I started this series on longevity talking about muscle centric health. I then proceeded to talk about what it takes which focused on consuming quality protein for building of muscles. For my third post, I’m going to discuss what it looks like at various levels of the human experience.
On a personal level, positive longevity is cognitive, emotional, and physical health supporting our everyday activities and most important relationships well into our 50’s and beyond. We can do daily tasks with ease and are also able to tackle challenges effectively. Personal growth enriches, strengthens and deepens our connection with loved ones.
At a family level, it’s growing in a healthy union and raising children who successfully individuate to lead their own lives, raise their own families and are able to perpetuate health and wholeness into future generations.
For organizations, it’s healthy, diverse leadership dynamically planning, executing, and managing operations to benefit stakeholders and the people they impact. And more importantly, able to effectively and positively implement succession that reflects wisdom for ongoing improvement and meaningful benefits for the company and its stakeholders.
But what about on larger scales ie. a nation?
According to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail, positive longevity depends on how societal elites structure and maintain political and economic institutions which determine whether countries are rich or poor, healthy or sick, just or corrupt.
It boils down to how leaders wield their power.
Do they extract from the masses to benefit the few forming a vicious circle of societal impoverishment and perpetual underdevelopment, or create broader coalitions to include greater representation of diverse groups that grow and perpetuate a virtuous circle of societal development.
Throughout history, we see rulers come and go but the institutions they create either promote and perpetuate growth, prosperity and equality or become absolutist regimes that keep many people in poverty, sickness and early mortality. Of course there are various degrees of each polarity at work but those are very real patterns of human governance that have always existed and continue today.
Though there are many factors contributing to each circle (vicious and virtuous), a key point I want to highlight is the response to creative destruction. When a system seems to be running fine (because it benefits those who set it up), people with authority and power tend to dismiss, reject or even set out to destroy changes that threaten their economic and political realities. The loss of control of how much money is made and ability to enact laws to regulate how business is done has been a consistent fear of those in charge.
This is a primary reason why nations succeed or fail. Elites (top level leaders who make financial and organizational decisions) in control of institutions are culprits or champions of the long term outcomes which benefit or harm the masses. They shape realities of many people. When they are closed off to changes that disrupt their operations, especially from those who are powerless, they are creating/ perpetuating vicious circles of operations which shut down creativity to foster newness of how life can be and how things can be done.
So what does longevity look like?
Healthy use of power and authority, AT EVERY LEVEL: personal, family, organizational, and societal/ national. This brings us back to muscles, the agents of power delivery. There is an integrity here about what truly matters for longevity AT EVERY LEVEL.
HEALTHY EXERCISE OF POWER IS ABOUT…
Openness to disruptions by change.
Positive acceptance and adaptation to change.
Redemption of mistakes and failures that contribute to new ways of living, loving and doing.
Integration of paradoxical ideas, perceptions, and methods that promote radical newness with benefits for all (self included).
Everyone from elites to the poor positively contributing to the collective subconscious of the human race through COURAGEOUS ownership and healing of their own grief, being open to creative disruption/ destruction to become people who can humbly engage conflict and paradox to move all of us towards greater peace, joy and love with significant equity, diversity, and inclusion.
I guess this is my grown up Christmas list.
May your Christmas point you to the Star of Longevity found even in the story of the Nativity. Christmas brings many blessings but don’t be distracted from the central message about our need to overthrow powers that drive vicious circles. The Baby born in a manger is representative of creative destruction that births newness and revelation of evolving realities transforming ones fabricated by those with fear based power.
Christmas is ultimately about the generation of virtuous circles that heal nations through compassion, justice and freedom.