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...

            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.

            Sniffles

            Of course I pushed too hard and paid the price of feeling that scratchiness in my nose by mid-morning.  At best I was gonna carry a mild cold through the holidays.  At worst I'd be a write-off for an entire week (which happened to me right after Christmas in 2015). It's not difficult to realise that I pushed too hard.  Despite being on Startical with its explicit guidelines , there was just way too much to get done before the holidays.  Even my Startical posts for nearly the past week have been placeholders to fill in later.  And now that's caught up to me and I'm starting sniffles. The challenge now is striking the optimal balance between preventative care and completing my commitments before Christmas: sending out personalised Owl-iday e-mails including the Owl-iday Special I had worked so hard to create.  I think I'll err on the side of preventative care as I really don't want to wrap up Startical feeling sick and useless...