Unified By a Threat

Unified By Threats?
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

JFK's vision of putting a man on the moon unified a nation towards a goal. Unification can be created through a vision or a threat. Remember the 9/11 bombings of the Twin Towers? What happened immediately after? All of a sudden everyone was nice to each other in America, everybody was patriotic; flags soared throughout our nation. Why? Because, a threat was encountered.

This interesting facet of human behavior works every time in most any situation. Take yourself for example. Have you ever felt lost? Or felt fragmented? Or unmotivated? Probably because there was no vision beyond your current state, or no impending threat. If we can find ways to create compelling visions, or artificial threats we can unify ourselves, and act as a whole towards an objective. Ken Wilber, American Philosopher, said that we seek "self realization, through self-transcendence;" in a way this exactly what we're talking about here.

Competition in essence in its basic form uses this model. Especially team sports where you're working towards a goal beyond yourself. In team sports you not only have a compelling vision to win, but you also have a powerful threat - the opposing team.

How about sales? In a sales you can establish immediate rapport by finding a common vision or threat with your client. Some sales forces already do something similar. For example, some finance companies will have the sales agent play the role of "being on your side" against the corporate presidents that will either deny or approve you. The sales agent becomes a team with you against the threat of the fickle executives.

The ultimate utopian vision of world peace and harmony would easily occur spontaneously upon the threat from outside our planet. If we were suddenly under attack by aliens....wallah!...the world would unify and differences, inadequacies, beliefs, history, and everything else would vanish and we would come together.

Angel Armendariz