Skip to main content

Hail Satan?


This will likely be the click-baitiest post title of Startical 2.0, but it is in fact the title of the film I watched on Netflix while taking a lunch break.  And it was good.

If you haven't yet seen it, let me perhaps surprise you with the seven fundamental tenets of The Satanic Temple:
  1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
  2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
  3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
  4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.
  5. Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
  6. People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
  7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
In short, if, like me, you've ever undertaken any activism in the name of continuous progress, the above should resonate quite well, as should the film itself.

All this reminds me of Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens from which one of my greatest takeaways was that:
Religion is both universal and missionary
 The film highlights the universal and missionary nature of the story of The Satantic Temple which applies equally well outside of religion to perhaps any progressive cause, including the visions of many startups.  Imagine if all these causes were to advance together in solidarity.  I often do and it makes me hopeful about the future.

            Popular posts from this blog

            TechNoel

            Answers to the question from Vaughn and Noor.  Art with Eva...

            Reminiscing about last year's epic rail journey

            Last year today I embarked on an epic rail journey from Montreal to Chicago via Vancouver and Seattle.  This time of the year is pretty much the only time I can completely escape startup life (and Internet connectivity), and a year ago I seized the opportunity to do something I'd been dreaming of since childhood: take "The Canadian" across Canada. Sat down with a beer and watched my videos from that trip (see playlists below) which brought back very fond memories not only of the trip itself, but also of Startical 1.0 which involved a similarly ridiculous Montreal to San Francisco rail journey. The playlists: "The Canadian" - Toronto to Vancouver by rail "The Empire Builder" - Seattle to Chicago by rail Also reminds me of my  Rails and Reels: History, Infrastructure and the IoT blog post from 2013, just after we had become "World's Best Startup".  Somehow rail journeys bring out the philosopher in me...

            Evolutionary Purpose

            Will and I discussed finding the balance of progress and purpose in organisations (startups and otherwise) which reminded me of the book Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux which was recommended to me by one of my mentors.  We found the clip above on YouTube (if you're not familiar with Laloux, it's a nice short summary of his work) and one element stood out for me: what he called Evolutionary Purpose . How I understand this concept is that the purpose (or soul) of an organisation evolves over time, rather than an individual or leadership team directing towards a specific outcome.  It's very much in line with the sailboat analogy and the lunch discussion I had with the team. It is very reassuring to me that the people closest to me today all affirmed my feelings on leadership, and interesting that it often took very different paths/context for us to be able to truly connect on the subject.