More The Paradigm Conspiracy
'To get around, we've had to screen out input on many levels--inner, outer, physical, emotional, conceptual, ordinary, and nonordinary. The totality is there, it affects us, and we each have access to it. We simply can't pay attention to all of it at once and still function.
The question is, what do we let through? What should we focus on, and what should we relegate to the status of background noise? Our paradigm decides.
Take the authentic self. For surviving in a family or a job, our souls don't seem as relevant as the outward persona we devise to cope with work and family demands. We screen out inward processes to make a place for ourselves in the outward world. Instead of letting our real self through, we let through the expected reactions.
It wasn't originally our desire to filter out our souls, though. Our paradigm filters mirror those of society--as they must, at least to some extent, for us to survive in social systems. Since we live in a society that's externally oriented, our paradigm filters let through what increases outward success--things like retaining facts, getting the better side of a deal, or being efficient, productive, and obedient to authorities. Less success-oriented values--ecological health, human freedom and dignity, inner growth, compassion, social and economic justice, the quality of life, or aesthetics--get screened out.
As a society, we're not particularly proud of this filtering priority. It's just that our shared paradigm says we have no choice: outward demands take precedence.
But choice is precisely what's at stake--choice of paradigms, choice of filters, choice of worlds. If we don't realize that we function as filters, we believe that we're experiencing life the way it is and must be: our only option.'
'The message is clear: institutions make us conform to their arbitrary rhythms but make few allowances for ours. This policy follows us through life. If we have a baby, if a family member or close friend dies, if we or someone close ot us goes through a personal crisis, or if we struggle with a long-term illness, we're supposed to get ourselves back together ASAP and return to work. We're not paid to have a life. And if having a life interferes with our job performancemore than a couple weeks--if, for example, a woamn takes off six months to get to know her newborn or even a couple years to give her children a good start in life--she's lucky to get her job back.'
'Then there's the issue of what kind of person we're "allowed" to be: Does the paradigm or social system allow us our integrity and so foster trust among us? Are we allowed to do the right thing, even if it costs the company money? Can we bring our ideals and compassion to our work?
Or does the paradigm system expect us to do what's "necessary," values be damned? Are we faced with the choice to either become someone we don't like or lose our position? The paradigm's rules and structures can, for instance, pit us against each other, as modern schooling does with grading. Resentments and jealouslies get built into the system's methods of supervision, incentives, compensation, and rewards....
Worse, we can find ourselves expected to make money at the cost of terrible human suffering and not notice what we're doing. That's the new meaning of free trade in the global market....
A close friend of ours knows such a person, a corporate lawyer who specializes in arranging deals between corporations that are moving to poor, southern nations and the foreign governments. When our friend confronted the lawyer with the need to negotiate better working conditions, he got annoyed and asked why he should do that. His response took her by surprise, because she'd known him for years as a good, kind, and decent person. His attitude seemed totally out of character. Yet he's become precisely what the current paradigm of international business requires him to be. If he followed her suggestions and championed a better quality of life for the foreign workers, the American company would probably get a different lawyer, and he couldn't sustain the lifestyle to which he and his family have grown accustomed....'
'...true principles die hard.... The executives who make these decisions don't always sleep as well as we may think. In a section of When Corporations Ruled the World entitled "Pain at the Top," David Korten discusses the toll that the new face of business--massive cutbacks at home and sweatshops being created abroad, all in the name of "efficiency" and "maximizing profits"--is taking on top executives"
"It is a sense that something simply isn't right, that they are leaving their children a deeply troubled world. Many face growing conflicts between their personal values and what their corporate positions demand of them.... As one CEO related to Fortune, 'You get through firing people the first time around, accepting it as part of business. The second time I began wondering, "How many miscarriages is this causing? How many divorces, how many suicides?"' I worked harder so that I wouldn't have to think about it."'
'In the popular BBC political satire television series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister--a perfect send-up of the control paradigm in government--the civil servant Sir Humphrey who assisted "the Minister"... was skilled at every control-paradigm trick imaginable. Whenever someone called for change, for instance, he used the "three-card trick"; he offered the Minister three options only: one on the extreme right tha twouldn't work, one on the extreme left that was no better, and one in the middle that Sir Humphrey wanted the Minister to choose-an option that gave the appearance of change but really kept things just as they were....
Besides the obvious dialogue-excluder of authoritarian hierarchies, one of the most effective ways to eliminate dialogue is to create opposing factions: right/left, conservative/liberal, chauvinists/feminists, black/white, heterosexuals/homosexuals, teachers/students, management/labor, us/them. Once we're sufficiently polarized, we become so preoccupied fighting each other that we don't step back and notice the oppresive structures that turn us all into walking tinderboxes.'
'Deprived of freedom and security yet bound by control systems, we behave like caged animals. Intelligent beings don't do well in cages. While there's no record of dolphins ever attacking humans in the wild, for instance, caged dolphins have occassionally become aggressive. Before long, their immune systems deteriorate, and they die. Chickens do the same, so much so that the agribusiness mass growers cut off their beaks and pump them with antibiotics to keep them minimally alive until slaughter.
Human cages--[control-paradigm] relationships, schools, jobs, or belief systems--may be less visible, but they're no less closed, and the passive/aggressive, self-destructive behavior we act out on ourselves and others indicates that we fare no better than dolphins or chickens in them.'
The next two of these will be particularly good. And all this reading and writing is stirring things together in my mind... I think something very, very good will come of this.
I love you.
The question is, what do we let through? What should we focus on, and what should we relegate to the status of background noise? Our paradigm decides.
Take the authentic self. For surviving in a family or a job, our souls don't seem as relevant as the outward persona we devise to cope with work and family demands. We screen out inward processes to make a place for ourselves in the outward world. Instead of letting our real self through, we let through the expected reactions.
It wasn't originally our desire to filter out our souls, though. Our paradigm filters mirror those of society--as they must, at least to some extent, for us to survive in social systems. Since we live in a society that's externally oriented, our paradigm filters let through what increases outward success--things like retaining facts, getting the better side of a deal, or being efficient, productive, and obedient to authorities. Less success-oriented values--ecological health, human freedom and dignity, inner growth, compassion, social and economic justice, the quality of life, or aesthetics--get screened out.
As a society, we're not particularly proud of this filtering priority. It's just that our shared paradigm says we have no choice: outward demands take precedence.
But choice is precisely what's at stake--choice of paradigms, choice of filters, choice of worlds. If we don't realize that we function as filters, we believe that we're experiencing life the way it is and must be: our only option.'
'The message is clear: institutions make us conform to their arbitrary rhythms but make few allowances for ours. This policy follows us through life. If we have a baby, if a family member or close friend dies, if we or someone close ot us goes through a personal crisis, or if we struggle with a long-term illness, we're supposed to get ourselves back together ASAP and return to work. We're not paid to have a life. And if having a life interferes with our job performancemore than a couple weeks--if, for example, a woamn takes off six months to get to know her newborn or even a couple years to give her children a good start in life--she's lucky to get her job back.'
'Then there's the issue of what kind of person we're "allowed" to be: Does the paradigm or social system allow us our integrity and so foster trust among us? Are we allowed to do the right thing, even if it costs the company money? Can we bring our ideals and compassion to our work?
Or does the paradigm system expect us to do what's "necessary," values be damned? Are we faced with the choice to either become someone we don't like or lose our position? The paradigm's rules and structures can, for instance, pit us against each other, as modern schooling does with grading. Resentments and jealouslies get built into the system's methods of supervision, incentives, compensation, and rewards....
Worse, we can find ourselves expected to make money at the cost of terrible human suffering and not notice what we're doing. That's the new meaning of free trade in the global market....
A close friend of ours knows such a person, a corporate lawyer who specializes in arranging deals between corporations that are moving to poor, southern nations and the foreign governments. When our friend confronted the lawyer with the need to negotiate better working conditions, he got annoyed and asked why he should do that. His response took her by surprise, because she'd known him for years as a good, kind, and decent person. His attitude seemed totally out of character. Yet he's become precisely what the current paradigm of international business requires him to be. If he followed her suggestions and championed a better quality of life for the foreign workers, the American company would probably get a different lawyer, and he couldn't sustain the lifestyle to which he and his family have grown accustomed....'
'...true principles die hard.... The executives who make these decisions don't always sleep as well as we may think. In a section of When Corporations Ruled the World entitled "Pain at the Top," David Korten discusses the toll that the new face of business--massive cutbacks at home and sweatshops being created abroad, all in the name of "efficiency" and "maximizing profits"--is taking on top executives"
"It is a sense that something simply isn't right, that they are leaving their children a deeply troubled world. Many face growing conflicts between their personal values and what their corporate positions demand of them.... As one CEO related to Fortune, 'You get through firing people the first time around, accepting it as part of business. The second time I began wondering, "How many miscarriages is this causing? How many divorces, how many suicides?"' I worked harder so that I wouldn't have to think about it."'
'In the popular BBC political satire television series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister--a perfect send-up of the control paradigm in government--the civil servant Sir Humphrey who assisted "the Minister"... was skilled at every control-paradigm trick imaginable. Whenever someone called for change, for instance, he used the "three-card trick"; he offered the Minister three options only: one on the extreme right tha twouldn't work, one on the extreme left that was no better, and one in the middle that Sir Humphrey wanted the Minister to choose-an option that gave the appearance of change but really kept things just as they were....
Besides the obvious dialogue-excluder of authoritarian hierarchies, one of the most effective ways to eliminate dialogue is to create opposing factions: right/left, conservative/liberal, chauvinists/feminists, black/white, heterosexuals/homosexuals, teachers/students, management/labor, us/them. Once we're sufficiently polarized, we become so preoccupied fighting each other that we don't step back and notice the oppresive structures that turn us all into walking tinderboxes.'
'Deprived of freedom and security yet bound by control systems, we behave like caged animals. Intelligent beings don't do well in cages. While there's no record of dolphins ever attacking humans in the wild, for instance, caged dolphins have occassionally become aggressive. Before long, their immune systems deteriorate, and they die. Chickens do the same, so much so that the agribusiness mass growers cut off their beaks and pump them with antibiotics to keep them minimally alive until slaughter.
Human cages--[control-paradigm] relationships, schools, jobs, or belief systems--may be less visible, but they're no less closed, and the passive/aggressive, self-destructive behavior we act out on ourselves and others indicates that we fare no better than dolphins or chickens in them.'
The next two of these will be particularly good. And all this reading and writing is stirring things together in my mind... I think something very, very good will come of this.
I love you.