When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort.

My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service.

Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world of building objects and utilizing tools as means to this end. He rejects precisely the cornerstone of service, utilizing the time and effort of human beings and reducing them to mere resources.

*

My time and effort are not for sale apart from my service.

*

If I offer my services to someone and they take from me only my time and effort and reject the remainder, that is the theft of a gift.

The ability to accept a gift of service and to refrain from stealing it is what gives a person the right to lead. Here leadership itself is service.

*

The strong preference for rejecting service while utilizing a person’s time and effort as if they were some kind of useful device — this ought to be a disqualification for leadership, but for many, this nearly defines it.

Until we learn to prefer service leadership to tyranny, our lives will continue to hemorrhage meaning, and we will find ourselves less and less inwardly motivated to labor.

*

The incapacity to exchange gifts of service is what makes a tyrant a tyrant.

*

Some people cannot even see how service isn’t the sum time + effort and so they steal innocently. Innocence, however, is cheap. Such people are unfit for leadership however much charisma and instrumental competence they possess.