We are 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 Reason Closed Social Systems Don't Work
Responding to the need for balance in society doesn't work using closed-system thought
patterns, because the current systems:
Maintain a toxic order:
First, if the system equilibrium is already toxic, it gets reinforced. Bad "norms" are simply perpetuated, since closed systems "run on automatic". They don't have the power of discernment. They don't evaluate systems in light of personal needs, human evolution or planetary health. Their one mandate is to "preserve the established order", even if that "order" is toxic for the people and planet.
Put systems above people: Achieving "social order" through closed-system methods put systems above people - system needs over personal needs. Systems come first. That's the message we hear in social systems, namely, preserving systems is more important than nurturing people. Closed systems say to people, "You are part of us, therefore we own you. Who you are is incidental. You must perform the roles we assign you in the ways we require. We won't allow you to deviate. If you changed, we'd have to change, and that we won't allow. Our 'social order' would collapse". Putting the rigid structure of social systems first costs all of us. People get "chewed up" by systems. The idea of "sacrificing ourselves for the greater good" may be a laudable idea if the greater is good. But, what if it isn't?
Control is Abuse: Closed social systems don't work because they keep order through control - force, punishment, and other power-over methods of enforcement. But, can social harmony be forced? Is top-down control the way to achieve "social order"? Threats and intimidation cannot be the fabric of healthy social systems. They do too much violence to our inner lives, costing us our freedom. How healthy can our social system be if the people are psychological wreaks? When we are deprived of out essential powers as free, creative beings, our social systems reflect our emptiness. When do we get in return for "submission"? Not security. Being one-down in a control hierarchy isn't a secure place. When people get deprived of freedom and security while at the same time they are bound by control systems, they behave like caged animals. Intelligent beings don't do well in cages.
The Nature of Reality isn't closed: Another reason closed social systems don't bring social order is that reality itself isn't a closed system. The old scientific belief systems such as closed-entropy energy systems, also used to reinforce closed-system social control patterns, are rapidly becoming transparently false as scientific research has shown over the last few decades. No matter how much closed systems try to control variables and shut out change, reality won't be shut out. We can't make our social units into "islands of no-change", because the greater reality (the context on which our systems depend) is dynamic.
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.
Life in a Paradigm Controlled
by External Reward Systems
In a paradigm of externals,
externals call the shots. Instead of allowing us to be guided from the inside
out (a formula for anarchy, the control paradigm claims), the paradigm controls
our behavior through rewards and punishments. We come to think and act like
Pavlov's dog, salivating over the next bonus, a bigger kennel to call home, a
fancier collar to sport, or a top dog position. The paradigm isn't about
developing our talents, abilities, or potential; it's about making us
controllable by giving or withholding external rewards.
To achieve this control, the
paradigm grades each "thing" in a hierarchy of externals. The inner
life means nothing compared to the outward characteristics indicated by our
species, race, gender, age, status, group affiliation, and income. If dogs
possessed the wealth of Bill Gates, for instance, they wouldn't suffer in
medical experiments, just as people who have money don't work in sweatshops or
sell their children into slavery.
That's the problem with
externals: they're fine until they become the means for enslavement, which
unfortunately they do almost immediately. When a paradigm puts external values
first, consciousness dimensions are dismissed out of hand. Small wonder that the
potentials of our minds and hearts-and all the values that go with them, e.g.,
meaning, compassion, justice, or wisdom-go undeveloped. A control paradigm has
neither use nor place for them.
Closed Social External
Control-Based Paradigms Don't Like Discussing This
Naming paradigms and their power
for good or ill isn't a new insight; it's as old as philosophy. It is, however,
an overlooked insight in an age that can't seem to shake a materialistic,
control-obsessed paradigm-and for good reason. Reflecting on paradigms is the
stuff of change, and changing paradigms is the most fundamental and powerful
change we can make.
To a paradigm of control,
that's not welcome. The sum total of our experience contingent on something as
invisible and changeable as a philosophy? Change by paradigm shifts, which
anyone can make? Powers of perception and creativity that defy rigid material
boundaries? Humans as beings of immense powers and abilities? Once you let these
cats out of the bag, there's no telling what mindsets and institutions might be
made obsolete.
Obsolete is precisely what
established institutions of power and control don't want to be. They learned
from the fate of carriage and buggy whip manufacturers when cars came along.
Established interests now make sure that questioning the neanderthal paradigm of
burning things for energy triggers "War-of-the-Worlds" panic about
destabilizing the world economy. Even the call for improved public transit
systems borders on subversive.
Stiff challenges face a paradigm shift on the simple level of out-there
technology, frozen at a stage that Captain Picard sometimes finds among the more
primitive human civilizations he encounters. What challenges might we face if we
embark on a far deeper level of questioning-on redrawing the paradigms that sort
out who we are and why we're here?
Plenty. If the cultural paradigm's
purpose is not to honor human potential but rather to make it an obedient
servant to existing social structures, then nothing could be more threatening to
the established order than a paradigm shift regarding our self-conceptions. We
fit into society as it is now only as long as we don't remember that we're more
and here for more.
Examples of Control
Paradigm Lack of Interest in Developing Human Potential
The agenda for traditional
psychoanalytic therapy, for instance, isn't to develop human potential; it's to
keep people functional in established social structures, however miserable their
lives may be and however abusive or wrong-headed the social structures.
"Well-adjusted" becomes a synonym for mental health.
But if someone is well-adjusted
to being an SS officer in Nazi concentration camps, is that person mentally
healthy? In Fire In The Soul, psychoneuroimmunologist Joan Borysenko
writes of this narrow aim of therapy: "Sigmund Freud...believed that when a
person was cured of neurosis the best outcome that could be expected was return
'to an ordinary state of unhappiness.'" (New York: Warner, 1993, p. 54)
Psychotherapy's official job is
mopping up the mess that social systems make of our lives by convincing us that
the mess is our fault, our failing, our screwiness. If we don't conform, adjust,
fit in, and measure up, something must be wrong with us. And psychotherapy has
its truth: we may well be frozen in grief or shock and not functioning at our
best, but don't the social systems that shape us deserve equal scrutiny, equal
critical analysis?
Thankfully many therapists
reject this paradigm and venture forth with their clients on the forbidden
territory of meaning and human potential as well as of critiquing social
structures, but it's no easy task persuading insurance companies to come along.
Control institutions pay insurance companies to pay health professionals to keep
people in their place, serving the established order.
The Agenda for School Systems
in a Control Paradigm
Nor are school systems
committed to developing the more that we are. Schools are an arm of social
structures, whether religious, governmental, or economic. According to the
paradigm-defined needs of those structures, tapping human potential doesn't
create enough Dilberts to ensure the "efficient" running of corporate,
governmental, religious, and educational hierarchies.
In this century, business
interests have dictated the structure of schools. Henry Ford quickly noticed
that creative genius and intuitive knowing aren't useful on factory lines. So he
pioneered the "modern" school system that inculcates values and skills
appropriate for 20th century work life: being punctual, obeying orders, enduring
hours, weeks, and years of boring, repetitive tasks, not talking while working,
not resting, keeping to the schedule at all costs. Our minds become casualties
of industrialization.
Our souls end up casualties as
well. Trusting our own judgment, thinking for ourselves, adhering to our values,
and having confidence in our innate worth don't make us good foot soldiers for
my-way-or-the-highway bosses. Only people with low self-esteem are sufficiently
insecure to tolerate abusive work environments. Insofar as we believe we don't
deserve better, we adjust, becoming the kind of person that's required to
"do the job."
Obligingly, school systems
produce people with precisely the low self-esteem that's needed for worker
"flexibility." Fears of being wrong, of not making the grade are fears
confirmed for 90 percent of the population. That's the percentage who are
required not to get A's by the bell curve system, guaranteeing that 90 percent
of everyone coming out of school believe that they're incapable of excellence.
Schools mirror back to students the mass message that "you're just not good
enough, but if you do what you're told without question, you may get better and
be rewarded." That's a handy message to have installed in the psyches of 90
percent of the population-handy for perpetuating corporate, religious,
governmental, and professional tyrannies, that is.
All this modern schooling goes
against what we know about the human mind and how we learn-and have known for
decades. Studies in learning show that we learn best when we're most relaxed,
yet schools maximize stress through fear of failure. Studies show that children
learn most easily through cooperative learning, yet schools impose a competitive
model. Studies also indicate that students' beliefs about their own learning
abilities affect their performance-if they believe they're good learners, they
learn easily; if not, learning the simplest things becomes difficult-yet schools
systematically undermine students' confidence.
In these and many other ways,
school systems perform virtual lobotomies on our psyches, producing graduates
who've long since lost their joy in learning, who believe they must be right all
the time and "know it all" or be condemned to outer darkness, and who
experience post-traumatic stress symptoms at the thought of having to learn new
things on the job.
On Cultural Non-Commitment to
Potential
Alice Miller, a champion of the
potential we all possess from birth, pulls no punches in her books-For Your
Own Good in particular analyzes the social, cultural agenda of shutting down
our potential. As she explains, the traditional rules of child-rearing passed
down from generation to generation have nothing to do with developing our
potential, either emotionally, intuitively, psychologically, or intellectually.
Their one agenda is control: control the child as soon as possible by any means,
whether it's by punishment, humiliation, intimidation, beatings, grading,
whatever it takes to break the child's will and autonomy.
The justification for this
agenda is that children raised any other way won't fit into society when they
grow up. According to this cultural paradigm-expressed in the rules of
child-rearing-learning to forget who we are and to become what others want and
expect us to be is the most important survival skill. Our potential as human
beings is irrelevant, a side issue, compared to our ability to conform.
Of course we're supposed to believe that social systems have our best interests
at heart and that obeying them is indeed "for our own good." If we
conform properly, our potential will develop accordingly. But is this so? As
we've seen, schools and therapy-two systems that you'd think would be committed
to developing human potential-have no such commitment. In what system or area of
the culture might such a commitment exist?
Governments are fully occupied
with who has power over whom, who has the biggest budget, where money can be
found, who wins which election or vote, etc. Developing the human potential of
its citizenry is not a priority. If anything, it's not on the agenda at all. The
insider's view that "the masses are asses" is music to ambitious
politicians' ears, who then believe it's their manifest destiny to expand their
personal power and become benevolent dictators. Dumb masses are easy to
manipulate with slogans and half-truths. For their purposes, the less human
potential the better.
As much as we value spiritual
teachings, we can't say that religious organizations have much commitment to
developing human potential either, though granted there are exceptions. Adhering
to fixed doctrines, building congregations, raising money, meddling in the
personal affairs of members, running down sectarian competitors, and using fear
and guilt to exact obedience and tithing keep them busy enough.
Businesses and corporations
certainly don't concern themselves with human potential, even though they
sometimes pay lip service to it in the hopes of making employees more
"productive." The bottom line is the bottom line, and if human
potential comes up at all, it's considered a frill or luxury-"warm fuzzy
stuff" that doesn't count in the "real world" of business except
to mollify disgruntled workers or help them adjust to higher levels of stress.
Scanning the culture, we
frankly can't find any system that's consistently committed to exploring human
potential. If anything, our social systems regard human potential as an
impediment, an annoying feature of human beings that gums up the systems'
otherwise efficient workings. If people would just learn their roles and stick
to them, everything would work so much better.
If we didn't know the paradigm
behind these systems, we may find this lack of interest in human potential odd.
Developing human potential seems crucial to keeping human civilizations vital
and evolving, up to speed with the challenges that continually arise. Technology
per se can't save us, since we're not using the alternative technology we
already have to remedy social and environmental ills. What we lack is the the
wisdom and foresight, the honesty, the sense of meaning, justice, integrity, and
the good to manage human affairs well. These aren't technology issues but
paradigm ones. Wisdom and foresight are precisely
the potentials that a paradigm
geared to domination and control factors out of us.
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