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The Paradigm Conspiracy
Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential
And How We Can Change Them
Our Global Crisis of Addictions
Substance Addictions
Process Addictions
Systems Fostering Addiction
The Concept of the Paradigm
Paradigm: Mental models that shape thought, feeling, action; An internal structure of beliefs and concepts which provide a "world view", "life perspective", "philosophy" or "mental model".
If something seems "wrong", the paradigm is the place to find out why, but this cannot happen
if the controllers of the paradigm wish to maintain the status quo, which is the current problem.
Paradigms begin with some model that is voiced as "exemplary" which seems to weave together theories, standards and methods in a way that temporarily makes better sense than anything else.
Development within a paradigm
Two kinds of developments occur:
The first occurs within the paradigms framework.
The second disposes of the paradigm and forges a new one.
Normal Science, according to Kuhn, is the first kind of development. After a while, it gets so comfortable that scientists forget that it's there, and it becomes functionally invisible so that there is "no paradigm" between their ideas and "reality". The concept of "health" means adjusting to the paradigm's definition of "health".
Paradigm Shifts
The revolutionary development comes when the paradigm reaches a crisis - it doesn't solve problems the way it once did. Anomalies that the paradigm can't explain begin to accumulate, and "paradigm health" begins to make society sick.
The more the paradigm fails to do its job, the more old-paradigm scientists and social engineers try to "make it work". They have forgotten that they even have a paradigm, because it has become invisible. They are convinced that they have "explored all alternatives", but they are too paradigm-bound to notice that they are stumbling over the limits of their own models.
The Paradigm-cause of Soul-Abusive systems
The Paradigm of Control and Power-Over
The Power-Over model of Control requires that we blame individuals, intimidate and punish
them "in order to keep our social system healthy", according to those who control the system.
Depends on the notion that "if somebody doesn't control us, social systems will fall into
chaos".
Soul: The Big Threat
In order to be controlled, we have to be unplugged from competing sources of control.
The major threat to external control is our internal guidance system - our Soul, our
whole-connected Core.
"Get Rid of the Troublemakers"
Because of the concept of "fear of chaos", social systems adopt the Control Paradigm and run with it, laying out institutionalized policies which imply that people are unacceptable as they already are, but will be acceptable if they surrender themselves to the social system.
The more power-over systems destroy our inner lives, the less social order we have.
Two Paradigm Conspiracies
The one that blocks our best efforts to confront crisis and change.
The one that constitutes a leap into "extraordinary science", from the viewpoint of the first.
The Control Paradigm Response to Addiction
Social systems have built-in mechanisms for maintaining established order, from "experts" to
"executive orders" to "threats of violence"
Systems neutralize change by convincing their adherents that "after all this time of using the power-over policy, who are you to question it?" , or "if it was good enough for your parents, it's good enough for you and your children".
The "problem" is not portrayed as a problem with "the system", but with "a few bad people", and if we "just elect the right people" the problem will "go away".
However, the idea of one group controlling another isn't the solution - it's the problem - it's a control paradigm response: "getting power over the problem is the solution".
Paradigm Shift Response
It's time for "extraordinary science", making a leap and shifting the paradigm. Healing the planet isn't about making anyone do or stop anything. It's about tackling the root issue, the control-paradigm conspiracy: how our dignity as human beings is denied by social systems designed to do precisely that.
Modern schooling is an example. It was not designed to develop our minds. It was designed to teach conformity, obedience to authority, tolerance for performing boring tasks, and other qualities useful for factory life.
To heal the planet of addiction, we have to admit that systems unplug us from our inner resources and that they do so because our paradigm mandates it.
How do we make a paradigm shift in our social systems?
Trace social pain back to its paradigm origins
Spiritual awakening - waking up to the spiritual purpose of social systems and envisioning social structures built on this model.
Creativity - tapping inner resources for system-shifting.
Creativity is narrowed by control paradigm structures by inhibiting free expression
Exercising our paradigm-shifting powers
Paradigm Anatomy 101
The Four Elements of a Paradigm
Assumptions - what we take for granted and assume to be true - the premises from which everything else follows
Strategies - theories, concepts, rules, roles and methods that put the assumptions into practice.
Responses - reflected in habits, reactions, social structures and patterns of behavior
Goals - how paradigms guide our actions. A control paradigm goal might be, for example, to establish a military model of social order, or to establish a superior position. In contrast, Soul-based paradigms give us goals that have to do with inward evolution.
Partial shifts don't cut it. If the goal is a soul-nurturing egalitarian system, then power-over assumptions (parents, teachers, and experts are always right and must be obeyed), dominating strategies (abuse is "for your own good", grading systems for motivation and power plays) and control responses (e.g., react to "unruly" children by breaking their will, or responding to business and political problems by encroaching on rights) must change as well.
The Three-fold Rhythm of Shifting Paradigms
Confronting the Pain
Waking Up to Our Goals
Reclaiming Our Innate Creative Powers
To our Assumptions, Strategies, Responses and Goals, we must ask the following questions:
Where are we and where are we going?
How do we get there from here?
How can we make the shift and go for change?
Contexts We've Been Raised to Assume
Behind individuals are family contexts; behind families are social-system contexts, and behind all of them are paradigm contexts. Paradigms turn out to be deep-structure contexts that shape both people and their systems.
Families - From birth, we turned our lives over to the care of parents and siblings, whose mental and emotional worlds became our playing field. Families in this way became the mirroring context from which our identities (persona) emerged. Family dynamics.
Social Systems
Paradigm Contexts
Ranking Differences in the Control Paradigm - The control paradigm creates systems in which relationships are unequal, with one side exerting "superior status" over another.
Connectedness Paradigm, in contrast, views relationships as celebrating unique talents that come together for mutually beneficial growth.
The Control Paradigm at School
Ranking context rewards for academic excellence in mathematics and verbal skills over those skills involving intuition, artistic ability, interpersonal skills, musical skills or learning talents.
In contrast, in the Connectedness Paradigm values differences and leads to cooperative learning processes, where students use their unique talents to help themselves and others learn, so that everyone masters the material
Control Paradigm Rules
Paradigms speak through rules, which draw the context of the paradigm. They tell us "what it means to live within the playing field". We "know the rules" and "obey them". Insofar as we take these "rules" for granted, the paradigms become functionally invisible.
All rules are not "bad", because they help us channel energy, making paradigms "down-home" and "practical".
Rules are only as good as the paradigm behind them. If the paradigm centers around control, its rules carry out the dominate-and-control agenda.
Injunctions: Follow experts, obey authorities, ignore feelings, fit the norm, put on the right face, deny that problems are problems, never make mistakes, never admit mistakes, lie to get what you want, lie to protect authorities, support the official view, be what others expect, don't trust your inner voice, value outward achievement over inward needs, place doing over being, be serious, don't joke around unless it is at someone else's expense.
Power-over rules in families, which function by parental authority: Don't discuss problems, don't show feelings, have ready answers, stay in control, assume children are "up to no good" and "hard of hearing", don't hesitate to use force, humiliation or intimidation. Don't encourage self-confidence, Keep children scared and "on their toes", assume that children's reasons are not legitimate or important. Never deviate from the rules, or family life would disintegrate and children would become addicts. Oddly enough, such rules are precisely what turn bright and healthy children into addicts, because such rules are designed to break our Soul-connectedness, so that we fit into a controlled context, training children to be "underlings", responsive to external authorities and cut off from their inner lives.
Power-over rules in societies. The same kind of rules follow us into society. Wayne Kritsberg in his book The Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome cites 4 rules that operate in addictive families - rules that are easily recognizable in businesses, churches, schools, organizations and governments:
The Rule of Rigidity - Maintain the balance of power by avoiding change. Rules and roles are seen as sacrosanct, no matter how silly or unnecessary. Classroom structure today is not questioned despite its obvious relation to factory life in the late 19th century. The same is true for the top-down power structures of organizations.
The Rule of Silence - People are not allowed to voice what's happening. In social systems, we don't question how things are done, nor do we speak the truth about how we're treated. We don't talk about problems, especially obvious ones, and we don't say what we think or feel.
The Rule of Denial - This rule teaches us to deny that problems are because of shortcomings in "the system", much less in the paradigm. Social systems operate by the same rule. We are expected to be loyal to social institutions, and criticism means disloyalty. Being loyal means staying in denial about how our systems work. Instead of naming harmful messages embedded in rules, we blame "this person" or "that decision". Then, we settle for "band-aid" "changes" that don't address the crisis-makers built into our system -- put there by the control model and the context created through its rules.
The Rule of Isolation - Keep to the group and don't trust "outsiders". "Only those sharing the same narrow context will understand". Control-paradigm social systems operate on we-they, insider-outsider divisions. "Those outside cannot be trusted" - secrets and factions build, creating more we-they divisiveness.
Control paradigm social systems also manifest the same insider-outsider dynamics, determined by who has access to what information. The "big secrets" are only known by "insiders". Before long, factions spring up among the insiders, creating internal wars.
Examples of this can be seen inside the CIA, NSA and other government covert agencies.
Isolation is also the way that control systems deal with those who break the rules and interact with "outsiders"
These four rules produce a playing field where the control paradigm gets acted out both through specific actions and through the structure of systems. According to the control paradigm, the "foundation plan of civilized order" is for one person or group to dominate others, and every rule, structure, institution and policy generated from the paradigm context generates this message.
Walking the Truth vs Sleepwalking
We're not walking the full truth of who we are because we're "sleepwalking", unconscious of our immense abilities. Instead, we've come to believe that those abilities don't exist for us. Even people educated at the best schools in this system experience education as indoctrination. The advantage for power-over institutions is obvious. People no longer indulge in big-picture thought. Control paradigm systems want the human brain to be an obedient machine, not a mind.
The Control Paradigm posing as a "philosophy"
The dumbing down - becoming less than who we are - brings us face to face with one of the control paradigm's most powerful devices for achieving control. The control paradigm presents itself as a "philosophy", as if it's innocently telling us what's what. It even insists that its mechanistic, materialistic, control-measured picture of reality depicts the "real world" and tells us how to be practical in the world of facts and things, dogs eating dogs and sharks eating whatever. The more our reality can be reduced to objects, this "philosophy" tells us, and the less we trouble ourselves with ideas, values and other intangibles, the more we understand the "realities" of the control universe.
Adopting this philosophy as "the most practical way to maximize our personal sphere of control", we don't notice that we're made controllable in the process. To "buy into" the "philosophy" is to become controllable by its "values" of external rewards and suggested into a view of ourselves that is not true to our nature and potential as True Human Beings. But, the control paradigm isn't philosophy. It doesn't encourage free thought or dialogue. It doesn't develop our minds or souls. It doesn't invite inquiry into its core assumptions, strategies, responses and goals. Instead, it functions as a mind-control trance.
The control paradigm comes across as "the one way" to experience reality, and it doesn't make room for alternative perspectives. To do so would go against the control agenda. As a result, the control paradigm in truth has little in common with philosophy and much in common with propaganda and mind control methods - trance inducers, the kind Hitler was skilled at using.
Trance guises
In order to work, mind control methods must be hidden or pass as something seen as socially acceptable. The trick to a manipulative trance - as opposed to a therapeutic one - is that it remains unnoticed. The trance-inducers need a good guise.
Conditioning and manipulation of others are always weapons and instruments in the hands of those in power, even if these weapons are disguised with the terms "education" and "therapeutic treatment". The control paradigm uses all of the above, but ultimately posing as a "philosophy" is its greatest cover. Posing as a "philosophy" lends the control paradigm an "air of authority". If we recognized mind-control methods, saw through their disguises, and named them as such, they would lose their effectiveness.
Anatomy of a Trance
Selective focus that by-passes the critical faculty
A trance state is when our minds voluntary choose to bypass their critical faculty and focus selectively, with consciousness fixated and focused to a relatively narrow frame of attention rather than being diffused over a broad area.
Suggestibility
Humans can be highly suggestible, which allows the by-passing of the critical faculty. It is a matter of record how subtle cues and suggestions can influence and even control people's minds and behavior.
But "I'm not in trance!"
Hypnosis is in fact not so much a "state" but a process of selective focusing that we choose to engage in, since many of the characteristics of the trance process apply to other processes of consciousness as well. In fact, when people are in a trance "state", many swear they're not. They have no sense of altered consciousness when responding to suggestion and do not believe themselves to be in trance.
Trance as a Tool of Oppression - The Dark Side of Trance. The very power of the trance suggests its potential as a tool of oppression - for making us less than who we are. Although there are positive uses for hypnosis, negative trance conditioning is very different. The mind-control uses of the trance process are thousands of years old and permeate control-paradigm institutions. Let's take a look how two master oppressors, Hitler and Eichmann, used the process in the concentration camps:
Eliminating the critical faculty - Prisoners were taken from their homes, deprived of all possessions, stripped naked, shaved head to toe, and mass showered. They were treated as if they were sub-human. The impact of this was that all the assumptions they had ever made no longer applied. Inmates went into shock and their ability to think was shut down. The critical faculty was gone.
Narrowed focus on survival - The brutality of camp life made prisoners think only on the barest survival level. Every thought focused on how to stay warm, get food and avoid the wrath of the guards. Thinking became highly selective. No one could form any reliable strategies.
Normal emotions were removed and camp emotions implanted - Given the shock of the experience, emotions shut down, including the emotions of disgust, horror and pity. Apathy took over - the inability to care about anything. The prisoners gave up their normal ways of responding. Instead, new responses were implanted ("suggested") - the desire to save one's life, not to antagonize the guards, to submerge into the crowd, even to do "favors" for the guards in order to gain a "favored position". The responses that the guards wanted from the prisoners were unquestioning obedience, abject submission, and lack of personal will except for what the guards permitted. Suggestions were also implanted to the effect that human beings had no intrinsic worth, only extrinsic usefulness to authorities.
Aware of the trance or not? - Those who bought the trance didn't last long. Those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences, and their bodies soon followed suit. The trance of dehumanization overcame them without their conscious awareness or resistance.
Coming out of the Trance to Walk Our Truth
Philosophy - Reawakening our critical faculties
Prayer or mediation - Letting our minds roam the big picture
Correcting dehumanizing suggestions
De-suggesting cultural influences. We decide not to give dehumanizing trances our assent or energies. The man who stood in front of the army tank in Tianenman Square in China was not in a control paradigm, fear and submission trance. His no-trance response apparently broke the trance of the driver of the tank. Another example is when the Berlin Wall came down. The wall symbolized a political control paradigm trance for almost 50 years, Once the control paradigm trance broke, the wall came down almost overnight.
Expanding awareness - Once we're awake, we're awake, and we have choices: trance or no trance. Of course, waking up from the control-paradigm trance is not what society encourages.