almost invincible temptation of ideal-driven communities.

However, at some rare times, the founders can understand that the only good way not to make their work perish is not to sacrifice the gift of desire they receive. And they let it live, they cherish it because it grows in synergy and fraternity with the new collective desire. They unbind Isaac from the faggot and save him from the devouring fire, thus risking that those living - and therefore different - desires will grow in a way they do not desire them to grow. It is only by putting those who come after us in the condition of freedom to destroy what we have built up that we can have the hope (but can never be certain) that they will actually not destroy it. We can hope to control some of the ideal processes that we operate only by giving up the control of everything - and if we want this something we saved to be important and essential, we must give up control of what we think is essential and important. To keep human things alive there is no other guarantee than freedom-without-guarantees. The higher the ideals, the more necessary and essential is freedom and the gratuitousness of desires. Moreover, the more generous and ambitious the IDO’s ideal is, the more likely it is to sacrifice and substitute desire. History tells us that the more you control desires in youth and/or in the first phase of the foundation, the more you will have people with little or no wishes in adulthood and/or in the second phase.

When we go through a serious crisis of narrative capital, to write new stories still capable of enchanting others and ourselves, we would only need new free and in-finite desires, such as those donated on the first day. But those people who are accustomed to wanting only things defined as desirable find themselves with a numbed muscle of desire. They no longer want anything, so they can’t live and write desirable stories.

It should not therefore come as a surprise to us that a common difficulty for communities that are going through a serious crisis of narrative capital is to find themselves with a large number of members suffering a shortage of desire, and therefore an apathy of eros, life. This regards above all the more generous and pure people, who more willingly sacrificed their desires to embrace the new - the more desires we donated yesterday, the more we suffer apathy today. What to do? For now, we can become aware that it is not easy to get out of these traps that are at the root of the death of great collective ideals and of so much individual pain, also because the illness of desire that manifests itself today is the effect of the sacrifice of yesterday’s desire, which was welcomed by all as a blessing. But one must at least avoid exchanging the cure with the illness (when, for example, inviting people in crisis and those who are burnt out to desire the same things again). And then, to hope for a resurrection of desires, we can try to listen again to the ‘banal’ daily stories of the families of our friends and colleagues, their ordinary stories of work, efforts and love. Maybe we will discover that ‘under the sun’ there are few other more worthy things to desire. And, perhaps, in the company of these simple but once again true and living desires, we may spot an angel waiting who still calls them by name.

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And this way they find themselves with people who are happy when young but burnt out and unable to generate life as adults. What to do? 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Narrative Capitals/5 - There is no more vital guarantee than “freedom-without-guarantees”

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/12/2017

171203 Capitali narrativi 5 rid«Human desire will forever remain only in its irreducible character (resistant to) any reduction and adaptation. »

Jacques Lacan The Seminar of; Book V (English translation by Cormac Gallagher)

It is not uncommon for experiences born in the name of gratuitousness to end up coming into conflict with the very gratuitousness that generated them. In many companies, the ‘simple’ goal of maximizing profit already produces organizations that do everything they can to try to direct all the available energies of their workers towards this end. But if the mission of an ideal-driven organization (IDO) is the definitive redemption of the poor or, perhaps, the conversion of the world, the members are asked to direct all available and even unavailable energies, possibly their entire life towards such a high cause. And so it often happens that in the practice of the IDO there is less freedom and gratuitousness than in the companies and organizations that the IDO criticizes precisely because of the lack of gift and freedom.

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The Different Power of Desires

Narrative Capitals/5 - There is no more vital guarantee than “freedom-without-guarantees” by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 10/12/2017 «Human desire will forever remain only in its irreducible character (resistant to) any reduction and adaptation. » Jacques Lacan The ...
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Narrative Capitals/4 - Founding and Saving facts and acts aren’t always striking

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/12/2017

171203 Capitali narrativi 4 rid“Only infinite love can reduce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other.”

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death (English translation by: David Wills)

Narrative capitals are pluralistic. Not all the stories they are composed of have the same value. Only a few are able to carry the weight of the new construction. ‘Wheat’ and ‘weeds’ are found in all fields of the earth, including those special fields where our ideals grow. At the beginning we must grow all the plants in the field, because - as the great evangelical metaphor says - if the peasants intervened to eradicate the weeds they would also tear away the good and precious ears of wheat.

[fulltext] =>

Preserving all the ears of good wheat is a vital duty and a moral imperative of the founders and the first generation of a community and an ideal-driven organization (IDO), and this rightful concern to preserve the entirety of the experience and its narrative capital means that when the foundation phase ends, the harvest includes good wheat mixed with the weeds. So the heritage that the founders leave us is always a legacy of wheat and couch grass.

Some organizations become extinct because, already in the original phase, they do not know how to live with the presence of weeds and the inevitable impurity of incarnations. So they try to immediately separate the bad grasses from the good ones and don’t allow all the seeds to reach ripeness. Also because, unlike the real seeds and fields, the genuine components of our ideals can be distinguished from the bad ones only with the passing of time, and often what seemed to be discordant at the beginning, later flourished in wheat, and vice versa. Ideals grow well only by getting contaminated by all the nearby vegetation. They nourish off the same substances, live in osmosis with very different trees and, sometimes, also with poisonous fungi (that are only poisonous for those who eat them, but not for the other plants). Sometimes these flowers and plants are so delicate that they can grow only because they are protected by the shadow of less noble trees that, however, are more resistant to scorching heat. Only bonsai trees can live in the sterile places of our living rooms. They do not bear fruit, they have no roots, and they do not grow. Real stories are written with entire chapters of novels written by others and with passages of myths of surrounding ‘pagan cults’. No narrative capital is entirely new. Most of its ideas and stories are inheritance, even when the writer of a new story is not fully aware of them (because he or she fears that recognizing the gift of the past reduces novelty). Whoever begins to live and tell a community, corporate or political story inherits and generates wheat and weed.

But - and this is the most delicate and crucial process - those who come after the foundation phase tend almost inevitably to identify weeds only in the first inheritance, i. e. in the ideas and stories that the founders found as materials that existed prior to their new house, and to consider all good wheat that was produced by the founder. They thus attempt a first separation by looking for weeds only ‘outside’ and ‘earlier’, not ‘inside’ and’ ‘during’ the original words of the founder. In some cases we end up writing a new narrative capital by completely eliminating the old ‘contaminated’ stories inherited from the past and the environment, composing new stories using only what we think is new and original of the available materials. And so the weeds also present within the new ideas and stories of the foundation grow undisturbed because they are confused with wheat. Until one day the good fruits (new members and vocations) are finished, suffocated by weeds disguised as wheat.

Sometimes, at this stage of narrative famine, the post-foundation community has the gift and strength to realize that if it wants to hope to save itself, it must courageously begin the separation of wheat/weeds even inside the original narrative capital of the founder. Usually it is not without internal resistance that they begin to have a more mature and ‘distant’ look at the ideas, writings and stories of the foundation in search of really good wheat.

But even in these necessary operations it is very easy to find ourselves having exchanged the weeds with wheat. This is due to a very common mistake. It is thought that the true and good part of the narrative capital lies in its most spectacular and sensational elements, and so the more sober, simpler, poorer and more ordinary components are torn away. It’s a serious and widespread error, especially in the experiences born of spiritual and religious charismas. In these founding stories there are events, key episodes and narrations that were most impressive for the imagination of the founders themselves and later for the feelings of their first followers. They are often linked to facts that lie at the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, between the ordinary and the miraculous. In some cases they take the form of stories of visions or special revelations and in general they seem to be secret, often Gnostic and mysterious.

Each foundation, especially if it originates from a rich and deep charisma, is surrounded by this narrative component. Even the Church of the early days, for example, abounded in such stories, of which it also nourished and enriched herself. The time came, however, when the first Christians had to govern the proliferation of this spectacular and miraculous narrative component. Thus, among the many stories that circulated in those second and third phases, only four gospels and few other texts were chosen. Today we know that some (perhaps many) episodes and words contained in the apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels were no less ‘true’ than the facts and words preserved in canonical texts. Many tales bloomed in a period farther from the first historical events, when some began to think that the first sober and essential kerygma wasn’t enough spectacular and secret to convert and conquer. But without that operation of separation and discernment the primitive Church would have been devoured by its own stories. The most sensational part that circulated about the life of Jesus and the apostles would have eaten up the overly sober stories of a young woman from Nazareth, the beatitudes for the poor and the afflicted, the story of the passion and therefore of the resurrection, which would have been equated to the many miracles of Jesus, to the ones that were similar to the deeds of the false prophets and magicians, or to the ‘resurrection’ of Lazarus. In the abundance of extraordinary stories, those first communities had to ‘sacrifice’ some real or probable facts in order to save the novelty of their own story capable of generating present and future. It is surely no coincidence that the resurrection of Jesus was accompanied by very few descriptions. The scene includes a few frightened women, a young man wearing white clothes, a gardener - incredulous people. The oldest manuscripts of the oldest gospel ended with these beautiful words, commenting on the empty tomb seen by the women: “and they said nothing to anyone” (Mark 16:8). In Paul’s letters there are no stories of the miracles of Jesus, only that of a ‘miracle’ of a crucified-and-risen person who is alive and is met by others along the way.

In moments of crisis of stories to tell, it is too easy to think that today’s new stories will have to start from the most striking stories of yesterday. We deceive ourselves if we believe that telling about past miracles is enough to generate new ‘miracles’ that would be needed today to continue the journey, and are missing. As if to revive the original reality it was enough to simply remember the special deeds of yesterday, and not relive them. We fall into a consumerist syndrome, which is as likely and tempting as rich of special events the foundation was, and we run the risk of blocking the next generation in the gluttonous consumption of sterile memories. Another resource curse: the more colourful the past is, the more faded the present risks of becoming, since the present is then lived by consuming the past, forgetting the future. Here the fatal error lies in the lack of understanding that the special gifts received in the founding phase were only ‘the wedding gift’ from which a beautiful (because ordinary and possible for all) new life was born. They are unique and unrepeatable experiences because they are linked to the revelation of the "prophetic" vocation of the founders. The fruitful inheritance that the founders leave us is not only dowry received as a gift, but the life born of those weddings. It’s a living child, not a shimmering, sterile diamond.

When this error occurs, the extraordinary part of the narrative capital, which is also part of the inheritance, becomes ‘bad money’, not because it is bad or false in itself, but because, in a new version of the old Gresham’s Law, it ‘drives out’ the ‘good money’ of the hard work of those who are seriously and humbly trying to write a new beautiful normality in life after the crisis of the first stories. This work of writing generative narrative capital is thwarted by the sellers of the memories, special effects and fireworks of the early days that are no longer there. It was not the big grey dog appearing to Don Bosco that generated the great Salesian educational movement; it was born above all from the very average ‘whistle’ that the young John Bosco provoked from the youngster named Bartolomeo. It was not the events recorded in “Fioretti” or the stigmata of Saint Francis that generated and regenerated the Franciscan movement, but the radical and tenacious fidelity of Francis to the ‘Madonna of Poverty’ of the Gospel. Isaiah did not save and nourish his people with the story of the vision of seraphim in the Temple on the day of his vocation, but with the humble prophecy of a child and a small faithful remnant, which fuelled non-vain hope during the exile, and which today continues to nourish our love-filled waiting that never ends.  

The sensational and extraordinary experiences of the foundation are beautiful seeds, but they don’t reproduce, and they only tend to throw the IDO back into the past, to make it addicted to narcotic substances. The new good narrative capital is not that of the memories of the miracles of yesterday, but the one generated by the new tales of today’s real and simple life.

In narrative capital crises there are always very few remaining resources. An IDO saves itself if it does not invest these in the consumption of its own extraordinary stories of the past, because it understands that the good wheat was to be found in the normal life of the first phase, in those facts that can still sprout many others because they are so extraordinary as to be ordinary, so finite to be really infinite. The story of a crucified man, a friend of sinners, fishermen, of those who forgive, of those who are forgiven, of communities that simply live in mutual love. Only on these normal and dusty roads of Damascus is it still possible to fall off the horse.

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The same is true for the field of ideals and charismas. The ability of a community to have a future lies in avoiding the mistake of thinking that good wheat is extraordinary and striking, while weeds stand for simple and ordinary life. 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Narrative Capitals/4 - Founding and Saving facts and acts aren’t always striking

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/12/2017

171203 Capitali narrativi 4 rid“Only infinite love can reduce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other.”

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death (English translation by: David Wills)

Narrative capitals are pluralistic. Not all the stories they are composed of have the same value. Only a few are able to carry the weight of the new construction. ‘Wheat’ and ‘weeds’ are found in all fields of the earth, including those special fields where our ideals grow. At the beginning we must grow all the plants in the field, because - as the great evangelical metaphor says - if the peasants intervened to eradicate the weeds they would also tear away the good and precious ears of wheat.

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The Road to Damascus Is Normal

Narrative Capitals/4 - Founding and Saving facts and acts aren’t always striking by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 03/12/2017 “Only infinite love can reduce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other.&r...
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    [title] => On the wounds of the earth
    [alias] => on-the-wounds-of-the-earth
    [introtext] => 

Narrative Capitals/3 - Great collective ideals germinate in seismic areas

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/11/2017

171125 Capitali narrativi 3 rid«Ci sono le voci.
Ci accompagnano.
Ci mordono.
Ci sussurrano brevissime consolazioni…
Ci comandano
ci sgridano
quasi mai ci lodano
gridano nelle notti insonni.
Le voci…
Di chi sono queste voci?»

Chandra Livia Candiani, Fatti vivo

The more we loved the great narratives we see vanishing, the more severe the famines of narrative capital are. When we had laid all our hearts, souls and minds in that good news, burned all our impossible desires, and it had become the dominant thought that did not let us sleep at night because we wanted to daydream our only true dream.

[fulltext] =>

Those who were more captured and enchanted by that promise that seemed boundless and infinite yesterday are more baffled and crushed today because the most beautiful story has stopped talking. As with earthquakes, those who are closer to the epicentre suffer more damage than those who lived on the edge of the crater. The crises of narrative capitals generate many 'victims', precisely among those who, by vocation and destiny, are closer and more intimate to that first great story. They often die and leave us, not because they didn’t love it enough but because they loved it too much. ‘The king is mute' is neither a denunciation nor a betrayal, it's just a song-cry of love, even when it's the last song.

But unlike the real earthquakes, in the symbolic ones that affect the narrative capitals of the ideal-driven organisations (IDO), measuring the real distances from the epicentre is far from easy, because they are different from the obvious ones and almost always invisible. In these different measurements the status and the organization chart does not help in any way. We have such a lot of difficulty in estimating the real damage and even more in starting good reconstruction processes, because, confusing those who are really close to the founding core of the IDO with the false neighbours, we often ask questions to the wrong people, who even in good faith only talk to us about some cracks on the walls; this way we don’t understand the true extent of the things that happened and the damage that was made, and we entrust the design of the new city to unskilful hands. Because, for example, those who regularly work in an IDO are not always 'closer' and 'more intimate' than the volunteers, the sisters of a religious order are not all closer than all the lay friends of the community, and even some of those responsible can be very 'far away'. People with the same formal distance from the centre of the charisma/ideal have very different real distances. And so, sitting in the same offices, in the same CDA, in the same choir of the abbey, there are people who suffer greatly from the crisis of narrative capital, others who suffer much less and some who do not suffer at all, and others who rejoice for the collapse of the 'house'.

In a scenario where everything is very fluid (and still very little studied and analysed) and where certainties are not present, we have a quasi-certainty anyway: the first instrument for recognizing people who are closer to the narrative capital is counting the damage. Those who had established their dwelling in the vicinity of the centre must be among those who have lost and suffered the most. And from here a second message can be derived: many of those who had a most intimate relationship and were in love with the first ideal narrative are to be searched buried under the rubble of their most beautiful story. Then, if the earthquake is very strong, some of them may ‘die’, leaving the IDO or the community. They ‘die’ for the sole ‘crime’ of having built their own house in the place closest to the ideals and the stories thereof. They had simply stayed at home, faithful in their lookout place, they had not gone on holiday.

There is also another message, which concerns those who have not been harmed because they were sufficiently distant. These inhabitants of the suburbs are of two kinds, and only the first is good. The first type includes those inhabitants who were visibly and objectively distant from the centre. The second, however, has the false neighbours, those who were formally close but fundamentally distant. The first are those people around the community and the IDO who had not invested many desires and expectations in that ideal story, and who therefore do not suffer too much when its most intimate and deep part is blurred (because, in a certain sense, they had never got to know it, if not in very small doses).

However, these real inhabitants of the less affected areas can play a very important role. They can open their houses and welcome those who have suffered serious damage. They can warm them up, tuck them in blankets, turn on the fireplace, cook chestnuts on the flame, party with the best wine. Pray together. And in some evenings that are more clear and full of stars, they can start to share the great stories of the beginning with their guests, to remember the first love, to listen to them as if it were the first time. With the same enchantment, with the same trust, with the same ardour. Nicodemus finally returns to his mother's breast, and he is truly reborn. At other times this miracle does not happen, but those months spent as guests in houses that only suffered a few cracks and had so much fraternity in them are always a gift and refreshment for the heart, they are the piece of bread and the glass of water so as not to die and continue walking in the desert. Many people who were exhausted and oppressed by the arrival of the famine of narrative capital could have started a new story and perhaps experience a real resurrection if they had only found a friend in the suburbs to open his door for them generously. And, sometimes, this 'far away' person that saves us from the great famine is that dreamy brother whom we had chased away and sold to merchants heading to Egypt many years before, but who had never ceased to love us, recognized us, and gave us bread.

The distanced ones of the second type, however, are profoundly different. They are found at all levels of an IDO, even at the highest levels. They have the status of neighbours even though they are far away from the core of the original ideal experience - it is in this invisible contrast that their danger nests. Among them there is a wide range of humanity, starting from those who quickly reached the commanding posts because of their relational talents or flattery, hurrying through stages without having achieved real maturation in the values of the mission of the IDO, to those who do not have sufficient spiritual depth to understand the ‘charisma’ but have learned the profession well, and to those who find themselves in an institution or community without ever having really chosen it, and try to float on the surface. Many are in good faith, some are even good themselves, others are simply superficial, few are generous, no one is a prophet. Since they have not suffered any damage, they apply to begin the reconstruction work. While the closest real neighbours try to work through the phase of mourning and need time and resources to heal some deep and real wounds, these others have many psychological and physical energies to invest. And so we find them in the front row, as the candidates for writing the new narrative capital.

Finally, there are those, too, who had rejoiced for the collapse. A sad joy it is, sometimes desperate, a despair opposite to that of the real neighbours. Its reasons are many and rather varied. Sometimes it is a conscious lack of vocation which is not accompanied by sufficient strength and freedom to leave the community, and which over time has become resentment and hatred. So much pain, always. At other times their ‘joy’ comes from the hope of taking some advantage from the sad situation, and perhaps they move their residence in search of tax benefits. Here there is no love for the first narrative capital or for the possible new stories, even when some of these people - who are always mixed with those who are closer and closest - can be found in the group of scribes chosen for writing the new stories after the great crisis.

We should not be surprised, then, if the historical evidence shows us that the great crises of narrative capital almost never lead to a real rebirth, because it happens all too often that the direction of the works ends up being in the hands of fake neighbours and, sometimes, those who have rejoiced over the collapse. The new city will somehow be built, but it will not be the resurrection of the first.

The rare possibility of a good future will depend decisively on the quality and quantity of the survivors who survived the collapse and without too much serious damage (because they are younger, more cautious or because they were at dinner with friends), and on the generosity of the ‘real distant ones' in their hospitality. But above all, the beauty and the prophecy of the new city will depend on how many of the survivors - who have seen and heard the house collapse over their bodies - and their children and parents decide to stay, to start again, to try to rise again. The fear of aftershocks is too great. And it happens very often that even the surviving neighbours descend downstream, towards the sea on the safer coasts, giving up forever the colour of the flowers and the irresistible scent of the air where everything has begun. Only a new vocation, another voice, a whisper of a second call can make us reconstruct a new house near the graves of our parents and children, accepting to live with vulnerability throughout our lives. To rebuild new and different houses, that this time will be lighter and more carefully designed. No more palaces or fancy mansions, to finally learn to live in the humble tent of the Aramean.

The greatest charismas and collective ideals are born and grown in seismic areas, because they are found in the border spaces between the strata of civilizations, religions and epochs. We never live comfortably and quietly in the cities generated by our greatest ideals. They are born on the wounds of the earth. They should not be there, but they are, thanks to the agapic imprudence of their founders. They followed the flight of a beautiful bird in a holy spring, and simply laid the first stone where that crazy flight ended. They did not plan the foundation, they did not choose the most suitable location for their city. The place has chosen them, because we don't choose the most important things, we find them inside as destiny and task. And there they started to build house after house, and finally gave us a city to inherit, fragile and beautiful, along with their stories, even more fragile, even more beautiful. And with them they have left us breathtaking ridges, horizons of paradise, endless spaces. On highlands that are rich in rare and colourful flowers, with high peaks crowned with light.

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Narrative Capitals/3 - Great collective ideals germinate in seismic areas

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/11/2017

171125 Capitali narrativi 3 rid«Ci sono le voci.
Ci accompagnano.
Ci mordono.
Ci sussurrano brevissime consolazioni…
Ci comandano
ci sgridano
quasi mai ci lodano
gridano nelle notti insonni.
Le voci…
Di chi sono queste voci?»

Chandra Livia Candiani, Fatti vivo

The more we loved the great narratives we see vanishing, the more severe the famines of narrative capital are. When we had laid all our hearts, souls and minds in that good news, burned all our impossible desires, and it had become the dominant thought that did not let us sleep at night because we wanted to daydream our only true dream.

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On the wounds of the earth

Narrative Capitals/3 - Great collective ideals germinate in seismic areas by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 26/11/2017 «Ci sono le voci. Ci accompagnano. Ci mordono. Ci sussurrano brevissime consolazioni… Ci comandano ci sgridano quasi mai ci lodano gridano nelle notti insonni. ...
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Narrative Capitals/2 - Rising again should be learned and is only possible without a contract

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/11/2017

171119 Capitali narrativi 2 ridThe great writers project their shadow in two directions simultaneously. In one they offer their shadow to their predecessors, in the other to those who follow them".

Wislawa Szymborska, How to live more comfortably

The most tenacious and constant search that humans conduct on earth is the search for consolation. It is impossible to give it up, especially in difficult times of existence, when the pain of the present and the uncertainty of the future generate the invincible temptation to construct illusions in order not to die. Many people, even the great, interrupt their ethical and spiritual journey and regress when and because they give in to these terrible temptations.

[fulltext] =>

Organizations, especially ideal-driven organizations (IDO), are also deeply tempted by the cultivation of consolations. Often, faced with the urgency of having to change their course with courage and strength, they linger in the status quo full and satisfied and consoled by some fruit that continues to arrive. It is a serious and common mistake, which arises from confusing the "interests" of the narrative capital of yesterday with the wage of today's work - and so they live of the (decreasing) gains of the past believing, falsely, to live off of the new gains.

The destiny of every human community lies at the crossroads between the memory of the past, the management of the present and faith in the future. Roots, for example, are not the past of the plant. They are, at the same time, its memory, its life today and its blooming tomorrow. If, however, the roots are interpreted only as past, the typical illnesses of nostalgia inevitably arise, the first visible effect of which is the separation and distancing from the youth and from the reality of the present - young people flee away when they meet nostalgic communities with their eyes turned towards their origin. The only nostalgia generating a good present is that of the future. When the roots are read as the past, the narrative capital of the origin is transformed into a mummy, almost unavoidably. When the community (in rare cases) becomes aware of the ageing of the first stories and their imminent death, first the evolution of the mummified "corpse" is prepared, originated by the desire to save all that can be saved of the old body (the forms, the gaze, the features). What is left to the children is a corpse. The mummy does nothing but eternalise the death of the historical body. So it is the opposite of resurrection.

But resurrections are very rare events. Real death should be embraced; collective awareness should be matured as regards that first body which - notwithstanding its beauty and infinite charm - will never be there again. It should be accepted that the new life stories will be those of the future, which will also make people understand and "remember" the past. These authentic spiritual operations are proportionately as difficult as the first narrative capital was great and extraordinary, as the first historical body was "beautiful" – and so everybody wants to preserve it and not let it die.

But every "gospel" can only be written starting from a resurrection. Without the resurrection of Christ, his disciples would not have written anything, or would have written some Gnostic text that would have been added to the many generated in those early centuries of the late Roman Empire (and in all times of deep crisis, like ours). And so the narrative capital of parables, passion and death would not be remembered in spirit. And we would not have the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, we would not know of that crazy cry, nor of the other words resurrected on the first day after Saturday.

The first narrative capitals of the communities that are still alive and able to generate are the stories of the resurrection, because it is from these that the second stories of the more ancient historical facts are born. Stories that generate a lot of life for a long time are not those written by reporters while the events take place. Those chronicles die together with their characters. Unlike those accounts that are written by the “remnant” of the faithful who knew how to remain under the crosses, under the rubble of the temple, in the exiles, and who then recounted those facts of yesterday illuminated by life that had continued thanks to their tenacious fidelity. Even when the stories written after the events coincide with the stories written before, they are never the same, because the risen body is not the historical body. And instead, the most common error (because it is almost necessary) of the charismatic and ideal-driven communities is to think that narrative capital is an accomplished historical fact, the ipsissima verba of the founders. They don't really let them die, and therefore they don't allow them to be able, sometimes, to really rise again. Mummies cannot rise again. They are death and that’s all - like Manzoni's Donna Prassede, "when she says she was dead, everything is said".

Narrative capitals are capable of a future if they are interpreted as a seed, and therefore as something alive and that, because it’s a living thing, must die, and will only bring much fruit by dying, because that first seed will generate another hundred, a thousand. A seed lives, grows and dies precisely because it is alive – living things are alive because they are mortal. If instead the narrative capital of a charisma is read as a casket containing family jewellery, so shimmering and precious but dead, it is prevented from growing up, dying and bearing fruit. But how can we learn to rise again? No one can teach us. We can, however, at least avoid false resurrections. Just like in the Bible where the most bitter enemies of prophets are false prophets, in ideal-driven communities the mortal enemies of resurrections are false resurrections. The biblical prophets allowed for authentic resurrections of the people because they had, by their vocation, the infinite power to say that a first story was over. They made a second life possible after the deportation and destruction, because they did not deny the end - as the false prophets systematically did. Accepting real death did not prevent real resurrection. The inventors of fake resurrections (which are always forms of false prophecy) prevent the true resurrections because they continue to repeat that the "corpse" has not really died, that it is only an illusory death, sooner or later it will awaken. And so they propose and invent resuscitation techniques, build new defibrillators and convince the confused community to invest its last resources in attempting this "resurrection". Which does not happen: it will not happen because it cannot happen - but the ideological force of this false prophecy manages to justify even failure, to the very end.

Another false resurrection is to hide the corpse. The disciples in Jerusalem, Emmaus and Galilee made it possible for the "miracle" of the resurrection to be fulfilled also because they did not conceal the corpse, which is the most common way of false resurrection. But the corpses only tell stories of death, and living things need living things in order to continue to live. Sometimes, paradoxically, "the concealment of the body" is unknowingly favoured by the founders and by those who had been most enchanted by the first narrative capital. It happens when founders and the first generation try to reassure themselves and make sure that their charisma and community will have a future. They write very detailed and closed rules, so that the first narrative capital does not die. Instead of believing and trusting their "children" and "grandchildren" who will have their own charismatic chromosomes, an insurance contract is stipulated with the future, and they are told: "You should not change the past.” And so the healthy concern to save one's ideals produces the inevitable ageing of narrative capital, and the end of the experience. By preventing it from dying, they prevent it from rising again. In these cases, which are very deep traps, to save oneself there is a need for "children" and "grandchildren" - and sometimes "brothers and sisters" - capable of loving the fathers while also going against the letter of their fatherly recommendations, although knowing that they had been dictated by love and in good faith. Every "contract with the future" is a new concealment of the corpse, because such a pact is, in fact, the order to "start work" for the realization of one's own mummy.

Perhaps the early Church experienced something similar. We can imagine the historical phrases of Jesus that Peter and other disciples would have reminded Paul of to show him that the Gospel was only for the children of Israel, for the circumcised, not for the gentiles. But Paul did not fear conflicts with his brothers, he listened fully to the voice that spoke to him in his soul, he believed more in the present than in the past, and so he "saved" that first community, helping it to rise again, using his "charisma” to add new narrative capital to the first immense story, making it even more immense. Paul's stories and tales are not only, and not above all the stories and tales of Christ's historical life: they are the stories and words of Paul, which have also served the stories of Christ's life that came after him, and which perhaps would not have reached us, or would not have had the infinite strength that they had and still have without Paul's tenacious fidelity to his own different narrative capital. If the communities had only the "Peters", they would not save themselves from the obsolescence of their own narrative capital. The arrival of new "Pauls" is perhaps the only true salvation for the IDO’s. But when we are in labour we cannot know it, we can only hope and pray for it, and we can stay with the "lamps lit" to try to recognize when and if it arrives. And even if it does not arrive, we can live well and for a long time even if we wait for a true hope, renouncing to console ourselves with false hopes.

Real expectations are a precious nourishment of real life. There are IDO’s that end their race because they do not let Paul arrive. Others cannot recognise it because they have turned off their lamps. Others again because they call "Paul" the first false prophet passing by, a seller of cheap and easy salvations. Resurrections are not contracts. Nobody can assure us that they will come. On the contrary, what makes the miracle of their arrival is precisely the very real possibility that it will never happen. Non-false resurrections are always a gift, and therefore unforeseen. Only then do they surprise us and leave us breathless when they happen. When we recognize that wonderful voice in the person we thought was just a gardener.

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The most typical mistakes we tend to make include preventing the past from becoming a future, for example by mummifying the first narrative capital. How to avoid it? 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Narrative Capitals/2 - Rising again should be learned and is only possible without a contract

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/11/2017

171119 Capitali narrativi 2 ridThe great writers project their shadow in two directions simultaneously. In one they offer their shadow to their predecessors, in the other to those who follow them".

Wislawa Szymborska, How to live more comfortably

The most tenacious and constant search that humans conduct on earth is the search for consolation. It is impossible to give it up, especially in difficult times of existence, when the pain of the present and the uncertainty of the future generate the invincible temptation to construct illusions in order not to die. Many people, even the great, interrupt their ethical and spiritual journey and regress when and because they give in to these terrible temptations.

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Avoiding False Resurrections

Narrative Capitals/2 - Rising again should be learned and is only possible without a contract by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 19/11/2017 “The great writers project their shadow in two directions simultaneously. In one they offer their shadow to their predecessors, in the other to tho...
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Narrative Capitals/1 - The new beginning of a spiritual and work heritage

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire il 12/11/2017

171112 Capitali narrativi 1 ridWe have to work in those intermediate areas between several orders of disciplines, in which exceptional wealth is often accumulated, like at the border of two different areas.

Achille Loria The Economic Foundations of Society

Communities, associations, movements, institutions and businesses live through many forms of capital. One of these is narrative capital, a precious resource in many organizations, which becomes essential in times of crisis and in the great changes on which the quality of the present, the possibility of the future, the blessing or curse of the past depend. It is the patrimony - that is, munus / gift of the fathers - made of stories, stories, writings, sometimes poems, songs and myths. It is a real capital because, like all capitals, it generates fruits and future. If the ideals of the organization or community are high and ambitious, as it happens in many ideal driven organizations (IDO), its narrative capital is also great. It is a precious resource during the first difficulties, when telling each other the great episodes of yesterday gives courage to continue to hope, believe and love today.

[fulltext] =>

The narrative capital is also the first mechanism for selecting new members of the organization or community. We love many things, but above all we love wonderful stories, those that awaken the deepest and truest part of our soul, that make us become better simply by listening to them. The greater our ideals and our soul is, the greater the promise contained in the narrative capital must be in order to activate and make us become part of that same story. Small stories attract people with small desires and ideals, great stories conquer great souls, extraordinary stories attract extraordinary people.

In the early days of its foundation, this narrative capital is the only asset that a community possesses, especially those movement-communities that arise from spiritual ideals - inside and outside religions. We nourish ourselves with the life that is generated, with the first stories and "miracles", with life and the words of the founders that are still lived and told to each other. The new life is immediately a gospel, fresh good news. Those who are reached by that generative story recognize their own story, past and future in it. In those early days, the rate of accumulating the narrative capital is very high, and its growth is exponential. Most of this special heritage is formed during the very first few years, sometimes in the early months or days. Its "productivity" is extraordinary and astonishing: in any environment it is enough to evoke those first stories to witness authentic miracles that are as and (sometimes) more impressive than the first ones. Saying and repeating the phrases and facts of the beginning produces literally extraordinary effects, which, in addition to making the community grow, also feeds the conviction of the truth and strength of the announced ideal in those who announce it, in a very powerful and admirable virtuous circle (stories - announcing them - bearing fruits - strengthening - announcing them again...).

If the "charisma" at the origin of these experiences is rich and innovative, and the founder is generous and creative, one can feed on the stories and words of the early days for decades - even for centuries - without feeling the need to add a single new one. But it is within this richness that the so-called parasitic syndrome develops. Almost inevitably and always unintentionally, the immense fruits that the stories of the past generate become an obstacle to the creation of new narrative capital. And today we begin to live with the income of yesterday - like the entrepreneur who stops innovating and generating new income because he lives very well on the revenues of past capitals. The bigger the first narrative capital, the longer the phase of life fuelled by the revenue is. This is a form of the so-called "paradox of abundance" (or "resource curse"), the trap in which rich countries fall thanks to a single natural resource, ending up impoverishing themselves precisely because of that enormous wealth. A spiritually rich founder and charisma can be transformed from "blessing" into "curse" without wanting or being aware of it, if the spiritual richness of their charisma makes it easier and faster to trigger parasitic syndrome (which can begin already during the life of the founders themselves who stop innovating and nourish themselves above all from their past). Because, paradoxically, the greater the spiritual richness, the more likely it is that the parasitic syndrome is activated. Communities with simple founders and charismas have other problems, but they do not know the parasitic syndrome, which is a typical disease of wealth.

But unlike financial or real estate capitals, which can allow a constant or increasing flow of revenue, narrative capitals begin to age and shrink if they are not updated and renewed. For them, Edgar Morin’s phrase is especially true: Everything that is not regenerating is degenerating. This obsolescence/degeneration can be extremely and dramatically rapid in times of acceleration of history (as ours is). From one day to the next, one finds oneself in a serious famine of stories to tell. Those first stories that were convincing and of a conversional power until yesterday, the ones that were our great treasure, had enchanted us and founded our individual and collective life become silent, cold, dead. The distance between the language and the challenges of the present and the stories of the past becomes enormous – here, too, the watchmen are young people: they are the first to report illness.

In ideal connected and charismatic histories, the first stories continue to speak in the second and future generations only if accompanied by the second and third stories. Franciscans have kept Franciscanism and Christianity alive by adding the stories of Francis to those of the Gospels, and Franciscans today keep Francis (and the Gospel) alive by adding their "acts" to those of the Poverello of Assisi. The first patrimony, the fathers' narrative gift, is not enough to keep on living: the gift of children is also indispensable - which is also a gift for fathers who manage not to die forever.

The exhaustion of narrative capital is the most common cause of the crisis and death of an IDO. It is not easy to escape from this deadly syndrome. Often one gets ill and suffers without even being able to get to the diagnosis, and the crisis is attributed to other causes (the lack of radical thought in young people, the evilness of the world...). At other times we understand that the crisis has to do with our inability to narrate the heart of the charisma, we see that the narrative capital doesn't speak (to us) more, or doesn't speak enough, or speaks to the wrong people, but the wrong cure is chosen.

The most common bad cure is adding new stories that are easier to understand in the "present century", but that no longer have the DNA of the first story. It is only in the end that many understand that it’s because we are simply telling another story. Thus it happens that a community born of a charisma that wanted to evangelize the world of the family, faced with the difficulty of continuing to explain the evangelical words of the first generation to themselves and their world, begins to deal with family policies, adoptions and natural methods after a time. These new stories are much closer to the changed cultural sensibility, much easier to explain and understand, more suitable for financing and finding advocates. But the decisive problem hiding in such operations - that are common today - concerns the narrative capital directly. The new association can no longer use the first narrative capital, which remains a resource for the archives or for a phrase to quote on Christmas cards. Here there is no grafting of new stories on the old tree, but only replacement of the first narrative capital with the new one. In some cases, which are a species of this genus, there is a first phase when the new part of the narrative capital tries to maintain contact with its original component. But the new and more successful stories gradually erode the old ones, until they are consumed entirely.

For many people these transformations and evolutions are inherent in the nature of things and history, they have always been, and always will be there. Others see it as a serious and decisive problem. The new narrative capital, simple and easily understandable, does not attract vocations. The first generation had been able to conquer people who are willing to dedicate their lives to that ideal because they were fascinated by the prophecy and the radical nature of the promise. If the great difficulty of explaining the first message generates words that are simpler and simpler to understand because they are bereaved of their ideal charge, what happens is a change in the type of people attracted by that message. The person in the first generation who had made that ideal the or an identity dimension of their life (this is the essence of every vocation) gradually disappears and new members arrive in their place with an increasingly lighter adhesion. In other words, the new narrative capital no longer selects vocations but sympathizers, or workers employed in works (life should be spent on God or on a world without poverty, not on "corporate social responsibility").

This is how thousands of charismatic communities and spiritual movements born in the twentieth century and in past centuries are becoming extinct. Sometimes new institutions are born from their death, at other times they die and that's all, when faced with the probable distortion of identity the community and its leaders react by hindering or preventing any updating of the first narrative capital. They continue to tell the first stories, with the same language, with the same words that no longer fascinate anyone.

A third, equally unhappy outcome is the re-absorption of the charisma within the tradition that the same charisma would have wanted to innovate and change. Faced with the difficulty of explaining - to oneself and to others - the charismatic importance of one's own community, one renounces to the specific and new components, and "returns" to do the same traditional activities that one wanted to innovate - at a young age, people want to announce the good news to other religions and non-believers, as adults, however, they go back to do catechism for confirmation.

These and many more are the scenarios that we will explore in depth in the next few parts of this new series. We will try to understand what good paths of the future exist whereby ideals can continue to nourish the consciousness of the world, so that the grafting of new stories on the first functions generates a new bloom, new fruits and new colours. We will ask ourselves: is it really possible to update and regenerate the narrative capitals of our communities? Or is their dying inevitable? What are the generative transformations? How do we understand whether we are betraying the promise or fulfilling it? These are difficult and risky questions and answers, but above all they are necessary ones.

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Deterioration is unavoidable when the parasitic syndrome is triggered in subsequent generations. How to avoid it? What are its effects? 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Narrative Capitals/1 - The new beginning of a spiritual and work heritage

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire il 12/11/2017

171112 Capitali narrativi 1 ridWe have to work in those intermediate areas between several orders of disciplines, in which exceptional wealth is often accumulated, like at the border of two different areas.

Achille Loria The Economic Foundations of Society

Communities, associations, movements, institutions and businesses live through many forms of capital. One of these is narrative capital, a precious resource in many organizations, which becomes essential in times of crisis and in the great changes on which the quality of the present, the possibility of the future, the blessing or curse of the past depend. It is the patrimony - that is, munus / gift of the fathers - made of stories, stories, writings, sometimes poems, songs and myths. It is a real capital because, like all capitals, it generates fruits and future. If the ideals of the organization or community are high and ambitious, as it happens in many ideal driven organizations (IDO), its narrative capital is also great. It is a precious resource during the first difficulties, when telling each other the great episodes of yesterday gives courage to continue to hope, believe and love today.

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Reviving the Tree of Ideals

Narrative Capitals/1 - The new beginning of a spiritual and work heritage by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire il 12/11/2017 “We have to work in those intermediate areas between several orders of disciplines, in which exceptional wealth is often accumulated, like at the border of two differe...