The Paradigm Conspiracy
Breaking Through Paradigm Defenses

We pay a heavy price for filtering reality as we do. When paradigm filters obscure our inner self to create an "outer self" that does the coping, the gap left inside grows into a chasm. The trouble intensifies when we identify with our paradigm filters. We begin to believe that to expose our filters is to expose ourselves, and worse, we begin to believe that to lose our filters is to lose ourselves, and that having "filters" is how we have survived. We fuse with them and believe that they're all we've got.

Acceptable Paradigm Cloaking Devices - Paradigm Protective Dynamics

The best way to make our paradigm "armor" invulnerable is to make it invisible. What can't be detected by the population can't be shot down. When invisible, our paradigms avoid the risk of attack. We hide our paradigm's filtering processes under acceptable cloaking devices - and many such covers will do the trick.

Staying Within A Group

One way to make paradigm filters invisible is to surround ourselves with people who share our set. We align ourselves with groups who take the same paradigm for granted. Surrounded by people whose filters are familiar, ours blend in. Paradigm filters stay invisible, and we ask "What filters?" and "What paradigm?" Everyone shares the same agenda of keeping the paradigm filters unchanged. When paradigm issues do manage to surface, it's to reinforce how "successful" and "right" the group's paradigm is. The official lines get repeated and the catchphrases echoed. Those who question the paradigm and don't speak its "language" are out.

It is because of this that cliques permeate paradigm-rigid societies, with each group accusing the other of being "cultish". Paradigm dynamics, or dogmatics of each group resemble what goes on in mainline churches, corporations, schools, universities, governments, labor unions and non-profit organizations. The strategy of keeping filters invisible under the cover of a group-shared paradigm turns out not to be considered aberrational behavior, but the "required norm".

When Groups Support Growth - There are groups that support growth and evolution, and group-shared paradigms can be useful if they are exploring these areas involving full potential. Working with people of like mind takes us forward by leaps and bounds. As we work with others in this way, developments emerge greater than any one person could produce. Whether group involvement supports "filter evolution" or "filter fixedness", therefore, is a matter of paradigm development.

Compartmentalization of Paradigm Filters

Mechanism: Another way to keep paradigms invisible is to split our lives into compartments and to design paradigm filters for each "box". When we are convinced to split our perceptive world into separate pieces, we protect the paradigm filters we use for each piece. In a fixed area, certain paradigm filters don't apply, and we don't mix them with filters we use for a different box. That way, we never have to ask how it all adds up; it just doesn't, and no one expects it to add up.

Social Result: Lack of Consistency. We don't ask whether the values we use at work are the values we'd like our children to live at home. If we adhere to one religion or belief, we don't want to hear about the views of another. By putting walls between our filters, we protect our overall filter arrangement. We avoid filter comparisons which would inevitably bring our paradigm out into the open and subject it to revision. 

Some of the greatest leaps in knowledge and art - cultural paradigms - occurred when two or more societies interacted. Control paradigm isolation of societies prevents these leaps. Box-category thinking, valuable as it is for producing specialized knowledge, prevents this type of exchange. It forbids us even to attempt to integrate our filters with wider contexts - a process which paradigm evolution demands. "There's no overall paradigm", we tell ourselves, which means our cultural paradigm stays "offstage", invisible.

Openness and Objectivity Issues

Another way to keep paradigm filters hidden is to "appear to be filter-free", as if "we have no paradigm, no filters, and no covers for them either.  For decades, scientists and social engineers hid filters behind claims of objectivity, pretending to be "unbiased observers".  Claiming to be "open" and "skeptical", while rigidly adhering to paradigm dynamics, are other ways of hiding paradigms we're not keen to question. Sometimes, claiming to be "open" is used as a strategy to make us appear paradigm-free, which guarantees that neither we nor anyone else has a chance to look at our filters. By appearing to be "big-minded", we keep our paradigm close to the chest and off limits.

Use of  Covers to Block Paradigm Awareness

If we are to evolve, we need to know what paradigm we're using, so we can change it. Defensive covers block this awareness. How far are people willing to go to protect their paradigm? History shows that people will kill to protect what they "believe" to be the case. Changing paradigms, ways of thinking and perceiving the universe based on new information, can be scary for some people. No wonder the strategies for keeping paradigms in place are more developed than strategies for changing them.

Use of Social Taboos to Block Paradigm Awareness

One of the most potent paradigm cloaking devices individuals and societies have is the taboo. A taboo prevents the questions we dare not raise, the things we dare not do, and the ways we dare not think. When members of a society obey taboos, they pretend that aspects of their lives do not exist. Problems are not problems, and obvious sources of trouble remain off-limits for discussion, and people are manipulated into not speaking of them. People let the social system throw walls of silence around them, so the system is not threatened by hearing the truth about what we're experiencing. Most current social systems on the planet are maintained in a status quo state in this way.

• Taboos About Sex - The actual function of the taboo on sexual matters in Western countries, which paradoxically exists at the same time as the maintenance of a strong focus on sexual matters, is to supplement and increase the focus on sexual matters in society. The same principles holds for gender-specific taboos, which also have the function of suppressing different factors relating to wholeness of being and expression. Many of these taboos have the function of introducing the socially complicating factors of "guilt" and "shame", and are also included in some religious paradigms.

• Taboos About Feelings - There is also another taboo which exists that makes feelings off-limits in some social system. People are programming "to be in control" of emotions. Even the words "emotion" and "emotional" are cast in negative connotations, and are often used to discredit a persons viewpoint. In fact, the process of socially programming the factoring-out of emotions is highly convenient for control paradigm systems, because if we cut ourselves off from how we feel under a situation of domination, we tend to "tolerate" it more readily, and we are programmed to disregard the pain when we witness control-system abuse to others. Control system abuse is seen on television 24 hours a day and termed "entertainment", which goes to show how deeply some paradigm elements are buried. Another phenomenon that arises is that the control paradigm feeds people with rationalizations, judgments and the ultimate ultimatum: "Things must be done this way or chaos will follow".

 Science Taboos

Many of the social control taboos in our society have in fact been inherited from science - what's "real" and what is not, what we can "talk about intelligently" and what is considered "superstitious" or "pseudo-science". In general, the rule is this - "if you can measure something, manipulate it, predict its function and then replicate it (control the outcome of experiments on it) - "it's scientific and real; if not, it's imagination or illusion."  People are programmed to accept this approach to science because it reinforces the idea of control over the environment. Unfortunately, this strategy reduces the idea of "knowledge" down to a matter of "control".  We are led to believe that "knowing something" means being able to "control" it -- which is the control-paradigm epistemology. We are led to grant science this "authority" and we are programmed not to question it, even if it stands in the face of mountains of observed (but not reproducible, and therefore "anecdotal") evidence.

Science Taboos - The Wider Impact

Defining knowledge in terms of control raises questions. What kind of "control" does science give us? Control paradigm science inevitably disregards wider contexts, because wider contexts aren't easily "controlled". To "gain control", scientists "eliminate variables" and "constrict the field". In fact, scientists learn early in their programmed training to think in narrowly focused ways and to disregard broader contexts, thus, the most defensible Ph.D. thesis is the most specialized one. A result of this process is that using narrowed control thought processes, we find ourselves faced with wider-context problems. For example, we are stuck with nuclear waste with a half-life of 500,000 years and clouds of acid rain that kill forests. If the same money went into researching new evolutionary technologies, as the impression was given to the public in the early 1970's that it "would be", we wouldn't have the problems we have today. But, a public programmed to think along the same lines has simply ignored this simple idea.

Science Taboos - Ethics and Values

A very important point to make is that the taboos that insulate control-science from its impact on society also hide its values. The directions that science and technology take involve decisions based on values - control values. Nonetheless, taboos place science above ethics.  In other words, control-science taboos hide its decision-making process and the values that guide them.  These values and decisions affect the course of science. The fact that some scientific research gets screened out while other research receives both funding and publication is attributed to "the natural course of scientific development", as if there is no paradigm-based filtering going on. In fact, "there's a whole lot of filtering going on". Various "experts" dominate each field of "inquiry" and also dominate the direction and "limits" of research. They give their "positions" at "conferences", where "reputations" may be "made" or "broken", and they edit the journals.

Even more telling is the funding of research by industry. There is an unspoken but real incentive to present projects that support the agenda of work being done in various industries. Combinations of industrial, academic, and political interests influence, and even control, what should otherwise be open scientific research, in many cases research that could potentially save lives. The cancer and AIDS industries are good examples.

Science Taboos - "Accepted Practices"

Control-science decisions affect not only the direction of research but how that knowledge is applied. As long as some practice is labeled "scientific", people are programmed to be hesitant to ask whether it's wise or cruel. The status of "accepted scientific opinion" is often enough to put a theory, along with its applications, "beyond moral question". A good example would be the painful tests and surgery conducted on babies without anesthesia. Another would be that if you cut someone's body part off while walking down the street, you'd go to jail. But if an obstetrician does it, without anesthesia, he gets paid for it. No consistency in this society. It sends a real message to baby boys about the world they're entering. Female circumcision and genital mutilation, permitted in some societies, sends an equally meaningful message to young girls.

Science Taboos - Philosophy and Consciousness

Consciousness, certainly infant consciousness, is meant to have no place in the official "world view' of science, and taboos keep it that way. Taboos hide how control-paradigm science affect our overall philosophy. Because of taboos, people don't ask whether control science is adequate for understanding the universe. By making all non-controllable aspects of life off-limits - outside the "domain" of "scientific inquiry" - the taboos of science make sure that the general population ignores many realities, but most of all the subject of consciousness itself. The dominant paradigm of knowledge places consciousness research generally off-limits. Intuition, inner realities, synchronicity, spiritual seeking, the quest for meaning, healing, personal and social transformation, near-death experiences, out-of-body travel, and symbolic systems associated with things like these, are termed by control-science to be "hokum" and "non-sense". Never mind that most of these things are a vivid part of reality for a significant part of the population. No "self-respecting" scientist would be caught dead investigating them.

One of the most powerful ways taboos shut down open inquiry is to ridicule those who step outside official scientific opinion. If something doesn't fit control-paradigm science, the phenomenon is dismissed as "non-existent", and the people who persist in violating the taboos of silence are dismissed as "crackpots". The subject of alien interaction with the planet is a good example.

Defensive Routines

Defensive routines are entrenched habits people use to protect themselves from the embarrassment and threat that comes with the exposure of thought patterns they wish to hide that underlie views and opinions. The perceived "threat from exposing thought processes", or the programming which creates this dysfunctional process, starts early in life and is steadily reinforced in the "educational" system. Everyone can recall the stigma at having the "wrong answer" in school. Defensive routines also block transformation, since they block access to the basic paradigm filters. As a result defensive routines block learning and expanded experience.

Defensive routines also block communication. When one person seeks to hide the paradigm upon which thought is based, very often the other person does it too. Defensive routines are contagious. Defensive routines are also "self-sealing". Not only do they hide paradigms, but they hide their own existence as well. To hide the paradigm and be psychologically "correct", people fall back on the "openness" cover, where people want to "seem" open an candid, so they work hard at appearing that way.

Lies, Secrets and Cover-ups - Trapped in Defense Mechanisms

By hiding the paradigm that lies at the root of problems, defensive routines allow situations to get worse. They do not let concerns or confusions surface, even if these may be the key to a breakthrough. Instead of helping us deal with realities, defensive covers divert energies into preserving masks and ego images. They force people to live a lie - not to be honest about what's happening. As long as we participate in a control system. we are not at liberty to speak openly about what we are experiencing.

When taboos forbid us to speak the truth, our lives get "zippered shut with secrecy", leaving us vulnerable to secrecy's chief weapon - propaganda. Everywhere people go they are lobbied into believing the official line that justifies control-paradigm systems. People begin to think "everything's fine, as long as we lock up and get rid of the 'bad' people, kill them or drug them until they 'fit the norm'. Then our system would 'work'". But, our systems don't work, no matter how many people are drugged, subject to mind-control, lock up or kill. Instead, a chasm of silence comes between people and system realities.