Humankind can no longer afford to accept naive realism in its leaders.

Naive realism was acceptable back when collective action was confined to the scale of tribes. Each tribe had its god, its reality, its way, and to it, that was the way.

Contemporary societies are too big, diverse and powerful to be left in the hands of people who are blind to the fact of pluralism.

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All the qualities we admire in a leader — resoluteness, firmness, constancy, perseverance — can result from either insightful adjustment into the human condition or from naive realism. In other words, the first and the last can closely resemble one another. And until very recently, the last has been counted first. The inversion of this order is already underway.

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Naive realism exists in both idealist and materialist forms. (“Reality is essentially spiritual.” “Reality is essentially physical.”)

Many people are “converted”, “reborn” or “enlightened” from one to the other, but nothing of much importance is accomplished in such shifts from “apparent reality” to “real reality”. And shifts from realism (in general) to skepticism toward all realism is also common and trivial.

However, as common and trivial as these transfiguration experiences are, when they occur to an individual they always and inevitably feel intensely important, unprecedented and final.

Why? Because until they occur, they are, by definition, inconceivable. Prior to the conversion, all talk about conversion is dragged into the horizons of naive realism, explained in terms acceptable to that naive realist worldview (conversion is an opinion change, or a superior explanation, or some sort of magic or supernatural shift in status) and thus stripped of its essential meaning. One’s first exposure to transfiguration is necessarily surprising, disorienting and temporarily intellectually isolating. It’s always the real deal, as opposed to what everyone else had been talking about…

Arresting the process at this point means staying merely “born again” — to remain permanently in the infancy of one’s rebirth. One must mature into this new reality and become a spiritual adult.

The failure to mature past the mere fact of rebith is “spiritual danger”.

To believe one is the first — to fail to recognize the universality of the experience — is to succumb to spiritual retardation.