There is a big difference between a follower and a servant.

A follower wants to achieve their own goals, and looks to a wise and inspiring leader to show them how. A servant on the other hand agrees to obey the whims of a master, so that the master can achieve the master’s goals, and then hopes that they are able to convince the master to reward them sufficiently for this support.

Humans are made to lead and follow, not be master and servant. We feel the difference instinctively.

It’s an uplifting and enriching experience to band together and work for a shared cause, either stepping up to lead the way, or else following an inspiring leader who guides you safely to your goal. It’s the sort of thing that we write novels and make movies about.

But obedience to a self-interested master? With rare exceptions, that tends to feel more like humiliation.

So why then would we want to organize our working lives around the master/servant relationship of employer and employee?

If you and I want to collaborate together so that we can both make a living, why should you have to become my servant? That’s a distortion of natural human relations. It’s toxic, and it becomes corrosive to both our characters. It starts to change who we are as people, and it spills out into the rest of our lives as well.

It limits us.

We need to move on from employer/employee relationships and start arranging things in a more natural way. And I’m not just talking about some sort of collective or cooperative where we become servants to the masters we elect. We need a more flexible arrangement. One that makes leading and following voluntary and spontaneous, in accordance with our natural human instincts.

An arrangement like that is already well established in the world of business and in law. Working together on a project or business with peers is called a Joint Venture. Working without an employer is called Self Employment. Starting Joint Ventures as Self Employers gives us a natural way to collaborate in accordance with our actual human nature.

We should be doing a lot more of this:

Next: How to make an Alliance

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