I was watching a documentary about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, and wondering about the people who were so glib/insufficiently caring(/unprofessionally caring?) about changes to the cooling pumps - which reminded me of many narrow focused people I have known over the decades ... people who don’t care that saving costs in their neck of the woods would increase costs or have consequences elsewhere.
As an example of that, a much touted action by Australia’s former telephone department (might have been the Postmaster-General’s Department, back then ... no, looking at this, was Telecom) was to stop recording the as-constructed location of communications cables - which meant others had to search carefully and thoroughly, without any useful guides, to check the locations of cables before doing any work.
This is an appalling breach of good engineering practice, but, presumably because it allowed everyone in that briar patch of bureaucracy to make themselves “look good”, it stuck - and, based on my working experience, easily cost the Australian community (because of the work done by other companies - and the preventable accidents which occurred as a result of not doing what good engineering practice said needed to be done) at least three times the savings - but those costs didn’t show up on the balance sheet of that briar patch of bureaucracy so they didn’t care (or were too incompetent to realise what they had done).
I’ve read of similar counterproductive examples relating to, for instance, deferring updates to railway signals which leads to massively more expensive costs later, but those making the decision didn’t care as they would be long gone when the piper had to be paid and, in the meantime, those costs didn’t show up on the balance sheet of their briar patch of bureaucracy.
A third example is people delaying essential maintenance activities for wastewater treatment lagoons such as desludging (wastewater lagoons are low maintenance, not no maintenance) until operational problems occur - which also (unreasonably) tarnishes the reputation of lagoons ... and I note that the Fukushima disaster with good reason tarnished the reputation of the nuclear industry.
The people responsible for conceiving, advocating for, making, approving and implementing those decisions all, in my opinion (IMO), lacked an appropriate form of caring - which means, IMO, that they lacked spirituality.
Now, the vast majority of us will not be in such positions of responsibility, but the principle of our actions indicating our spiritual status (or lack thereof) still applies.
When I raise that with people in my socioeconomic culture, their mind tends to leap to things like donating to charities, not being bigots, etc - all of which are valid points, but they are also something at risk of being a performative disguise ...
(Came across that term via social media, actually - so no, social media is not ALL bad ... )
What is needed is something that is less obvious - something people are less likely to be inclined to invest the deliberate time, energy and effort to be performative in.
As an indication, when assessing hydraulics engineers, in addition to CVs, referees, interviews, etc, I often wondered if I should watch how they pour milk out of a cardboard carton - like the cartons shown here. Most people tend to unscrew the lid on the top of the carton, then pour so that the opening is at the lowest point of the top surface - which creates an air lock, and thus unsteady flow as air is intermittently sucked inside the carton. A good hydraulic engineer would pour so that the opening is at the top, so the outlet is never fully obstructed by flow - much like this woman (and this is a good solution for cartons which need to be cut open).
So ... what could be a similar test regarding spirituality?
Well, there are actually quite a few - helping a parent with a stroller, smiling or at least not being surly, etc, but the one that came to mind for me today (and I acknowledge this is limited to cultures similar to mine - many places in the world do not have fridges and possibly not even electricity - or not affordably) was:
when planning how much room to take up in the office fridge for your lunch, do you allow for the fact that others in the office may also want/need space in the fridge - not just for lunches, but also for, for instance, parents who are expressing milk?
I’ll let that sit with you, Dear Reader ...
If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also Instagram and Mastodon.
Vote Yes for the Voice in Australia - see this backgrounder.
Finally, remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, and to mind our Mӕgan.
