Paradigms Lost
A Rant
I’m not really a rant-kinda-guy, no really, I’m not. . .
Whined the wishy-wash writer-wrestling with what the wrecked-world hath wrought . . .
Resistance is futile . . .a least, . . . that’s what “they” say . . .
So ranters gonna rant, rant, and rant, and I guess that’s me . . . today . . .
Yeah . . .
This is a rant – the ramblings of an old brain, retired from the rotation of the rat-wheel, writing, and writing, just the same –“Alan, you’re still working; you’re just not getting paid for it.”
This tirade was sparked by David Brooks of the Times who post-October 7th posited four paradigms for the on-going morass of the Middle East:
- paradigm of persecution, murder and abuse, centuries from Hittites, Babylon and Masada, Charlemagne, Emico, Hitler and Stalin, burnt offerings and pogroms endless and then ̶ an anguished cry “Never again!” – We fight!
- paradigm of colonization, oppression, landlessness, subject to Crusades, and roving wars with Persians, Ottomans, British, never asked, never free, now we say No More and chant “from the river to the sea.”
(when you say from the “river to the sea,” I hear eradicate me).
- mental model of the nattering nabobs of naiveté, ever-smoothing, quoting Rodney King and Martin “why can’t we all just get along?” preaching Partition, peace, prosperity and absolution, contained in an ever-changing Two-State-Solution.
And lastly, the archetype no one openly espouses . . . but many secretly believe:
- “It’s a dog-eat-dog world” – Grab it and Growl ̶ we want the farmland, the minerals, the water and to get it, we’re willing to do anything, even what you call slaughter.
I paraphrased (just a little) this David Brooks, named for the psalmist king of three thousand years ago, who started this mess by uniting Israel and Judah, or maybe that was earlier, Moses with the forty-year ramble with Pharoah, the Big Stick, close behind, and the Ultimate Carrot ̶ the “land of milk and honey” just an analogy for locality, an end to wandering, so goats could graze and bees could breed in a basket-hive. Young David (Brooks) sparked my synapses to pondering paradigms.
My first memory of when I first used the words in conflict resolution “Paradigms, Stereotypes and Mental Models” when men mocked my vocabulary and crazily wiggled their butts and offered me two dimes (“mental-models-and-pair-a-dimes-get-it?”). At least I didn’t use the word “heuristic.”
But paradigms, mental models, organizing principles, worldviews, viewpoints, points-of-view kept poking my preconception and stirring up this stew I call Cartesian cognition, “cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” which no one ever admits is really “Cogito ergo cogito me,” “I think therefore I think I am.”
Paradigms are the problem!
What started as a descriptor, a string-tied metaphor to help us make sense of the world, a model to eliminate distraction from interesting but irrelevant input, and ease the decision-to-action pathway has become hardened. The map has become the territory!
Not just in Israel, not just in Ukraine, nor Sudan nor Sri Lanka, nor Myanmar nor in US politics, but anywhere we generalize to simplify complexity, where we don’t-know-and-don’t-ask-and-make-shit-up.
Oh we might hang high sounding words on it-“Shining-City-on-the-Hill,” Zion, Caliphate, “Rule-of-Law,” “Geneva Convention,” “White Man’s Burden” . . .
. . . but let’s be clear we are often just making-shit-up to justify taking-what-we-want-and-to-hell-with-anyone-else.
A stereotype is not a combination of entertainment and word-processing equipment, neither is it Truth. A stereotype starts as a mental model, a way to understand someone we don’t know – “all Italians talk with their hands” ̶ that’s crap, of course, but it may help us to understand an energetic, expressive friend of Southern European ancestry, but it’s a generalization to simplify complexity – and worth as much as male bovine feces -maybe less if you’re a gardener or farmer.
Our stereotypes get us in trouble when we generalize a very large population – “Bob is an engineer. Bob struggles to express his feelings. All engineers are cold fish.” ̶ and don’t get me started how we generalize about gender ̶ really? Half the population are jerks, insensitive- idiots, hyper-emotional basket cases, or pains-in-the-ass. Right.
We use humor to reinforce our paradigm of the “Other.” All over the world there are border jokes that impugn intelligence of the “others” on the wrong side of a line on a map –“how do you know I’m from across the border; is it because of the way I talk when asked to buy a potato?” “No, son . . . It’s because . . . this is a hardware store.”
I’ve heard this joke in Newfoundland about Nova Scotians and In Georgia about Alabamans and vice versa. I wonder if it is told along the India Pakistan border.
Jean Shepherd, narrator and author of the movie “A Christmas Story,” who had a midnight radio show on WOR in New York City – WOR was a Big Stick” station, 50,000 watts of broadcast power, and I used to listen in my Boston suburb under the covers as a rebellious 9:00 pm bedtime kid, Jean said it all in one classic Shep routine,
“Ethnic humor demeans an entire group of people based upon something they have no control over ̶ the accident of their birth. So ethnic jokes are Bad – problem is some of those jokes are really funny – so I came up with a solution ̶ a mythical land called “Ethnicia” –“How many Ethnician’s does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Four, one to stand on the chair holding the bulb and three to turn the chair chanting ‘clockwise.’” Shep found a way to save the joke without the mean-spiritedness behind it.
But that is often what a stereotype is, a mean-spirited generalized paradigm to talk about the “other,” someone we don’t understand because of where they live, or how they look, or talk, or ̶ God-forbid ̶ what they believe. We take one small piece of information and generalize it about an entire group ̶ sometimes we don’t even wait for one piece of data ̶ we just make shit up
Talk about making shit up ̶ can you believe how we “otherize” people who believe different things than us. Religion is the ultimate paradigm, a mental model invented to explain the unexplainable.
OK, true believers, people of Faith, forgive me, can you, at least, admit that God, gods, Spirit and the Divine are man’s inventions. No? You’re not going to do that, are you? Silly me. Respect.
Maybe though, you might agree that all this talk about “the chosen people,” “One True Faith,” “The Way and the Light,” is a tad exclusionary, and might make people think you think you’re better than them. Still, no? OK, I respect your right to your religion, just don’t try to make yours mine and stop fighting wars over it, OK?
Me? I’m with the late Andy Rooney, closing curmudgeon of the CBS show Sixty Minutes,
“I might believe in religion, which I don’t, if believing in it made people nicer, but it does not seem to.”
Here’s my paradigm, for what it’s worth, certainly not more than the twenty cents I was offered when I used the word:
God was some person’s way of saying, “Get over yourself. Look up to the sky. Look around. There is much that is greater than you. Have some respect.” Heaven and hell are a heuristic action plan –“Hey listen up ̶ you’ll feel better at the end of your miserable time on this earth if you’re nice to people. If you’re not nice, with your last breath you’ll feel the everlasting burning fires of regret for what you woulda, shoulda, coulda . . . but didn’t.” So fagetabout the angels or virgins and smiling horned red-face demons and try a little kindness.
That’s the problem with paradigms, with the mental models we construct. We come to believe they are real, even though we know there are many that were very wrong:
- “The horse is here to stay. And the automobile is just a fad.” Horace Rackham (Henry Ford’s lawyer)
- “Recorded music will destroy all musical ability.” John Phillips Souza (America marching band leader)
- “Telephones will never catch on.” William Orton (President of Western Union when Alexandr Graham Bell offered to sell him the patent.)
- “Television won’t be able to hold on . . . People will get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” Darryl F. Zanuck, (CEO Twentieth Century Fox Studios)
- “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, (CEO IBM, 1943)
So what are our paradigms today ̶ about changes in the climate ̶ about innovation vs. resource use reduction ̶ about competition vs. collaboration ̶ about what government should do for us and at what level (local, regional, federal)?
Are our mental models about people formed by what they look like, what they believe, where they live, what they have or don’t have?
Or are we ready to lose those stupid stereotypes and kill-or-be-killed paradigms, and have an economy based upon helping, sharing, lifting others up, rather than buying more crap and building arms, opioids and walls.
I confess I haven’t always paid attention, have been too wrapped up in the petty quests and vicissitudes of my existence, had my conscience soothed by a few charitable contributions and I know that a rant like this is useless unless I change my own paradigm.
Let’s think differently, hell, let think for a change, not get stuck in the unbreakable mental model of inertia.
Will you join me, help me, help us?
“You might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
