The Book of Joy

least have someone in your company whose business is looking after their
welfare, as people—it does increase productivity. I don’t know what
other evidence we want that would tell us that the caring corporation, the
caring person, almost always are the ones who do well. In fact do very,
very well. And the opposite is true as well.”
“Very true, very true,” the Dalai Lama added. “It’s quite obvious.
Many Japanese companies are very successful because of the relationship
between the employee and employer. The employees have the feeling that
‘this is my company.’ So they work wholeheartedly. So with the
employer that just cares about the profits, the employees will always be
thinking about the lunch break or the teatime, never thinking about the
company. If you build the real concept of working together, and the profit
is shared together, then real harmony develops. This is what we really
need now. Harmony among the seven billion human beings.” The Dalai
Lama was weaving his hands together, as if he could will the harmony of
the world’s population with his delicate fingers.
“I want to come back to what you were saying, Archbishop, about how
you feel like our human nature’s been distorted. What is it about our
modern life that distorts our innate sense of compassion and generosity?”
“We have been brought up to think that we have to obey the laws of
the jungle. Eat or be eaten. We are ruthless in our competitiveness. So
much so that now stomach ulcers are status symbols. They show just how
very hard we work. We work hard not only to supply our needs and the
needs of our families, but we are trying to outdo the other. We have
downplayed the fact that actually our created nature is that we are made
for a complementarity. We have become dehumanized and debased. As
Martin Luther King Jr., said, ‘We must learn to live together as sisters
and brothers, or we will perish together as fools.’
“I hope that books such as this one will awaken in us that sense of
being human. And then we will realize just how obscene it is for us to
spend the billions or trillions that we spend on what we call a budget of
defense. When a very small fraction of those budgets would ensure
that . . . I mean, children die daily, die because they do not have clean
water. That should not be the case if we were aware of our