“The dominant ideology is always invisible, especially to those who hold it. That’s how it works — that’s how ideology is.” Michael Rectenwald
Like a fish not seeing the water it swims in, the most obvious and important realities are often also what’s the hardest to see (and therefore, not addressed). So, born into a world where we need money to survive, have you ever thought about the “from cradle to grave” business plan — the social contract — all of us co-create to live? Or is your default setting “blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up?”
You as the center of your universe
In his Commencement Speech to the Kenyon College class of 2005, David Foster Wallace shares :
“everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence … the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”
This type of basic self-centeredness is ubiquitous.
A paradigm is about a way of thinking and doing and to paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “Never expect anyone to understand anything when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.”
Isn’t that why we often feel like there is a war zone in our minds, particularly when it comes to business? Or vested interests?
That’s despite Wallace’s astute observation: “a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is … totally wrong and deluded.”
He realizes:
“The most dangerous thing about an academic education … is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.”
Because conditioned to see and interpret life through this tunnel-vision of self, you are unlikely to see:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman
So, even if someone has the best of intentions, you may perceive anyone challenging you as an enemy because your default setting is YOU against everyone.
Simplifying complexities
“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.” Karl Popper
When it comes to tackling problems, Popper further divides the world into two types of people/approaches: “All problems are either clocks or clouds.”
Excerpt from Social Movements Powering the Future of Money :
“Clocks are neat, orderly and their parts interact in theoretically predictable ways. Problems that crop up can usually be solved by reduction quickly by breaking a problem into individual pieces and then attacking the pieces. Hailing from the factory assembly line days, this ‘clock’ mode of thinking is predominant and is also what science does best.
On the other hand, clouds are highly irregular, disorderly, unpredictable. To solve cloud challenges, one first observes how patterns form without squeezing them into pigeon holes to meet a deadline.
For example, can you understand nature by rushing around to find the exact right tool to cut its joints by a certain date? In a way, that is how Business-as-usual (BAU) infiltrates your entire being, sublimely dictating your role to focus you on maximizing shareholder value each quarter, if not every single day.”
Very broadly, if you believe homeless people are a problem, you may be so emerged in the dominant ideology that you do not see “this is water.” If you see them as a consequence of the system we depend on, you could be a cloud thinker.
Dualistic thinking, or the “egoic operating system,” as Cynthia Bourgeault calls it, is our prevailing way of reading reality from the position of “What’s in it for me?” aka how the system we depend on molds our unnatural behaviors.
Through our lens of self, overly simplification can also predispose us to taking things too personally.
The dualistic mindset is essentially binary. Either/or positions simplify by comparison, by opposition and by differentiation without the need to account for any nuances in-between. Dualistic polarities tend to be black or white and examples include good/evil, true/false, intelligent/stupid, socialism/capitalism. Such for/against thinking systemically also extends to nations, jobs, races, religions, genders, ages, vested interests, status and other demographics.
So, consider that the world wars never really ended as BAU instills such habits:
“The characteristic way of management that we have (been) taught … is [to] take a complex system, divide it into parts and then try to manage each part as well as possible. And if that’s done, the system as a whole will behave well. That’s absolutely false, because it’s possible to improve the performance of each part taken separately and destroy the system at the same time.” Russell L. Ackoff
Then as fear and insecurities condition you on self-preservation, you will want to win at all costs. In this BAU paradigm, once you see anything and everything as something to be monetized for your benefit, you will lose sight of everything else. Isn’t this how many self-organize to enable corporate persons (especially Big Business) to build their too-big-to-fail empires?
Another excerpt from same book:
“In 2011, three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology released a report summarizing: “We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers.”
Excluding government-sponsored enterprises and privately-held companies, they had researched a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, analyzing all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships to build a model of who owns what and their revenues patterns.
James B. Glattfelder shares that 737 top shareholders (about 0.1 percent of the players/shareholders) collectively control 80 percent of transnational corporations’ value. The core 147 players collectively control half (40 percent). Most are financial institutions in the US and the UK. Of the top 50, 45 are financial firms like Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS …
Business-as-usual — especially where corporations own corporations which own corporations ad infinitum has already concentrated wealth, income and power into fewer and fewer hands.”
Today, our world is legally more tailored for such artificial entities than real humans and they have no greater god than growth. Honed by our competing self-interests, Business-as-usual — the social contract we live — is the dominant ideology. With Control regulated through Scarcity of money and resources, “this is water” augments artificial “Scarcity” thinking and doing as our default way of living.
Is our addiction to the BAU cult our default “Scarcity” setting?
Wallace opines:
“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story.
The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”
According to Wallace, the real value of a real education is to have “simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, so that we will keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water.”
He acknowledges:
“It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.”
The system we depend on is built on our default thinking that the world revolves around “Me.” That’s how the system molds us on perceived Scarcity. Isn’t that why even though the Internet can directly connect us, it’s now controlled by “natural monopolies” (how economists describe companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google). A “natural monopoly” takes advantage of an industry’s high barriers to entry to create a “moat” or protective wall around its operations.
In a BAU paradigm where corporate persons (especially Big Business) are benchmarked against having no greater god than growth, this (un)holy grail is at the expense of everything else.
A Real People World, Anyone?
For the paradigm to shift from “Me” to “We” and from “Control” to “Empowerment,” a change of direction — a mindset reboot by doing — is needed.
In the early 2000s, I shared with Thomas Brian Stevenson, then retired as EY Asia’s chairman:
“Each of us has the perfect gift to give the world … if we are able to each give what’s so uniquely ours — won’t we be able to create magic for and with each other?”
Very much to my surprise, my ex-boss told me I was trying to turn the titanic. But why are you and I not enough as we are?
Almost 10 mini Facebooks design experiences (developed two pre Facebook) and several failed experiments later, amid encountering cognitive dissonance galore, I learnt the hard way that we cannot solve our systemic challenges with the BAU logic used to create them.
Even though no one person knows everything, the BAU tendency is to treat “clock” symptoms like one throws a starfish back into the ocean.
A paradigm shift does need all of us as there are no saviors:
“If the world is to be saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with no programs at all. Why not new minds with new programs? Because where you find people working on programs, you don’t find new minds, you find old ones. Programs and old minds go together like buggy whips and buggies.” Daniel Quinn
Can strangers globally understand that the root cause of our problems is the default “Scarcity” setting perpetuated by the system we depend on?
Will you unlearn habits to relearn a new way of thinking and doing (heal yourself and each other along the way) so we can openly co-catalyze a new social contract for a Real People World where we are the best we can be for everyone’s benefit?
Watch this space for the launch of the “Hacking mindsets” series — an emergent experiment to observe if humanity is ready for this paradigm shift from “Me” to “We” — with your participation.
