1. The document discusses the blurring of borders in the digital age and proposes "The Border Diet" to help strengthen borders of the self. The diet involves having secrets, taking breaks from social media, practicing silence and stillness, avoiding mental pollution from trivia, and not being overly open or exhibitionist online. 2. Key aspects of the diet include making yourself "undiscoverable" online at times, practicing alone time as advocated by Pascal, keeping "stocks" of things you can give to others high before giving, and reconciling with your own borders. 3. The goal is to avoid "self-depletion" and strengthen one's inner self, as strong borders of the self

1. 1
IN PRAISE OF BORDERS
Leandro Herrero
My ‘Director’s Cut’ of a TED talk given at TEDx East London under the theme of
‘Society beyond borders’ on Saturday 18th of January 2014
When a borderless world is unquestioned, the cult of
openness and transparency is worshiped and the
digital revolution dissolves distance, time and space,
then it’s time to reclaim the borders of the Self, which
could also be so easily and dangerously melted together
with many other borders. This paper reveals some
preventive measures.
If you go to a little town in Ireland called Pettigo,
you will find that it is split in two, right in the
middle. Half belongs to ‘The South’, the Republic
of Ireland and half to ‘The North’, Northern
Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. Many
countries in the world know about
borders and boundaries, and history
has been written on the back of
them, but I think Ireland would rank
very high as a place for a true
anthropology of the border. They
know about borders. Borders which
used to have walls and towers and
guns.
Today, the border in Pettigo is
merely marked by a different colour
of the road. One line, two shades of grey on the
ground. That’s it. The border is gone. Perhaps a
reminder of hope to the many other borders with
walls and guns that still remain in many places in
the world, still writing history, very often a
history of suffering, separation, and shattered
dreams.
Where I grew up, in Spain, as many people of my
generation, traveling abroad was not the given
that it is today even for children. I did not go
abroad or used my passport until I started
Medical School. I was 18 when I first crossed the
border with friends. It was an exhilarating
experience. We went to Andorra, the tiny country
next door! You could actually see a sign saying
welcome to Andorra! We were really abroad! We
could not believe it! Things have changed a bit
since then.
Last year, in 2013, I took 45 airplanes. Believe me,
a complete anti-climax compared with my first
trip to Andorra, which was then followed by the
far more adventurous…France!. We just kept
going north following the main road, crossing the
next border! That was a crossing of liberation and
identity, a small rite of passage still sharp in my
memory.
For us, young adults of the Spain
of the seventies, France did not
mean romantic week ends in Paris,
but watching films we could not
watch and buying books we could
not buy our side of the border. The
border was a big thing.
Today we have all come to
celebrate the freedom to move
around, not to be constrained
either by observation towers and machine guns,
or by other boundaries of race, gender or
ideology.
This has become a noble aim of rights and
freedom. Any idea to which we could attach the
words ‘without borders’ has a head start. From
‘Doctors without borders’ to ‘Basketball without
borders’, and anything in between, we have
praised the borderless world so much, and for
very good reasons, that we have unconsciously
made any border bad. I am here to reclaim some
borders.
Any idea to
which we
could attach
the words
‘without
borders’ has a
head start

2. 2
The greatest border
revolution
Something has happened in the recent
generations. The greatest border revolution was
not achieved via any Geneva treaty or a peace
process. There was no war or uprising or people
in streets and plazas. The world became digital.
And this digital world has turned almost
everything upside down. The changes in our
world are almost Copernican. The new human
landscape is almost unrecognizable, although the
current generations of digital natives don’t see it
like this. We, the analogues, know the difference!
The revolution has brought both immense
progress and interesting paradoxes. Because of
the overwhelming consensus on the side of
progress, the paradoxes don’t tend
to get much air time. These are a
few.
Distance is gone. It’s now the same
distance between me and my next
door neighbour and a friend in
New Zealand. Distance is not
measured in miles or kilometres.
If anything, it may be the
bandwidth of your Skype. But with
the death of distance we have not
necessarily gained in proximity to
each other. Nobody has put it
better than Sherry Turkle of MIT in
the title of her latest book: ‘Alone Together’. The
illusion of proximity is amplified by the
epidemic of Full Disclosure of Myself driven by
ubiquitous social media and the fall of the
Privacy Wall. Somebody said that the young
generations don’t care about Big Brother, what
they are really afraid of is Big Mother, when she
asks you to be your friend in Facebook! That is a
border! Closeness is now a numerical concept
plus some digitalised faces talking in Texting, an
idiom with no official Royal or Language
Academy.
We have become hyper-connected but not hyper-
collaborative. Connectivity is not collaboration
but we tend to use them both as having a
dangerously close meaning. Hyper-connectivity
allows us to participate in the social plaza by the
not too onerous movement of a finger (clicking,
liking, and following) creating a new generation
of armchair activists. To the critics of this
clicktivism, others say that this is still good
because at least it facilitates awareness and
sensitization to issues. Which is true if what you
want is to create legions of hyper-sensitised and
hyper-aware voyeurs.
Technology also makes us rich in time and space,
yet we suffer from the greatest time famine. The
anytime-anywhere landscape came with a
roadmap to the Promised Land of the milk of free
time and the honey of work-balance lifestyle. As
other travellers of the biblical desert discovered a
long time ago, there is no milk or honey at the
destination. Moses would have been fired today.
The digital revolution has also installed the word
instant in the presidential palace. This word
today defines almost all expectations for anything
in life. So children grow up with less and less
sense of deferred gratification which is what
forms character. If you could get
instant coffee in the analogue times,
now you could get instant knowledge
in the digital one. Today, answering a
question in your children’s
homework may be as intellectually
complex as cutting and pasting. ‘I
know how to’ has replaced ‘I know
why’. Knowing where the answer is
may render your child an A, even if
the child does not know what the
answer is. Critical thinking is
outsourced to Google algorithms. Re-
search is a Google search you have
done twice. We are the mini-gods
who can reach Ithaca on screen.
In the winners and losers we tend to see the
winners because they are so pervasive and
‘obvious’. But the roots of the word obvious mean
‘in the way’. The shining progress is in the way
of critical and healthy look at the deep impact on
the way we think, the way we do, the way we are,
ourselves, our Self.
The great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset is
often known by a single sentence in one of his
books: ‘I am I and my circumstances’. That was
the thirties. Today Ortega might say ‘I am I and
my Facebook tribe’, my ‘followers’, or ‘fans’, or
my ‘likes’. Or perhaps ‘I am I and my avatars’.
Ortega moved the border of the self
adventurously for his time, although his
existentialist statement may seem banal today.
Today, the borders of the self have moved again,
this time far beyond, perhaps to terra incognita.
The illusion
of proximity
is amplified by
the epidemic
of Full
Disclosure of
Myself and
the fall of
the privacy
wall

3. 3
When I was a practicing psychiatrist, ‘multiple
personality disorder’ was something unhealthy in
the manual. The digital world has blurred the
borders of identity. Identity here is multiple (you
can be anybody and many bodies in Digital
United ) yet, you are not mentally ill!. Multiple
personality is now healthy. Adolescents, in
particular, today form many simultaneous digital
identities. Psychological borders have been
blurred. I challenge you to find this in a standard
Psychology manual
In my tribe I trust
Once upon a time, in analogue time, writing a
Declaration of Independence was perhaps the
climax of identity and purpose. It was a
Declaration of Borders. Today, independence is
dead. Nothing that we do as individuals, or
employees in an organization, or as a group, or as
a country, is independent. As the multiple
domino effects we see in the markets, insulation
and independence are only real as dreams. The
Ortegan conspiracy is alive. Today I ask my
business clients to write down their Declaration
of Interdependence, whether of themselves or the
organizations they lead. Once
clarified that I did not make a
spelling mistake, very often the
scales fall form their eyes and the
focus switches from preserving
independence to mastering the
interdependence.
In the individual sphere, we
declare our triumphant freedom
and independence – remember,
mini-gods are really, really free -
but surrender our privacy to
thousands of ‘friends’ we have
hardly met, becoming dependant
on an audience. Aside privacy,
this networked world that we
belong to, makes us more inter-
dependent particularly in one way: more tribal.
Belonging to a tribe (urban, digital, cause…) is
often greater in power than to a country or even
to a ‘global citizenship’.
My tribal brother or sister is primarily ‘somebody
like me’. So I rely more on what other ‘patients-
like-me’ say of my illness than what doctors say.
Tribal websites and portals (‘patients like me’
being one of them) are growing . Trust is
horizontal.
In my work as an organization architect, we see
similar phenomenon. People trust more what
‘people-like-me’ say about the organization that
what the CEO tells them. This is reflected year
after year in Edelman’s trust barometer: around
30-40 % of employees trust the CEO; around 60-
70% in the ‘people like me ‘category (read, one of
us, my mates, my colleagues, comrades, my
horizontal, transversal tribe…)
The old analogue world was very good at
creating top-down authority. The digital world is
horizontal. The analogue citizen looked up and
down, the digital citizen looks sideways The
power is in now in the tribe. Peer-to-peer trust is
greater than hierarchical trust. . What the social
network says and likes is my reality. The world
has became flat. The truth is a web of beliefs. All
my Facebook monkeys can’t be wrong!
From all ‘border issues’ that have been blurred, or
open, or taken down in the digital, networked,
horizontal, sideways, tribal, instant, time-less,
space-less world, one above all worries me: the
one of the self and the soul. I suggest that the Self
Without Borders is the tragic illness of the 21st
Century. Not everybody will catch it in full, but
symptoms are worryingly
widespread already.
It seems that more and more people
are now living in what the late Irish
poet John O’Donohue called ‘inner
eviction and outer exile’. The self is
forced to come out and reach the
audience, the nomadic tribe, the
Promised Land of the likes and
followers where the milk of belonging
and the honey of acceptance is
waiting for you. Its not just a little
stroll around the house, it’s a full
outing and potential moving out. In
the extreme, it can be permanent exile
that could end up in the Intensive
Care Unit for the Self and the Soul.
The big problem with Self exhibitionism and self
eviction is that it depletes your inner goods. To be
human is to give something of yourself. When
there is no stock left and all is gone to the market,
to the Grand Bazaar, there is nothing to give. I
know people who tell me ‘I am an open book’, ‘I
have no secrets’, ‘I am transparent’, most often
said with pride. They worry me. They have their
stocks of identity exhausted. Their borders are
gone. The cult of openness, transparency and self
the Self
Without
Borders is the
tragic illness
of the 21st
Century. Not
everybody
will catch it
in full, but
symptoms are
worryingly
widespread
already.

4. 4
eviction to the outer-exile unsettles me. I often
wish them a bit of opacity.
The border diet
So, I had to do something! Using my medical
background (just kidding), I have created the
climax of all recipes: a diet. Its called The Border
Diet: A Fitness Plan for the Self and the Soul. I am
still working on the branding!. The diet has the
following points:
1. Have a list of secrets, make an inventory, keep
them. Review them monthly. Having no
secrets is a symptom of Self depletion. There
are sacred secrets of your soul and in your
soul. They are your real friends, because they
are the closest to you. The problem is that in
the Full Disclosure pseudo-nirvana regime,
the word secret has become associated with
bad. It should not be.
2. Take social media sabbaticals. Make yourself
not just ‘unavailable’ (this is the analogue
term) but ‘un-discoverable’ (digital).
Bluetooth devices asks you to switch them, or
not, to ‘discoverable’ mode so that other
devices can recognise and ‘pair’ with them
(my apologies to digital natives, I know you
know that, but I am writing here for
analogues as well). So learn to make yourself
‘un-discoverable’ from time to time. Or chose
selectively to whom you make your Self
discoverable. And how much, and for how
long.
3. Drop Pilates, take Pascal classes. Pascal said
that ‘All of humanity's problems stem from
man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’.
That has not changed since the 17th Century, if
anything it is today incredibly more difficult.
The 21st Century human can’t ‘sit’: we are
restless, attention deficit disorder animals.
‘Quietly’ is hard in a 24/7 noisy world. The
‘room to sit alone’ is crowded with nomadic
audiences and populations of different sorts.
But, it’s all about practising!
4. Make an inventory of assets you can give to
others: start with time, ideas, attention, care.
Keep stocks high. Make sure you don’t give
too much at a time. Perhaps in small
quantities only to people you know and need
you. Then increase the dose progressively.
Many relationships fail because instead of
mutual enhancement they turn out as mutual
depletion.
5. Practice daily silence. Start simple: radio off,
earphones off. Despite common belief, it’s
possible. Simultaneous multi channel, muti-
stimulation of the senses is not needed for
survival. Silence will help you listen to your
Self, and who knows, beyond. Not for
nothing silence has been called God’s
language.
6. Practice stillness. Stop moving, jogging, going
to the gym. Well, not all the time. Don’t do
anything, I repeat, anything, for a good 30
min a day. Try. It wont kill you. Notice I have
not said meditation. Meditation is doing
something.
7. You would not choose to be in a room full of
smoke or a contaminated nuclear area.
Mental pollution is much worse than the
other. It’s the greatest digital health hazard.
Avoid systematic mental exposure to trivia as
you avoid breathing smoke.
8. Don’t be open, transparent and exhibitionist.
You are fooled by your ego. Hard as it is to
accept for many people, nobody really cares
about you checking in at the airport of X,
having cereals Y for breakfast today or just
changing your cover photo in Z. You are
1. Have secrets
2. Make yourself
undiscoverable
3. Take pascal classes
(alone in a room)
4. Keep stocks high,
then give
5. Practice silence
6. Don’t do anything
7. Avoid trivia (mental
pollution)
8. ‘your posting is not
important to us’
9. reconcile with your
borders
10. go to number 1

5. 5
mainly reporting to yourself what your Self
knows already. You’ve probably been cynical
more than once when put on hold by a voice
that says ‘your call is important to us’, but
obviously not as important as taking your
call. Imagine the world saying, keep posting,
your posts are important to us. Get the
picture?
9. Reconcile with your borders, protect your
distances, go back to your inner house. Then
you can give from within. But you need to
protect your Self from all windows open, all
doors open. The Self may catch a cold.
10. Then, go back to number one
As any diet, it does not come free of hassle and
effort. It needs practising, commitment,
resolution and those other things you apply to
your physical health. Reclaim your borders. You
may even feel bad, or selfish, or guilty. This is
normal. Drop the guilt. Give yourself a break, a
good recurrent border break. Because this is
seriously about your Self. You are you and your
borders. I am I and my borders.
Leandro Herrero
Leandro-herrero@thechalfontproject.com
www.leandroherrero.com
www.thechalfontproject.com
www.viralchange.com
+44 (0) 1494 730999
Leandro Herrero is the CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd and Managing Partner of
Viral Change Global LLP. The Chalfont Project is an organizational consulting group
in the business of Building Remarkable Organizations. Viral Change ™ creates large
scale behavioural change in organizations and society. The Leader with Seven Faces
is the flagship leadership programme of The Chalfont Project.
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