Part of my morning routine is listening to an audiobook.
Recently I started “Thou Shall Prosper” and I’m rather shocked in many ways how much negativity towards business pervades our lives.
So much of it is below the surface. I’ve mentioned presuppositions in other posts and many times the negative context lies in those presuppositions.
A quick way of understanding what a presupposition is to think of “what is taken for granted” in a saying.
But sometimes it’s just blatant.
For instance – more films show business tycoons as the bad guy than the hero. I can’t often think of many that show the business person as the hero.
Lately I’ve started watching the Blacklist again. In this show one of the stars is Red. Now Red is on the good guys team – but he’s also on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list. He’s a criminal now working for the good guys.
That’s just one example. There are many more that just make the business person the bad guy and nothing more.
However, those are the more obvious examples.
Some of the more subtle examples is in the way we talk. Below the surface as I mentioned before.
Let’s look at an example from the book.
Companies often want to “give back” to the community. There are certain presuppositions that go into “giving back”.
There’s a phrase often associated with giving that is “give and take” so when we hear “giving back” it’s very natural to assume that something was “taken”.
So the presupposition for companies giving back to communities is that they’ve taken from communities. I would even go as far to say that in situations like this companies feel they’ve taken more than they’ve given. And so they feel the need to give back to the community.
Before I get too far down the rabbit hole here. I’m about at time for my morning.
What this presupposition seems to miss is that businesses have already given so much to a community.
Their services.
The jobs they have created.
The boost to local economy.
But too often business seems to get the bad wrap. As if wanting to be in business and start a business is somehow immoral.
It’s something that’s ingrained deep in our society and until we’re able to break the automatic programming in our thoughts and language – we are going to be struggling to be successful in business ourselves.
Alright. More tomorrow.
Leave a Reply