Concern over Zoroastrian Courses offered by the Latin American Spenta University Foundation".... there is now a “new ancient approach” which I propose in the field of quality management. This strategy goes beyond the traditional focus on procedures, policies and the final product or service. This “new ancient approach” to quality issues is concerned with the ethical values proposed by Zarathushtra, or Zoroaster, thousands of years ago".
- Dr Jose Abreu. Director of Zoroastrian Studies.
The problem is not that Zarathushtrian principles are being applied to management (would that this were so) but that images and ideas from Business management and Information Technology are providing the superstructure to which Zoroastrian principles are being accommodated (often clumsily and not without casualties).
Of course, such language is in fashion, in vogue, and there is nothing wrong with restating ancient truths, as long as these truths are not reduced or damaged in the process. But one has to ask oneself, why the inordinate pre-occupation with Business Management and IT? Why do they not concentrate on images of trade-unionism, or solidarity, or husbandry, or family-life or something more.....well more organic? Apart from the suspicion that these people have business, or management uppermost in their minds, the real reason may have something to do with the idea that the way we imagine the world (and ourselves within it) determines how we approach it, react to it, treat it. Only conceive of the world as mindless, worthless stuff waiting to be "managed" or dominated and already you conspire in its exploitation. On the other hand, see it imbued with a divine presence (or even in terms of today's ecology, as a subtle network of interrelationships) and you are immediately predisposed to it with a sense of solidarity, a vague sense of brotherhood, of belonging to nature . The successors of Zarathushtra (and the prophet himself if we are to believe Mary Boyce) perceived the world in a sacramental way. Everything and every function was ever ready to light up for them into a sacrament which yielded not to rounded off knowledge, but to an overwhelming sense of mystery. They were awed, rather than informed.
But instead of being invited to conceive of ever more more apt, sublime, meaningful imagery to describe the experience of the sacred, we are asked to perceive them in terms of managements and organizations (profit-making or not) with images of the workplace, of managers and "processes" (whatever they are), classification, information. Even the mind itself is to be imagined as something assembled, put together from various disparate sources (like a machine or a body of men) rather than an organic whole, something that grows and has its own integrity.
The result of all this reduction is that we get ever more "explanations" which become ever more shallow, bordering on the meaningless. Explaining the mind by calling it "a collection of different mental processes" does not explain mind any more than calling a flower a "collection of flowery processes" tells us anything about flowers. (But it does introduce us to another overriding obsession of theirs: classification). Why is the mind a collection of processes and not a gestalt, an organic whole? Perception is far more complex (and actively creative) than merely the "organized reception of information"; memories are not the mere "storage of information", and it is possible to believe many things of which one has no information whatsoever (indeed ignorance is the cause of many beliefs).
And what of love, and sympathy, vulnerability, altruism, tenderness and the other receptive human and Zarathushtrian qualities which do not fit in with good business practice? They are there, but these qualities of the heart are to be cultivated for no higher end than to relieve anxieties and restlessness: as therapuetic aids, "fitting" one comfortably to accept the current norms, fashions and politics of the day. Zarathushtrianism as therapy, rather than as an aesthetic of empowered presence. And everywhere the promises of material well-being and peace-of-mind if one accepts this sugared pill.
© Ryszard Antolak
painting: Mina Mokhtarzadeh
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