Kuleana, Self-Responsibility, and Self-Determination

If I may, I am thinking out loud with you about these things:
Kuleana is the Hawaiian value of personal responsibility and accountability. The “banality of evil” is a phrase I have newly learned and am chewing on, in respect to the connection it has to kuleana.

“Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the ‘banality of evil’ —the fact that, given certain conditions, ordinary people can succumb to social pressure to commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable … men and women did terrible things to other people in part because responsibility for their actions was diffused, rather than focused on each of them as individuals; we find ourselves in a similar position whenever we witness someone else’s trouble but fail to help because we assume others will.”

This is taken from an article in which famed psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, talks about the horrific prison abuses of Iraqi prisoners by young American soldiers revealed at Abu Ghraib in April of 2004. He had been called on to be an expert witness for one of the military policemen involved.

I’ve learned that professor Zimbardo has written a new book called The Lucifer Effect, Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, and I’ve added it to my list for future study. In Managing with Aloha I continually assert that we are born good, and that factors outside of us can turn our behavior toward the less than good

• when we neglect to work on our own ho‘ohana (intentional life’s work),
• when we do not mālama (keep healthy in our self-care), and
• when we do not cultivate the habits in our living with aloha that keep us grounded in pono decision-making (in rightness and balance.)

This is an important concept in my coaching of managers and leaders, for I coach them to assume — to KNOW and to trust — that the good IS always living in all their staff; it may be dormant, asleep, nervous, afraid and in hiding, or even lazy and unexercised, and it’s their role to draw it out in people, by creating the working environment in which their staff’s goodness and aloha will newly flourish.

This is what Professor Zimbardo says about my assertion;

“We want to believe that we are ‘good,’ moral, and self-aware. We want to believe that we are different from ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ people. Thinking so is essential to maintaining a sense of personal dignity and worth. But the line between good and evil is permeable, like the cell walls of our body that allow movement of chemicals across their boundaries. Anything that any human being has ever done – anything imaginable – is potentially doable by any of us in the same circumstance.

This is not to excuse immoral behavior; the point is simply that understanding how someone could have engaged in wrongdoing, rather than dismissing it as a bad deed done by a bad person, allows us to identify corrosive social forces – the very same forces we need to counteract if we want to avoid going down the same wrong path.”

In MWA’s chapter on Kuleana, I write why I believe that responsibility seeks opportunity. In turn, opportunity creates energy and excitement for us. Living aloha with kuleana as a personal value weaves ownership into this captured opportunity, and there is a transformation of self-actualization that in effect, comes from keeping a promise to yourself; the promise is to BE yourself and not succumb to outside, “corrosive social forces.”

More from Professor Zimbardo, and why I’m planning to read his book;

“You should always demand the respect that you deserve, from everyone. I believe we can all benefit from exercising our ‘heroic imagination’ – our capacity to envision physically or socially risky situations, to mentally struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and to consider our actions and their consequences.”

So do I.

If you wish to read Professor Zimbardo’s article in full, you will find it on page 199 of the April 2007 issue of the O Magazine; unfortunately it is not included as one of thier online features this month. Appropriately, the article is called For Goodness’ Sake.

Comments

[Adam Kayce : Monk At Work]

Hi Rosa,

I love this value of Kuleana — it seems odd that so many of us learned to act otherwise. I believe it's one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves, not to mention what it can do for the rest of the world.

Thanks for sharing your culture with us!

[Rosa Say]

Aloha Adam, thank you for visiting!

I love Kuleana too. We get strengthened in some very glorious ways when we are willing to be held accountable for those things we are most passionate about taking responsibility with - and we are certainly never bored, for there is too much to do!