Peter Block: Freeing Yourself from Consumer Culture

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Peter Block, a leading consultant and best selling author whose work is about empowerment, stewardship,

chosen accountability, and the reconciliation of community. He's a partner in Designed Learning, a training company that offers workshops designed by Peter to build the skills outlined in his books.

He received a master's degree in Industrial administration from Yale in ninete and has received national awards for outstanding contributions in the field of training and development, including the American Society for Training and Development Award for Distinguished Contributions, the Association for Quality and Participation President's Award, and Training magazine HRD Hall of Fame. His new book is An Other Kingdom,

departing the consumer culture. If you value out of the show, please go to one you feed dot Net Slash Support and make a donation. This will ensure that all five episodes that are in the archive will remain free and that the show is here for other people who need it. Some other ways that you can support us is if you're interested in the book that we're discussing on today's episode, go to one you feed dot Net and find the

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feeding your good wolf. Thanks again for listening, and here's the interview with Peter Block. Hi, Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to have you on. Your most recent book is called An Other Kingdom, departing the consumer culture, and so we will get into that in great detail here in just a couple of minutes. But let's start like we always do, with the parable.

There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So I will start with a dream. So I always had this dream that I'm on a dark street late at night and some people are coming up behind me, aimed to my direction, men, and I'm scared. It's always a panicky kind of dream. And so I asked a friend of mine about this dream, and he said,

what do you think they wanted? And I said, I think they wanted to destroy me, robbed me, kill me. And then I thought for him and I said, is there another way of thinking which never occurred to me? And he said, yeah, perhaps they wanted to be seen. And so that shifted from me that what I thought was danger when I feared the wolf at the door, maybe the wolf is just hungry. He's not after me.

And so that parable tells me that even though it was a dark night and there is a shadow side to all of us, the way we see that shadow interpret that shadow is the nature of our transformation. And so my work has been trying to reconstruct how I see how the world sees these dark characters looming in the distance. And every cynic and every time you lose faith, you always have evidence to prove it, but an evidence never includes your choice of how you see the world.

It's like people say to me, you push my button and I heard someone say yeah, but I didn't install it. What you're trying to do with this, with your theme here of the world, is to reconstruct the nature of a button in which how I respond to the world, honoring the dark side, honoring in this book the idea of Pharaoh, the idea were all caught up in slavery, all this stuff. But then how I see the world is decisive. It's called context, and so to me that parable.

So this is one thought, it's asking for a shifting context. The other thing, it's very individualistic. It says your life, my son, or my grandson, will be determined by how you show up in the world. And we have very few parables of how we excellent. That's a long answer to a question you didn't ask. No, I certainly asked, So thank you for the answer. So let's start off and talk about the book. And in the book you say we have a dominant cultural narrative best described as

the free market consumer ideology. So talk me through. What are you trying to say when you say that, I'm saying we're living in a world that assumes as true that upward mobility is the point. It assumes as true that expanding businesses. Taking things to scale is the way nature is, and the dominant narrative has caused me to be ambitious, individualistic, okay, all right, competitive, and to think I am defined by my average annual income. Every parent says to the child, I want you to be happy.

What they really mean is I want you to do well. So when I'm dependent on you in my later years, you're up for it. And so we've monetized our experience. We've commercialized our transactor. Marketplace used to be a Saturday morning occurrence where people came together to be together and then they bought and sold stuff, you know, because they sustained them. Now the marketplace is headline news. We've elected

a president whose major accomplishment is his wealth. This is economic prowess, his toughness, and so that's what we're trying to So we tried to try to describe it gently, all right. But the belief that my well being is somehow defined by my economic my ability to shop, and I'm part of that. I love the notion I shop, therefore I am. So that is our kind of the consumer ideology that we live under. And you say that that free market consumer ideology has four pillars to it.

You talk about scarcity, certainty, perfection, and privatization. So let's spend a couple of minutes on each of those and and explain for the listeners what's so bad about that approach, because the way you described it, On one hand, you know, there's a part of me I've read the book and I go, well that, yeah, I get it. On the other hand, it's like that is the dominant cultural paradigm. So what's the problem. The problem is that if we believe that we don't have enough scarcity, then we decide

that I win, you lose, you win, I lose. And that's framed in the first grade, when I'm told that we're going to grade you on a normal curve. And so my job is to compete with my classmates. Until I went to the first grade, I thought learning was fun. So the problem with that is it alienates us from each other. All these mindsets create a deep sense of isolation. So in my workplace, I think I'm in competition with the person next. And so the scarcity mindset is a

lie there is enough whenever there's a crisis. You know, the day to day is we're poor, we owe too much, but when there's a crisis, we have all the money we need. When it's time to bail out the world, all the money. So it tells me that in my town, Cincinnati, there's an enormous out of money, So why do I act as if there's not In the world. There's an enormous amount of food, So why are we marketing hunger? And so that's the scarcity thing. The certainty is the

appeal of a totalitarian world. The reason high control leaders are in the ascendants these days is because we're afraid of the future. We think it should be predictable. So anybody who runs for office, any leader of any organization, any talk show host who offers certainty as a magnetic appeal. And yet if you look at your own life, most of the time you didn't know what the hell is going on. None of us work in the field that

we studied. So the idea you should, you know, to ask every child what do you want to be when you grow up? The honest answer is I don't know and I don't care. But we lie to give us the feeling. And to me, the longing for certainty is the basis for a high control world. High control organization. The media nows that five organizations that around the media, you know, and it's not that liberal. All of these are forms of modern concession. Okay, is the world that way?

Do any certainty? Is there not enough? Is there something wrong with me? So the longing for perfection says that God created me, but he made a mistake in this case, and so that we wish to be perfect is the wish to be God. And so we're always you know, high standards, goal and stuff like that. And so all of these conspire or work together. Two chip away at our freedom, chip away at our humanity, our ability to connect with each other. Those are big coasts. And then

the last one is the privatization peace. Well, the privatization is the implementation plan of the first three. It says that you cannot trust the collective anything with CEO. Starting a cooperative communal is dangerous, and so it says that in order to live the life of the first three, I have to argue against government, I argue against the common good. And in six twenty or something, the King of England privatized the commons and so the common land

that I could sustain myself. When they put a fence around the common land, the common good. All of a sudden, I had to move to the city and get a job. So the privatization is the action step. It's the belief that the public sector, the communal sector, uh communal interests, land trust, common good. Tragedy of the Commons by James Harden has been refuted, and he refuted it, but he says, if you hold land in common, they'll destroy the land. And so to me it's been it's been the way

of rationalizing by longing for a certainty. I wish to be perfect, and so we have to become We have to question whether the private sector, the private life, the life I lead alone in my home with an automatic garage door open, is really in my ankies. And it's a tough one because these are all deeply and so you would say that it's not in our interest because it's not working, because people are generally less and less happy in life, that that there's a great your sense

of meaninglessness and isolation, and that we're suffering from that. Yes, and it's not about being happy, it's about having financial and relational control over my life. So you know this economics have happiness is a kind of a funny promise because everything else offers as happiness is the point. Maybe meaning is the poet, maybe having a purpose as the point. Maybe the problem about our anxiety about our youth. It's not that they're young people. Maybe the problem is we've

rendered them useless and maybe they need a purpose. Maybe when we house the elderly in warehouses of comfort, maybe loneliness is what kills them, not all day. And so I think it's deeply isolating and makes us deeply cynical, makes us support leaders regardless. And it's not about being left or right or anything like that. And so I

think it's about it's a search for meaning. It's Victor Frankel was in a concentration camp, so he was not the living in a high consumers and he found meaning and the fact that he chose to breathe, and he realized he had control over his own sense of freedom even though he couldn't move. So I think it's about freedom and meaning. Right, he had realized he had control

over his own reaction. On a similar note, I was watching something the other day and Saul I never say his name, right Eli Eli Wise l Wise l Thank you Chris. Edit that out, So I sound smart. Um, you have to be a Jew to be able to pronounce. Are you Jewish? No? I'm not. That's why I can't do it. How you are? I just I just brought you in anyway, I saw ed that out to well, no, it's good, I'm not belonging Ellie, Ellie Wisel. I heard him say uh something near the end of his life,

which was, um, always think higher and feel deeper. And that just sort of when I think of concentration camps, he came to mind, and I just thought that was such a beautiful phrase. It is, and with respective consumerism, it's a it's an experience against thinking higher and feeling deep. Yeah, because the promise of consumerism is that no matter how

much you have, it's not enough. Now, do you think that that is a tendency inness that has been exacerbated by consumerism, or that it's been created by consumerism, because it does seem to be a human condition to a certain degree to to want more, to always sort of think, well, what's the next thing? Or do you really think that that's more of a modern creation. I think it's the creation of modernism, because before modernism, before the teen Hunters

and all began. People found the Earth's sacred, they found history compelling, tradition compelling, the circle form compelling. They couldn't imagine changing their status in life. And so I think it is a product of modernism. It's not anywhere near our nature now. It doesn't mean our nature doesn't have a dark side in a greedy side, and a violent side, and a disobedient side. I mean, Adam and Eve made that point. But I don't think it's in our nature

to want more than I have. I think in the absence of a memory, an affection for a place, and be surrounded by people that even though I don't get along with, I know we're going to take care of each other. Then more is a corruption of my nature. I don't believe that. I have a friend who's a nun, and so we do a lot of work trying to end poverty. And I looked at her after a conference about any poverty, and I said, Monica, wait a second,

you chose poverty. What's going on here? She says. The reason I chose poverty because in exchange from my choice was community that I knew, no matter what I did, no matter how productive I was or how spiritual, I was that this was a group of people who would care for me for the rest of my life, and

that's as much my nature as wanting more. One of the solutions that you talk about are there's two words that are woven through the book as potential solutions or other approaches, right, and one is neighborliness and the other is covenant. So let's start off with neighborliness. What is neighborly nous and how is that different than community, which is a pretty common word that's used these days. Is it the same thing or are we talking about something different?

And I think they're cousins. Neighborliness is wider. Community is my sense of connection, my feeling of belonging to participation. Neighborliness is about the economy. It's about where I take my idea, how I raise my family. The product of neighborliness and community is to raise a child, to provide livelihood, to keep me safe, to help me age, to welcome the stranger. So neighborliness more is to the point it's more powerful, even though nobody including me, understands it. But

I think there's something in that word. It says it's a way of being together where community is a little bit overused, and when something becomes popular then you have to be a little nervous. But community also, you know, it's kind of interchangeable. But I think neighborliness is what

the Jews discovered in the wilderness. And so I think if I feel a sense if I live in a culture or context of neighborliness that I know, I mean within walking distance of all the things I thought I had to drive to, which is my health, my job, my children in the right school, my ability to shop. And so it's a it's an expression of locality, and it has in my mind only in my mind, it has an economic core. And that's why the consumerism is

the dominant narrative. Neighborliness is an alternative future, and I think we're headed that way anyway. The jobs are disappearing. Come on, we're not going to bring industry back to America. If we do, it'll be it'll be a million dollar tax benefit. It will be a three hundred million dollar business with four people working in Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I don't think that both the nature of globalization and the nature of technology points to a

lot of job creation. It points to almost the opposite. And that's what the enaghborliness to me means that you and I will construct a livelihood together based on our interdependence. Back to the Wolf story, it's not just confronted migree or confronting my choice to see generosity. That's what we create together. And we can create a livelihood together. And I'll end up in the end borrowing sugar from you again instead of going to a convenience store. Sugar is

not good for you. I can't. I can't help you there, Peter, Well, but come over some whole grain flower and I might be honest with flower. That's not good for me. I want to I want to flower free diets. All right, let's let's exchange vegetables. Yes, vegetables. I think we can all agree on that. So talk to me about covenant. So the question is the distinction between covenant and to me contract. So contract defines our relationship as quid pro are you gonna do for me? Here's what I'm gonna

do for you. And to have a good contract, it has to be time limit specific. We know what it's a predictable way of being together. And most of the world, most the culture believes in a contractual way of committee, and what's in it for me? You know, all these T shirts for you, what's in it for me? All the feeding of you know, faith creating prosperity. It's like, we're going to contract with God if I do this you, So all of that makes it commodifies me, makes me

an instrument exchange. The word covenant means I'm going to make you a promise and I have no idea what the hell is going to have. So covenant has an element of faith that places exchange, and so the covenants relationship with God, it has a faith tomension to it, but it's much more demand and contracts are easy. I can change my mind anytime I want and let you off the hook, or if I don't, if it doesn't work out, I say, will you let me down? Covenant

there's no out, no back door. And so it's an expression of my capacity as a free and human being to decide what I'm committing to with no expectation of return. It's not dependent on anyone else, and so it's a covenantial relationship. It has to do with fidelity, It doesn't have to do with delivery or performance. Contract is about performance and as soon as you claim a person is a performer, you've stolen their humanity. But I'm only good for what I can produce with Monica said, I know,

I'm part of a community. Even then, we've got some sisters that do nothing and working. Okay, So in the contract actual world, how't you go? You know, come on, in the covenantal world, I don't care if you do nothing. I will do what I can help you with your life. And so that's a that's a distinction, and that's existing in every relationship that really matters. If you have parents or children, if you have customs and family and friendship,

it's not conditional on their performance. That's not friendship. That's a deal. So it's a powerful concept that we've shrunken by limiting it to a biblical context. You're talking about covenant, we're talking about um community. You know what you just said, there is you know what mother, father, children, you know we we honor that relationship regardless. There's also you actually use the phrase in the book that there's a shadow side of community, that there's a shadow side of this

sort of thing. So let's let's talk about that because I think it's important to hear both sides of that too. Without the shadow side, it's wishful thinking, it's Pollyanna, the wolf is at the door. And at times community can be tribal controlling. It's expressed in the general culture is like mindedness. I want to be with like minded people. In the general culture, it's expressed as a fear of

the stranger. And so if my community of our relationship is based as an against the other, against the stranger, and there's a party of me that wants to be on the winning side, you know, that's the that's the other side of the wall. And so there is in some communities we have the best community of the world, except for those people, okay from Section eight housing that moved into the three of these three houses and they're

littering the ground. And I think, well, if you're such a great community, why don't you find out who these people are, Why don't you clean up after them? Why don't you welcome them to your social events, to your house. But there is a part of me that's just afraid. I was born. A friend of mine says, we're wounded at the moment of birth. My humanity Eve eight the app what's that about? You know, she wasn't that hungry. And so the part of me that is terrified of existence,

I'm afraid of my freedom. That's what I think. The fear. I'm afraid of my loneliness. It frightens me. Actually, I think, Okay, I has given birth? What do I owe for that? How am I doing? And so I think the fear is a measure of our humanity to be afraid? And so how do I deal with the fear? Where I hold on? I try to be right, I try to look good. I want a life that I could edit and take out the bad parts, you know, not just a program. And so you have to acknowledge in young

in terms, it's the shadow side. He swallowed the snake. What kind of meal was that? That he took the darkness of a snake and took it inside of me? He said, for me to be a whole, I have to embrace the shadow side. I have to add all the mythology that he talks about. Is it really about saying until you acknowledge the process is that once I own my own self centeredness, my own isolation, it loses

control over me. It's in the denial of the shadow in the denial of the dark, greedy wolf that it owns me, and I become it in a masked and convoluted form, And so that parable The answer is, it's not just what you choose to see, but both are true. Otherwise you end up with a TV sitcom as an expression of life. So let's change directions a little bit.

I want to talk about another book of yours, which has just a wonderful title that I'll just ask you to expound just on the title itself, which is the answer to how is yes? What are you getting at there? What I'm getting at is that as soon as somebody says, how are we going to do this? How much does it cost? How long does it take? I know they

don't care at all about what we're talking about. And so, having lived become a system person, a corporate person, all of that, it seems the argument against possibility was always framed in the question of practicality. Oh, it takes too long, where is it working? People who run large institutions are the most cautious people in the world if you can't

provide them with a predictable world. And so it was the end of a chapter of a book I wrote on stewardship, and the publishers says, why don't you write a book about this? And so, you know, when anybody makes this suggestion, you have to resist it for four or five years. But then for me, the how question destroys our faith in each other, as if the only thing that matters is how long, how much, how predictable? And so I just kind of felt that it was

to work. It was. It was an anthem two people working in large organizations to say, give up your ambition and do something useful and meaningful without leaving, and don't be seduced by the practical. People accused me of being an idealist, which is a major flaw. But now when they say you're too idealistic, I say, thank I haven't dried up yet. Yeah. You've got a line from that work that says transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions

than seeking practical answers. And it reminds me of you know, the show We cover this area a lot, but the you know the old Rilka quote about you know, living the questions themselves, don't seek answers, but live in the questions themselves. Questions bring us together. Answers alienators and so every time you or I have an answer, we think we know what's best for each other, and that's colonialism.

I know it's best for you, and so it's an argument in the question, we honor the mystery and unpredictability of the life, and to live in the question is to be frustrating and anxious as a human condition. And the question that grabbed me, I don't know if I had that yet when I wrote that book was what's the question that, if he had an answer to, would

set you free? And somebody asked me that twenty years ago, and I thought, m good question, And so I spent the last years of my life trying to say, what is the question if I hadn't answer to, would give me the freedom that I've belonging. And lately it's dawning on me. I'm getting close to the question, but that

question has animated my search for freedom. What I realized for myself is that I felt that somehow, because I was born, I owed something that in the delivery room that my birth and invoice was delivered to me, and there was what have you done? And to justify the fact you had given a life? And so my question is to someone you got. Have I done enough yet? Yeah? I got the question. I just don't have the answer. That reminds me of Leonard Cohen in a book about songwriters.

He he said something to that extent about you know how he rewrites you know, lyrics so many, so many times, and he was, you know, this idea of redeeming the day you know was was such a big, big thing to him. There was there was a sense of I mean, I guess covenant right in a a there, and I feel that all the time somehow to be given given a life which I didn't even request. I don't think unless you talk to James Hellman, but I don't think Hellman thinks you've got a little damon up there to

put you in the right place before you're born. But I think that's a great question. Is a redemption is not out of guilt, it's out of our humanity in a sense that I don't I have to kind of honor the fact that we've been given each other in a life. And Leonarn Cohen is a great example. I saw interviewed once and she said, you know, some of your songs are just breath takingly profound and everything. Where is that place you go to to create Suzanne or Hallelujah.

And he says, I don't know. If I knew where it was, i'd go there more often. You know, listeners of the show have heard this dirty times. But he is the He was the number one guest I wanted to have on the show, which it never it never worked out, unfortunately, but at least we have his his legacy, and he started as a wealthy Montreal poet and then he went to the village and became calm. So we're

near the end of time. But I want to wrap up with something that I read in an interview you did somewhere, and you were talking about how, at some juncture in your life there was a teacher of yours or a mentor of yours who sort of gave you the idea that the fact that you might be sad sometimes or anxious sometimes, or that you would have negative feelings wasn't a problem to be solved, but was actually

just part of being human. I remember the moment I could I can tell you what the room looks like, all right, I can tell you where I sat in the auditorium. So this is Peter Kestenbaum and I was in Stockholm doing a little workshop on something I was doing, so I thought that was a general session. I'll sit in and he gets up there and he says, your anxiety, your loneliness, your sense of imperfection, the alienated part of your life means you're a human being. He wrote a

book called The Vitality of Death. And I heard him talk for twenty minutes, and I said, whoops, because up until then I was trying to get it right and uh. And so I walked up to him and I said where do you live? And he says, I live in San Jose. I said, can I come and see you? He says yeah. And so that was a huge turning point that all the things I thought were wrong with my loneliness, my anxiety, my wish for more, all of that, he said, this is the nature of being human. That

turned everything around. Now it's taken me a lifetime to get it, you know, but I think that's the point. So the point is that the world of certainty, consumerism tells us in some way that there's something wrong with us. So if you can convince me of my deficiencies, you own me. Every performance for you ever done. All right, every church, every whatever. It says there's something you're born in sin really and that means, oh, I got more to work on. Well, can you help me work on it?

Of course I can because I love you. Okay. So this is a fabric of defending against our freedom. And so that that was a big shift in my life, is to realize I'm not crazy, there's nothing wrong with me, and I'm not alone. And it's kind of got me through a lot. Even though I proceeded to mess things up on a consistent basis. It just I didn't draw

conclusions about my failures. Yeah. I think it's Christian Emurdy sort of taking this conversation all the way back to the beginning and the idea of, you know, the culture that we live in. You know, Christiana Murdy said something to the effect of to be to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society is not a sign of health. To be insane, They're saying and saying, that's a huge insight, beautiful, and where do you find that. I want to find

that in the Saturday morning marketplace. I don't want to have to go to yoga like I did, not to learn that. I want that to be the part of the fabric of our economic system, the fabric not only of our churches, but are you know what we do on weekend. You're bringing that into the world with your care and your questions, and I really appreciate it. Well. Thank you so much, and thank you for taking the

time to come on. As I said earlier, the book is called an Other Kingdom, and we will have links in the show notes to where you can find that book and other things from Peter. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Thanks Sarah. Okay, bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the one you Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support