WORKING WITH CONCEPTS
By Connell Fanning and Assumpta O’Kane
This article is part of a series of articles to draw attention to the role of concept using in personal development and to encourage us to stand back in our daily lives to reflect on ourselves as concept users. Here we are introducing the concept of ‘the company we keep’ and show how it has an impact on our continuing development in a way that can open us up to new possibilities in how we are thinking.
On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine many commentators turned their attention to Vladimir Putin, asking why he has unleashed such destructive and cruel action on Ukraine, its people, and the lives of thousands of Russians.
In a previous article, we talked about Jacinda Arden’s resignation as Prime Minister of New Zealand using the concept of ‘personal development’ to offer a different perspective on her decision. In this article we dig deeper into ‘personal development’ and inquire into a particular aspect of it, ‘the company we choose to keep’. Our purpose is to use ‘the company we keep’ as a concept to deepen our understanding of Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
The ‘company we keep’ governs our judgement making
Hannah Arendt suggests that the ‘company we choose’ in our lives determines the judgements we make. That ‘company’, she explains, is made up of “those with whom we wish to spend our lives with … [a company] chosen by thinking in examples, in examples of persons dead or alive, real or fictitious, and in examples of incidents past or present.” In other words, ‘the company we keep’ plays a big part in what goes on inside us, invisible to others and often to ourselves as we make meanings of our everyday experiences.
So, we ask, what company does Vladimir Putin keep?
When the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was asked by an oligarch who was Vladimir Putin listening to, he replied, “He has three advisers. Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”
Relating to chosen company
Now that we know who Putin’s company is, in so far as publicly we can, we come to the next question of interest from a development point of view, which is, how does he relate with the company he keeps. By relating we mean what awareness does he have of what is going on inside him when he is thinking with others?
Is he deferring to the authority of these long dead, hero type Russian leaders, and is he captivated by them as the unrivalled ‘status quo’ whom he wants to be like? Do they inform his thinking without him asking questions or exploring or being curious because of a desire to take on their personas and continue in the spirit of their thinking to conquer and expand the global reach of the mighty Russia? Is anything outside of this felt by him as failure, something that is horrifying to Putin?
Another option for us to consider is whether ‘his relating with the company he keeps’ is embedded in an instinctive, uncontrolled need for personal power, control, and insatiable greed? Can it be that such needs, hidden to the outside world until recently, are driving him to acquire territory at any cost to feed this desire for unilateral power? Can Putin’s relating to ‘the company he keeps’ be characterised by the fulfilment of instinctive, un-processed needs, and mean that he is simply incapable of relating in the sense of having a two-way relationship, a dialogue with ‘his company’?
Whichever of these options we personally lean towards, we believe we are in fact looking at a very big gap in the personal development of Putin. Both types of relating lack a sense of any two-way questioning interaction, suggesting that Putin is operating from a singular point of view only. There is no authentic relating going on ‘with the company he keeps’, only a one-sided conversation in the mind of one man.
Such a stark absence of mutual dialogue with ‘the company he keeps’ would have significant developmental implications. For as long as he relates in this way, Putin will not have the ability to change his point of view or to put a value on mutuality in his relationships. Nor will he be able to hold different perspectives at the same time and live with the paradoxes and challenges that this brings and will have low levels of curiosity to explore issues, with little discipline or humility to engage in intentional learning. The absence of such essential aspects of personal development can be seen, we believe, to have serious consequences when it comes to judgement making.
Judgements constructed in a singular, narrow, power-hungry perspective and without any genuine two-way relating with ‘good company’ are truly out of line with the complexity and challenges of the modern world. We continue to witness the horror of Putin’s lack of relating with ‘the company he keeps’.
Turning to ourselves
While there is no upside to this dire situation, it can help us to be alert about ourselves and question the choices we make about the ‘company we keep’. We can also ask ourselves to think about the extent to which we are engaging and relating with our chosen company and whether we are alert to the limitations of having one-sided conversations which only serves up what we want to hear about ourselves.
The development question arises for each of us as to whether we slow down often enough, open our eyes and look to see if we are in a singular conversation with ourselves? Furthermore, does this result in us imposing our lack of self-awareness on others?
A more progressive forward-looking development invitation is to grow ourselves in connection with others through the company we keep. By opening up ourselves, getting curious and ready to be surprised about the standpoints of others, we can live in a more connected way with others and play our part in the demanding issues of our times. We can bring this important developmental foundation ‘the company we keep’ intentionally in our everyday lives. We can choose to develop ourselves to be curious, to explore standpoints, and ask powerful questions in a two-way interaction with ‘our choice of company’.
Assurance: The Keynes Centre does not use any large language pattern modelling (so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’) software or similar Information Technologies in the research and writing of our articles because we wish our readers to know that we are relating to them directly through our thinking and writing.
