26 Apr (Mis)Shapers of Our Lives
We humans—with our species exceptionalism, our arrogance, our smarts and our not so smarts, our bloated brains and shrinking hearts, our degenerating ranges of sight and sound, the cooling of our touch, and the freezing of our feelings—are in deep, deep trouble. It is a trouble of our own making. We constructed an elaborate maze where every attempt to escape turns into a blind alley.
What’s the maze made of? At the highest level, a knowing paradigm and conceptual framework for “making sense” of everything (especially and most destructively when things don’t and can’t make sense). Here are three elements of that frameworks that, unbeknown to us as we go about our lives, lock us into ways of thinking and feeling and relating that are self-defeating and non-developmental.
Glasses that Blind Us
A common way that people get stuck socially, emotionally, intellectually morally, and politically is by being trapped in binaries. Seeing “bipolarly”—either-or, this or that—is how we have been socialized to see, think, feel, and choose. Getting free from such a limitation involves engaging binaries in such a way that discovery of something other than them is possible.
You Mean It’s Not About Me???
According to the influential Jean Piaget, the infant’s life is characterized by solipsism, in other words, the infant lives in a “Me-Centered Universe.” This may be, but we never outgrow it! Solipsism keeps us locked into ourselves, perhaps especially, into our pain.
The Ubiquitous “Because”
The binary self-other and the solipsism of self (the “me”-centered universe) are a dangerous combination. When we add the demand for causality (as Western and most other cultures do), we have a lethal mixture that fuels emotional distress, loneliness, hopelessness and rage. Applying this great conceptual discovery for science, engineering, and medicine to the human realm is a mistake. We are socialized to see current emotions in terms of past events—to assume that some event in your past causes you to feel and react to something today (“I’m traumatized”), to assume that everything anyone does has a cause (“I got angry because he hurt me,”) and to be paralyzed and do nothing because you’re afraid of the effect it might have. The obsession with cause in everyday life keeps people stuck.
I love creating conversations where people collectively explore the ways these conceptions show up for us—and how we can construct escape routes.
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