A Modest Proposal * on "The Meaning of Life": (With Apologies to Monty Python) (2003)

Abstract This article posits that Public Administration facilitates of (with apologies to Monty Python). The first section locates personal in individual empowerment and concludes that this empowerment is best achieved through a democratic system of action. The second section asserts the definitional boundaries of Public Administration necessarily must be drawn to include the democratic political system, which controls decision making and shapes implementation. Public administration, as the field that addresses the implementation of democratic action, therefore facilitates the of Life! Introduction and Summary While the pretentious reference to The of Life was written with a smile, the conceptual logic is presented seriously. Any of Life is, of necessity, individually defined (Frankl, 1984). Universal answers to metaphysical questions are stymied by the biologically individual nature of human beings. Collective human concepts must be constructed through a process of aggregating individual expressions. Whether humanity's meaning or is achieved, therefore, is an aggregation of individual expressions. The more individual concepts of are achieved, the more society may be understood to have achieved human purpose. Public Administration struggles with a similar and interpenetrating definitional debate. Public Management attempts to address the achievement of intent, yet intentions and actions are not stable, but constantly evolve. Public Administration concerns the achievement of intent, yet intent is an aggregation of these continually changing individual intentions. Public administration is about achieving aggregated individual expressions of will and purpose. The extent to which more individual expressions are more fully expressed by the polity, is the extent that public administration is successful. Successful public administration, therefore, is about the achievement of the of Life. This title is borrowed from Jonathan Swift's satirical essay Modest Proposal written in1 729. The of Life The Meaning of Life, whether in serious philosophical treatises or as humorous Monty Python cinema, is at the core of the human condition. The central questions of human existence are: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What are we supposed to do? A biological perspective (or Monty Python) might claim that human is to propagate. A species' success lies in its ability to reproduce. In that area human beings are apparently quite successful. But humans have always sought a more transcendent than mere reproduction. The problem is there is no universal agreement on such a purpose, but it is the very multiplicity of opinions that may guide us to an answer that lies in process rather than outcome (Frankl, 1984). Human beings are biologically discrete creatures, and the very concept of collective purpose must be articulated individually (even as I am doing now). No group mind articulates our decisions, though interaction may result in some agreed upon group actions. Only discrete individuals attempt to communicate their perceptions of the world to each other. These individual perceptions may, in a postmodern sense, be the result of accumulated interactions of the individual with their environment, but those interactions are experienced and interpreted individually. To the best of our knowledge, mental activity is individual. Even Jung's concept of the unconscious (Jung, 1968) must still be articulated by individual human beings through individual faculties of communication. Despite the individuality of our expressions, we realize that, as social creatures, we must work together to accomplish most of our desired individual ends, and we realize that working together requires decisions. …