Analysts sell transformation while impostors profit from illusions

The invitation to a transformation can have countless motivations. In business terms, for example, it can stem from the need of founders or managers to increase productivity and, consequently, profits by creating an environment conducive to happiness. In government initiatives, boosting civil servants and partners, through their perception of safety and recognition, is a way to expand creativity and make projects move even faster. These are legitimate motivations. But such plans tend to fail miserably, despite excellent intentions, if the sender of the invitation does not give proof that they themselves underwent the same transformations they propose, and that those brought them closer to a good life.

The term “good life” can be viewed from many points of view, from the wise to the theoretical. It can be explored from the perspectives of philosophy, democracy, critical theory (Habermas is often associated with such research), but what matters to us is its accessible version, laden with humanity: a life that has found a path good enough to reduce suffering. A life that suffers less is a good life.

Maturity, which evidently has little to do with age, always asks for more coherence. Coherence saves energy, saves time. The universe, coherent, uses its power to create lights, small, distant stars. Nature, coherent, does not think twice before pouring the sea over the continent, when it must. One does not dialogue with the cyclone, with the eruption. Who has ever managed to schedule a meeting with the depths of the subsoil and cancel an earthquake? The apparent chaos of the environment is, in truth, the coherence of life.

We, a humanity fragile before nature and the sufferings caused by others, learn, then, that coherence is an ally of life. It is coherent, for an individual who believes about themself that they are smaller than others, to emit signals that organize the consummation of their perceptions. It is coherent for someone who believes, mistakenly, of course, that they are greater or better than others to build scenarios that prove to them they are right. The moral of the story is: every human life, wise to the last consequences, organizes the world in order to stay alive. If the only way of living one learned was submissive, humiliated, a beggar for affection, it is coherent to keep it that way, precisely in order to stay alive.

Civil defense, however, sends text messages when the risks of storms are dangerous. Receiving an invitation to transformation is like a civil defense alert. It is a warning that beliefs and behaviors are about to cause one more damage. Can it be prevented? By coherence: most likely not. But it is possible to create emergency plans, plans for the future. It is possible to vacate dangerous areas of the soul, move to higher, sober, refreshing landscapes.

As for me (in the following paragraphs, I decide not to use the traditional Freudian first-person plural), I no longer dare to invite any brother (as I call other humans) to something that could delay or interrupt his path.

Long before believing in improvements in the quality of analysis, research or technique, I have devotion to human freedom. It can go wherever it wants, and will have, whenever I am able and it is appropriate, my company.

If I had a universal truth, I would present it and, with no need for persuasion, it would be widely accepted. That is never the case, because what I understand by truth may make no sense at all to my brother. But I do have a truth or two, not universal, that is sometimes nice.

What is certain is that I usually confess to my intellectual and political critics that I am in search of a map of coherence. And I can’t wait to change my mind where one can change one’s mind! At any rate, I have accomplished the feat of being relevant to myself, which is a lot. That spares me from falling for impostors’ patter.

With that, I hope to have made clear that I cannot, today or in the future, promise that I have the revelation of a secret, an infallible way, a miracle that can yield laughter and money. I leave these promises to those with experience in them: those who deceive and those who are deceived (they almost always pay, in money, for it). That does not disqualify me as a salesman, however. Under ethical conditions, as a telemarketer, I was the best at selling automatic debit at Tim Sul S/A, in some month of 2004, a year before beginning my professional life in journalism.

When you hire me, you will pay me for what I can do for the transformation you seek for yourself and your business. And it will always be much more expensive than those who deceive. If coherence is a differentiator in life, imagine in the market.

I am a little freer, and a little happier, today than I was yesterday. My realistic observation (although I am a serene pessimist) of life is a disillusioned sigh. When, at 15, I suffered bitterly the end of a relationship that had been the best thing of my whole life, and that would never be repeated, because that was my only opportunity for happiness, and at that moment all I had left was to live in mourning until my lonely death, a friend who could have been my great-grandfather told me: “Vine, do you know what the advantage of being disillusioned is? It is not being deluded.”

At first, giving up believing in promises leaves one uncomfortable. Then it becomes a lifestyle so sincere, so honest, so coherent. I stopped demanding of others that they be what I expect of them. And I do not care when they demand that I be what I am not. In one ear and out the other. I still suffer, but in a good life, one that suffers less. In the end, who would have thought, I am a happy man, as far as possible.