The Transcendental: The Church Project

'The Greater Good'

March 15, 2024

Take a break from the affairs of the world, and focus on the cards you've been dealt. Focus on yourself, your health and well-being, your struggles, if any. 'Cause again, it is with your project that you get to contribute to your vision of whatever kind of community or space that is, and that project is yourself. I think this is especially important to social workers who get sidetracked and lose sight of their project getting caught up on the work that they do. And it may well be a challenge that is not being addressed because it sits on a blind spot.

'Cause when people hear 'social worker', 'community worker', a 'humanitarian', people think of the 'greater good', 'something bigger than themselves', and it's almost like people think it's okay for these community workers to set aside their personal problems like to do with themselves or with their partners or their home, and then call that a sacrifice for the greater good. And as a spiritual worker, my assignments include community workers' well-being and not just how you can be a community worker or how you can serve or share your gift to others. So, I could see this concept of sacrifice being problematic to community service providers.

And it falls under the classification of excesses where the community worker goes overboard and it creates an imbalance and disharmony, which may not be a thing of community interest but will definitely be a personal affairs' thing known to the person or the immediate circle. Doing social work doesn't require anybody to put their personal problems on the backburner. Being a community worker doesn't make people servants of the community, and by 'servants' being at their beck and call. 'Cause I was working on a file earlier this March and this social worker was like there are people she loves working with and others she's not particularly fond of working with and the culprit is 'entitlement' from the people receiving her service. The people she loves working with, she said they won't receive assistance or support from the system because they were ashamed - and that's a topic for later 'cause I also see something problematic there. But for now, we talk about the 'entitlement' thing.

I think she's talking about something else. It's not entitlement that makes people say things out of frustration, people who are waiting to get assistance and support. It's actually that, frustration. When people say things while they're waiting, it is not because they feel entitled. It is because they're getting desperate, frustrated in the midst of whatever difficulty that is they are experiencing. It's like when people are caught in a traffic jam, some people just lose their heads there. But in saying that, these people just don't have the cool or the patience yet required for getting these services. And it's how people could collaborate or cooperate with community workers, they have to be patient. And there are community workers who are gifted in having that kind of conversation with people who don't have the patience. They don't tell them, "Oh, you're entitled." They say, "We know you need this service, and we want you to know that we also want you to have it. It's just that there's this volume of people." 'Cause these people are in fact entitled to the service. You made the service available for people who need that kind of support or assistance, they are entitled. You even have them register or sign up to receive it. That's making them entitled to the support. So, it's funny when people say it's entitlement when they're the ones who offered the support and because people get frustrated in the midst of the difficulty.

If people wanna know what a sense of entitlement is, or the bad thing, the problematic thing when it comes to community work, it is when people tell a community worker: You don't have personal affairs. You don't get a leave from community work even if it's for mental health day. I don't care if you are sick, you need to serve us. I don't care if your life is falling apart, you serve us.

That's entitlement. 'Cause that's when people stop collaborating and cooperating with community workers to get things done. That's when they put themselves above the community worker like they are slaves and not service providers.

In that sense, it's not for the greater good. It's serving entitlement and masking it as serving the greater good.

But this is something that people don't see unless they care for the health and wellness of community workers. It gets more problematic when the community workers themselves don't see that.

The community workers' power comes from having that health and wellness. That's how they provide service to others. Because they are healthy and well. When the community worker neglects his own health and wellness, he loses that power.

They say you only get what you give, in this case community workers only give what they have. Interestingly, this other social worker in a different file I worked on said a similar thing. You can't serve others if you're not well yourself.

Entitled people are slave drivers. But they're problem is not that they're bad people, it could be that they don't have a concept of energy and power that is required to make them good team players in the community work realm. Entitled people think community service providers are dispensable, replaceable. They don't think as far as resources that these people are non-renewable. But these people are actually renewable, but just not in the way entitled people think they are.

Community workers could be restored. Their energies and powers are renewable. But the community worker must have that concept or he must know how energy and power could be lost as it could be gained. A community worker who works with slave drivers, they have yet to know the concept or they have yet to apply it or incorporate it in their work. I am not about to get dramatic about this, so we just talk about the solution. 'Cause where there's drama surrounding a community service provision problem, there's bound to be entitled people delivering a speech about sacrifices for the greater good, and we don't really want speeches from slave drivers. We don't need more people getting the wrong idea about community work.

What people call 'the greater good' is just really what results from the personal good. It's just the baby or the offspring of personal good. We have community workers because these people are doing or have done well in their personal affairs. Entitled people drain community workers of energy and power with their concept of the greater good. They have community workers forgetting and neglecting, underestimating the source of that energy and power which is their personal good and well-being. And then they deliver dramatic speeches when they lose a community worker.

It's not working. It's just a bad concept. But it's not like we can't make good out of bad concepts. It's just problem solving. If you're working with slave drivers, you know what to do. You stop working with them and work with team players in the community. Team players are more organized in their approach. They take care of each other. But that comes from having that concept of energy and power. They value the source, by valuing the people. The people are the source.

You don't need therapy to know what the solution to your problem is. It's right there, you just go there and work with the right team.