Betraying your mission to save your bacon
We watch this happening everywhere.
The mission of a University is to be open-minded, exploratory, co-learning, research-based, big-picture thinking, challenge thinking, stretch, innovate, and emerge.
Not bending the knee to the money, finance and the lobbyists. And as they do this, throwing a select group of students under the bus, or in the case of the USA, onto a bus to a detention centre for writing an op-ed about a war that doesn’t fit the propaganda narrative of the University funders or the US administration. In many countries, this type of ‘in broad daylight’ hijack is called being disappeared.
The number of institutions that are being asked to bend the knee through blackmail is staggering. The number who say yes is even more staggering.
In some cases, the long hand of steady mission erosion has been one Little Atrocity at a time. Most Universities are quarter shells of anything innovative or progressive. The status symbol is enough it seems to buy bland ‘more of the same’ dressed in a different costume and hoping to be seen as an innovative program.
It really isn’t.
I want learning that challenges every fibre of my being. I want all voices to be heard and no one to be silenced unless it is a voice that seeks to brutalise and kill life.
I want to go to, shop from and engage with enterprises that hold their mission, what we call the Evolutionary Purpose, as sacred. The Pattern Integrity (https://syntropic.world/pattern-integrity-and-source-idea-as-sacred/) of it, the unique values and particularities that were present at the very moment the idea for the enterprise arrived. I want to engage with those who actively consider the alignment of the incentives of their mission with the choices they make. Integrity all the way up down and through.
When we bend the knee to money and power, we have become prostitute leaders, that first Little Atrocity (https://syntropic.world/little-atrocities-the-path-from-integrity-to-self-deception-and-bad-business/) of supplication that will end in horror and collapse.
It is a devil’s pact.
When we throw the very people we are here to serve into the dumpster, it is but one breath away from our now power lords throwing us into the same dumpster. We accepted a price for the sacred-unable-to-be-priced, and in so doing, reduced what mattered most into dehumanised commodities.
The sacredness of the Pattern Integrity of our mission is the script for meaning, life and courage.
There is always another option than bending the knee.
Better done with others, who hold to the Pattern Integrity of their life and work as inviolate and sacred.
This type of community and these types of principles are the foundation of the Syntropic World.
The Syntropic Foundations Masterclass commences today. It is not too late to join. Here. https://syntropic.world/masterclass/
Photo December 22nd 2024, Article written April 1st 2025
