Three major predators threaten mojo: skepticism, empathy and tedium.
Skepticism is easily overcome.
The key to controlling empathy is to realize the mutability of feeling. Violence often yields gratefully to a whisper.
Tedium is best left to the tedious.
Peter’s Principle is a side-effect of a world epidemic of the blind leading the blind.
*
A human being must eat or he will die. Therefore, the purpose of a human being is to eat.
Absurd?
Ask a few random people what the purpose of a business is, and then ask them to explain their answer.
*
Most people do not know how to think about or talk about Why questions.
They are unaware of the the fact that for each of us a tacit sense of Why illuminates reality and determines what we see.
Lacking this fundamental awareness, they are even more oblivious to how Why reflects from the skin of things in the form of relevance.
Least of all are they aware that this sense of relevance leads us to ask some kinds of questions and to neglect other kinds of questions.
The horizons of our intellect are drawn by the questions we know how to ask.
*
Peter’s Principle happens when a person gets promoted to a position that requires the ability to ask questions that he does not know how to ask.
Instead of learning to ask new questions he dispenses with asking questions and cuts straight to answers of the kind that have worked for him in the past.
Why? he is asked? “Because we are making this.”
Why? “Because this is how things are done.”
According to similarly incapacitated people (in all likelihood, his boss) — he has the answers. He has a clear goal and a clear plan for getting there.
*
Utilitarians see no reason why schools, nations — the whole world — shouldn’t be run like a huge company.
Why not? How else should they be run?
A utilitarian sees no alternative, and therefore there is none.
*
As recently as a century ago wealthy industrialists were looked down upon by certain people as crass and barbaric. That was before industrialists took over education and made sure education taught everyone no alternative than to look up at them.
There’s nothing paradoxical about Peter’s Principle. It is the consequence of how we think about business.
Our way of thinking about business determines what kind of person is best qualified to lead a business.
When this kind of person is identified as a leader, he is put in the position to award promotions and to determine the principles by which promotions are awarded.
*
What if what is required to lead a business is essentially knowing how to make an organization flourish by putting the right people in the right places?
A leader who allows (or causes) Peter’s Principle to undermine his organization is the embodiment of Peter’s Principle.
*
Peter’s Principle manifests first at the very top (or at least requires an overpromoted incompetent at the top if it is to remain untreated), but its root cause is cultural.
*
In the United States business was not made for humanity, but, rather, humanity for business.
A man who knows how to put humanity in service of business — or as they prefer to say it “utilize human resources to maximize growth and profits” — is, in our eyes, the ideal business leader.
*
In the United States, nobody says that the purpose of the individual citizen is to serve the collective. *
In the United States, everyone says that the purpose of the individual employee is to serve the business. **
If we ever put a classic C-level executive in the White House it will be the end of the end of the United States.
Sure as shit, we will eventually put a classic C-level executive in the White House.
We are more loyal to the ideal of the C-level executive than we are to the principles of the Constitution. We don’t actually want the reality of freedom. We want freedom as a national symbol. It could just as easily be “strength” or “unity” or “righteousness.”
—-
NOTES:
(* …Except in the case of an emergency, of course. If some distant petty tyrant is saying hostile things about our nation to his citizens and entertains fantasies of one day harming the United States, the luxury of individual rights should be temporarily suspended until the threat is neutralized.)
(** What is collectivist, authoritarian American patriot to do? In order to be a true American patriot and really hold to our collective ideals he must paradoxically reject all his deepest patriotic drives, and renounce his deepest collectivist desires. He is forced to embrace emergencies — conditions in which he must suspend American values and behave in a radically anti-American manner for the sake of the protection of America and its ideals. And, of course, to support the maximum expansion of business into the lives of every American, which is tantamount to the expansion of collectivism and unbridled authority into the details of each person’s life. But, since this collectivism and near-totalitarian authority comes from the private sphere and not from government, our freedom is understood to be intact, despite the fact that 90% of our waking activities are completely involuntary, and if we are honest with ourselves we completely lack the spiritual and material resources to escape this condition. And this is absolutely acceptable by most people’s intellectual criteria — and also their bodies and spirits, after being administered a gram of soma.)
Intuition is not reasonable. It behaves like an animal: it sniffs the air, detects movement, spots patterns and leaps, often capturing its object with uncanny accuracy.
After intuition has a success, the entire process can be explained objectively — that is, from an exteriorized perspective — in a way that makes perfect sense to the rational mind. However, often such explanations have little to nothing to do with the actual process that won the success.
*
The average rationalist is unnerved by intuitive leaps. He’s fine with intuition in principle… but he does want more detail on how intuition accomplishes its goals: intuition’s methods for examining an environment, the criteria used for evaluating relevance and meaning of movements and patterns, and formulas used to calculate the trajectory of the leap…
An ambitious intuitive will confabulate plausible answers to all these questions. If he makes up fictional accounts that please the rationalists enough he can win respect and authority, and eventually accumulate enough power that he can simply do what he does without being interrogated and micromanaged into sterility (often by other creatives). Until he reaches that point he must credit all success to technique.
*
A strange variant of Peter’s principle: creatives are promoted to their level of managerial incompetence not on their leadership ability, nor on the strength of their ideas — but on the basis of their ability to falsify the creative process to fit the misconceptions of rationalists. It is by this process that corporations destroy their capacity to innovate — but on the plus-side also protect themselves against the significant discomfort of unlearning their institutional insularity, and being forced to contend with multiple human perspectives as such. It is far more comfortable to think merely objectively.
*
In its activities, intuition is not reasonable.
Does this mean that intuition and its outputs should be accepted as irrational and never be asked to account for what it does?
No — Intuition should account for itself, but primarily in the quality of its results. Intuitive ideas, once conceived should be thoroughly tested.
Does this mean that intuition cannot be assisted by method?
No — Intuition can be helped greatly by being provided optimal conditions for its free action.
The only room for method in the ideation processes is to create the most fertile, optimal conditions for intuitions, and these conditions vary greatly from person to person. Some need pristine uncritical freedom to play. Others need tension, challenge, argument, criticism. Some need solitude, others need audiences and yet others need the a precise chemistry of collaboration.
*
An intuition-friendly innovation method — and it is solely by intuition that creative and innovative ideas are conceived — will rely on research to help create the idea conditions for productive intuition. It will also be aware of how research can fail to help or even to dull intuition.
Research plays two roles:
Between these two kinds of research, intuition should be permitted to simply do what it does naturally.
*
In the end, though, once an idea is hatched, nurtured and matured, it must leave the nest and stand the test of reality.
If this test is lacking, some other criterion for success will assert itself, and this criterion is nearly always political power. The intuition of the most powerful person asserts itself as the judge — or rationalists will decide the matter according to what is most comfortable to the rational mind.
This is devastating to the creative process and to team culture.
Here is why: Intuitions rarely grasp one another’s insights directly. Reality is the medium by which intuitions come to agreement. Testing provides the ground by which multiple intuitions can lock into a real situation and make their individual contributions to collective understanding.
*
False accounts of intuitive processes are a lot like superstitious explanations of natural phenomena. The explanation satisfies the logical requirements of the naive intellect without actually coming close to conforming to the true dynamic.
In fact rationalism is the business world’s superstition.
*
In the medieval age, physicians bled and leeched their patients. The worsening condition of the patient caused by blood loss signaled to the medieval physician the the need for more bleeding and more leeching.
When things go downhill in business, businesses immediately respond with more process, more detailed planning, more safeguards, more accountability, increased scrutiny…
When we show someone a new way to see something, we not only call attention to new aspects of that thing, but also show how it looks if we downplay or disregard other aspects.
In other words, learning a new perspective means unlearning to emphasize what we are accustomed to emphasizing. It means remapping one’s sense of relevance.
This runs counter to many conceptions of learning, which understands knowledge to be a cumulative process. More and more facts are gathered and systematized according to one’s existing conceptions. But this kind of factual accumulation serves only to reinforce the conception by which the knowledge has been ordered.
It is incredibly difficult to unlearn this cumulative conception of learning, and many people are entirely unable to do it. This inability is called “naive realism”. Naive realists confuse their own perspective with reality itself, and therefore think without empathic considerations.
When large groups share a common naive realist perspective, they are unable to learn anything new. They can continue to absorb facts, but they cannot absorb them in any new way that places them in different relationships. They collectively ignore what doesn’t make sense to them, agreeing among themselves that it is nonsense with no sense to understand. And they also agree that what they what does make sense to them collectively is correctly understood, which means looking into the matter further is a waste of time. And because they fail to look into things with any rigor or thoroughness, they fail to see any evidence of the inadequacy of their understandings.
*
When we as individuals are unsure of our opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor. When we as members of an organization are unsure of our organizational opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor, a fellow member of our organization. This is the basic mechanism of mass insanity: “Madness is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
What if the ordinary naive realism of the business world is such a form of mass insanity? What if the very mode of naive realism we teach our children in schools, reinforce in our popular culture and news media, and enforce in the workplace is a self-destructive delusion?
What if? To anyone not caught up in it, it is obvious.
*
To naive realists, other people are understood in the factual manner one understands everything. Learn what behaviors they perform, what goals and what opinions influence the behaviors, in what context these behaviors are performed and how that context influences the behavior, and add it all to the stock of one’s knowledge. Oh — and don’t forget feelings: now we’re empathic because we’ve added subjective experience to the mix.
Our very conception of subjectivity is distorted by our naive realism.
*
The irony of naive realism: in moderation this intellectual impairment appears to be an attractive personality characteristic. This is because naive realism permits a greater concentration of will.
Naive realists have powerful convictions, act decisively, speak plainly without equivocation or qualifications, and stay the course, even when those with invalid opinions question them.
We reward naive realism with power and respect.
*
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?– W. B. Yeats
*
Actually, naive realism is not the problem. It is completely necessary that the majority of people be naive realists.
The problem always lies in the specific mode of naive realism. From time to time, for the continuance of culture, reality must be reconceived, which means the naive realists must be provided with a new, fresher, more productive, less destructive conception of reality, which must be mistaken for reality itself. Without this basic faith, humanity would lack all will and would never move mountains, build cities, establish institutions — or even make art of any kind, including philosophy. But reality is a living thing. It is born from an older reality, lives, has children, but eventually dies. Conservatives will keep the old reality alive at all costs, even if it means that reality must be forcibly sustained against nature, on an iron lung of dittoed conviction and selective eye blurring.
Who a person is determines what he makes of things.
Give a research project to three different people with three different temperaments, you’ll get three different results based on how each person views what he is doing.
A project manager will make a research project into the orderly execution of a process. The activities, the output and the sign-off are all milestones to be reached.
A designer will make a research project into the creation of a deliverable. The research findings populate the diagram, and give it content.
A scientist will make a research project into a gathering of verifiable and defensible facts.
A philosopher will make a research project into an opportunity to learn something new. Everything that is done is turned into acquisition of knowledge — preferably disruptive knowledge that reveals old understandings to be insufficient or outright wrong.
A businessman — assuming he is actually a businessman, and not a project manager, designer, scientist or philosopher — will make research into something that helps his business, either through the discovery of opportunities or the uncovering of flaws or the development of a better understanding of his business’ stakeholders.
Discussing one’s life story, beliefs, hopes and loves over a candle-light dinner is far less intimate than collaborating on a shared practical life problem — which is why most people prefer the former to the latter, and it is also why soul-mates get divorces.
*
Without active involvement in the world with others, subjectivity is limited to the self. This is why those who need to cultivate their faith withdraw from practical life.
*
The collaborations that most demand intimacy are the ones that cause the most anxiety, and arouse the strongest aggressive impulses. In such cases, whoever is in a position of power will be faced with the temptation to impose his own vision on the situation and force others involved in it to accept it whether they like it or not.
Imagine a world where we are all finally living together harmoniously under the best form of government. A world where people can live the lives they really deserve. A world where children are well-educated and well-parented. A world where the market shapes our lives to the degree it ought to, and is regulated only where regulation is helpful. A world where employers are fair to their employees. A world where we have solved the problems of healthcare and unreasonable tax policies. A world where individuals and communities are granted their rights of self-determination within appropriate limits. A world where each individual behaves virtuously, as instructed by correctly interpreted holy scripture. A world where humankind and nature and divinity are put in their proper order. A world where we take seriously only the true claims of science and reject the pseudo-science of ideologues. A world where the bad guys have been vanquished, and the good guys are firmly in charge.
Who could imagine such a world and not want to make it a reality?
If we are serious about making this happen we will need an army of well-trained scientists, mathematicians and technologists capable of bringing it about.
It is time to get serious about education.
We only ask the questions we know how to answer.
Education has been touched by the Midas finger and made into vocational training. Children are taught to do useful things that make large quantities of money for themselves and others. And of course, professors are also expected to bring in grant money. Universities are businesses, albeit businesses of a special kind. Like all businesses, universities need money. This is why most university presidents spend more time thinking about fund-raising than education. When you set sentimentality aside and think about it rationally, which is more crucial to the existence of a university, money or education?
Government has been turned to solid gold. It is an instrument of collective economic prosperity — prosperity for its own sake.
And of course business has always existed to make money for its owners and employees. What other purpose could business serve, besides making money?
*
(Sometimes idealists claim that businesses should serve some purpose higher than profits. But businesses that do not make money do not survive. To claim that businesses do not exist to make money is as absurd as claiming that human beings do not exist to breathe air.)
*
In a world made entirely of gold, gold can only buy more gold.
I’m pretty sure most people welcome having an occupation, because they have nothing else to occupy their time, and human nature abhors a vacuum. Such people cannot comprehend how anyone could mind being assigned a purpose.
*
When people occupy me with tasks they want done according to their defined procedures, or with making products they want made to their defined specifications, that is an occupation of my time, of my energy, of my mind and of my self-identity that I welcome just about as much as a nation welcomes an occupation by a foreign power.
Maybe the etymology of the world “occupation” can shed some light on the essence of its meaning.
ORIGIN Middle English : formed irregularly from Old French occuper, from Latin occupare ‘seize.’ A now obsolete vulgar sense, to have sexual relations with, seems to have led to the general avoidance of the word in the 17th and most of the 18th cent.
That sounds about right.
A question from a couple of weeks ago:
Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”
At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?
One answer: when we approach truth with our ideas, and our ideas are absorbed by truth and seem intrinsic to truth — when our conceptions develop into perceptions — that is when the thinker’s love is requited.
When we insist on imposing our conceptions on truth, and we disregard how we perceive reality and prefer our explanations to our primary experience, truth does not love us.
In other words, authentic metanoia* is the requited love of truth.
Dogmatic faith of the kind that is held despite contrary evidence of perception (isn’t this the popular definition of “faith”?), as much as it pretends to be love of truth, is in fact nothing more than love of one’s own preferred image of truth. And as anyone who exalts this type of “faith” will tell you, truth does not change, and continues to defy and betray us at every opportunity. The truth we experience — the “truth of this world” — is contrasted with the reality of the “world to come” which will not betray us and cannot betray us.
*
Metanoia is a Greek word commonly translated as “repentance”. It literally means “after knowing”. It is a re-knowing of truth that changes one’s relationship to life as a whole, theoretically, practically, morally and aesthetically.
When a problem obviously exists, but clarity to articulate it is lacking, no amount of effort in solving the problem will produce a solution. It only produces more unclarity.
But this does not stop us. We create tons of alternative clarity to distract us. We execute clearly defined processes in clearly defined plans. We produce clearly defined documents. We follow clearly defined best practices. We define objectives, key performance indicators, metrics, scorecards and track to those rather than think about whether the problem (whatever it is) is actually resolved or just ignored.
Anything to avoid struggling honestly with an undefined, unarticulated, yet clearly existent problem. This kind of struggle is philosophy, and very few people care to deal with it, even so far as to admit it is ever valuable, or even necessary.
*
Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”
Philosophy’s response to such situations is to learn — and not learn particular facts, but rather to learn to make sense of the facts that exist, because the problem is not incomplete facts, but how we are attempting to make sense of those facts.
*
If you think about it, philosophy and innovation have a lot in common. They’re both about new and unfamiliar ground — about seeing things in a new way.
*
Occasionally a charitable soul tries to scrounges for something good to say about philosophy, and says “philosophy teaches people how to think clearly” as if it is like logical QA for ideas. But that is an unphilosophical misunderstanding.
Philosophy, when it is actually philosophy, teaches us how to think about things we don’t yet know how to think about. But understanding what “thinking about things we don’t yet know how to think about” means itself requires philosophical understanding. It presupposes a level of insight into how thinking is done, and how thinking participates in our perceptions of the world and our experience of life.
So maybe it would be better just to say: when something’s going seriously wrong but in a way you can’t quite pin down, and nobody can communicate to anyone else without causing unaccountably intense distress, and everyone wants to follow a different course of action for different reasons, but nobody can agree on which reasons are most relevant — hire a philosopher, even if you don’t know what the hell he could possibly do about any of it.
“‘The external conditions’, writes Einstein, ‘which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist…'”
It is interesting that Temple Grandin naturally sympathizes with animals, and through this sympathy has been able to design better experiences for them, while remaining unable to sympathize with “neurotypical” human beings.
With great effort, she has been able to derive rules to help her interact with other people and make sense of their behavior in a highly exteriorized way, resembling a physicist’s understanding of the behavior of matter under different conditions. But for all her diligent observing, pattern-finding and rule formulation, she cannot empathize. She has said that when she is in the presence of “neurotypicals” she feels like “an anthropologist on Mars”.
This offers some clues on the precise difference between empathy and sympathy. It is not that Grandin lacks all capacity for sympathy and intersubjective relationship. She easily sympathizes with animals, in a way many others find nearly miraculous. It is that she is sympathetic only to forms of subjectivity that resemble her own.
“Neurotypical” subjectivity on the other hand has greater capacity to acquire a degree of intuitive intersubjective relationship with people unlike themselves. But this is built on a foundation of sympathy. Neurotypicals intuitively sympathize with the empathic intuition of other neurotypicals. Both parties understand — or assume — that a mutual intuitive understanding is being sought — that each is attempting to intuit the other’s intuition. This assumption is false in the case of Grandin, who has no experience of this kind of mutual coming to understanding, and so she seems strange and can be misinterpreted as rude, and all sympathy is withheld.
*
In my experience, organizations tend to be oblivious to all perspectives other than that of its industry. Some fortunate organizations serve customers like themselves, who already share their perspective. Here, the organization naturally sympathizes with its customers in the way Grandin sympathizes with cattle. Other organizations are in industries so powerful, with so few real alternatives, (such as insurance, medicine, and government) that customers are forced to learn their perspective in order to deal with them. This kind of organization doesn’t have to sympathize.
But other companies differ from their customers and suffer from it. Though they are blind to the fact that perspectival differences exist at all (let alone differ) — they usually become aware of the material consequences of the difference. For instance, they may start to lose market share to more sensitive, responsive organizations, despite having an equivalent offering.
If such companies attempt to acquire an understanding of customers, more often than not they acquire an externalized, rule-based, explicit understanding similar to that of a high-functioning autistic person. That is, acquire only the kind of objective data that Grandin would seek. Indeed most organizations work very hard to function as autistically as possible. Or to put a more positive spin on it, they strive to be scientific. To the greatest possible extent, they execute according to defined formal processes, guided all the way by validated objective facts. Whatever is “merely” intuitive, whatever cannot be operationalized, quantified and measured, is rejected on principle. Implicit, language-resistant understandings, like tacit know-how, feelings, aesthetic sensibilities and values — precisely the stuff empathy needs — are filtered out by the processes, or distorted into facts for easier comprehension and handling.
And as a consequence, many organizations begin to take on the personality characteristics of the stereotypical physicist. Their movements are stiff, calculated and unnatural — simultaneously excessively self-conscious and self-unaware. And they also have the same rule-fixations, the same overpowering need for repetition, regularity and predictability that autistic people tend to display. These are not qualities normally associated with charm and charisma.
But no problem. At the last minute, the marketing department comes in and dresses the physicist up in a Hawaiian shirt, slathers his head with hair gel, teaches him teenage hipster slang, and gives him a crash course in pick-up artistry. Off he goes into the world, to acquire customers.
*
If companies wish to learn to empathize with customers, they will have to unlearn a lot of 17th and 18th century philosophical prejudices, and learn the new art of organizational dialogue.
Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”
At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?
*
When we face an enemy, we concern ourselves with the enemy’s mind. Understanding his mind is a means to the end of anticipating his actions. Respecting our enemy makes us stronger opponents.
When we love, we are concerned with actions as a means to the end of understanding someone’s mind. Love pursues the significance of every word and act, for the sake of what is behind it.
Lust, as much as it might resemble love, is actually more similar to the attitude one takes toward an enemy.
When I try to figure out what is worth living for and sacrificing for, I find it hard to put into words. The more the manifest sense of meaning is actually present, the less tempted I am to try.
But I can say with complete certainty that the three grand goals most within reach, the three most tempting answers to the question “Why?”, are false, however satisfactorily solid they feel in the hand of comprehension. These are goals founded on 1) magical speculation, 2) sound biological functioning (a.k.a. health or comfort), or 3) the acquisition of social/political/economic power.
When we offer these goals as justification for our actions we find approval and company in the world, and we find the goals achievable.