WHAT IS CAMELOT WITHOUT THE GRAIL?
Lately I came across an early video of Steve Jobs. With his remarkable astuteness he stated:
“The greatest people are self managing, they don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do they will figured out how to do. What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, been able to articule that, so the people around you can understand it, getting a consensus on a common vision.”
(Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety!)
What this “vision thing” most often boils down to is tricking employees into believing that (and thus acting as if) their interests were the same as those of their employers. Nice illusion.
However, there are groups / organizations that do share a real common vision. An ideal that they will never achieve. They know it — and this does not stop them in any way. Because that’s the essence of an ideal: that it will never be fully real. But it is a common compass that can guide you, and with every step on the way the ideal is realized a little more.
Maybe the most important aspect of such a common vision is that it draws you away from your petty self. Group egoism is a practical contradiction in itself, although most companies, especially in the financial industry believe in the contrary. It would mean declaring a group’s (centrifugal) ego-impulses as its centripetal (unifying) force.
No, a common vision leads you away from trivial egoism to something way beyond each individual’s reach. To something no one can achieve on his own. It creates a common spirit that is more than the mere sum of the parts.
This spirit did not exist before; it comes into being by cooperation. Sharing is a magic jar: As it is being emptied, it grows fuller and fuller. As everyone gives away his best, she or he is getting richer and richer. You won’t be able to define this, but “divine gift” comes quite close.
All this is the essence of the Holy Grail: a common vision, an ideal that unites a community’s members, that makes them overcome their egoism, not by negating their individualism, but by encouraging and strengthening it. They may be separated, their paths may lead them in all directions, and yet if they get lost or even go astray, it is a north star that can guide them back to the right way, back to Camelot where they are united around the round table.
On the other hand, if the knights forget about the Grail, their community falls apart because there is nothing left to hold it together. There is no common interest, their ego-impulses prevail, and the inevitable consequence is that everyone fights only for himself — and against all others: bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. Like in the story of King Arthur. Like all genuine myths, it has (possibly) never happened, but it surrounds us always.
So, what is Camelot without the Grail —individualism without a common ideal, without a vision that binds the individuals together? Such individualism degenerates to egoism and war of all against all. Only the Grail can unite individuals and leave their individuality untouched. Such are the communities of the 21st century: They are not based on giving up your self in favor of the group identity like in earlier times but, quite on the contrary, on the one element in common: individuality.
And maybe one day one knight even finds the Grail. (But don’t believe that he will be able to tell.)
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