Leadership and the Culture of Simulation (4)

Where does this lead us? What are we to do?

The Culture of Simulation is designed to obscure reality, create confusion, and to concentrate power with a few. All the crises that we face today are all products of this culture of simulation. If you feel isolated, disempowered, and lost in the world, you are beginning to understand the effect that this culture has.

It doesn’t matter what is said about this culture. It is like the mist rising off wet grass. It disappears into the atmosphere of the morning. Words and images are the currency of simulation. Do you automatically believe what you are told? Or do you pause and reflect, is that true? Is that real?

Rights: Lefteris PItarakis

As we live in the context of the Culture of Simulation, we need to ask one another.

Where does this lead us? What are we to do?

First, we need to understand that this culture has a structure to it. Its framework of organization is ideas and methodologies applied through the centralized institutions of business, government, and the media. We receive it as a perception of the world that we are expected to believe without thought. It is as I describe in The Spectacle of the Real. A framework design to capture our attention, suspend our critical faculties, and never let go.

On a recent trip, I had a conversation with a nurse. She remarked that in her city there are two hospital systems. She works at one of them. I asked her about how her hospital handled the coronavirus pandemic. She said that unlike the other hospital in her city, her hospital did not mandate every staff person to be vaccinated. She had registered a religious exemption that was respectfully accepted.

Later I asked, “How is the social climate at the hospital?” She said the pandemic had been very hard on everyone. The restrictions and protocols that they had to follow did not always allow them to do what they thought was best for their patients. Then she said, on my floor, we understand this, and we have been very supportive of one another.

This framework of simulation is a top-down directed management approach. Forced compliance becomes the culture of the organization. As a result, a greater disconnect between the executive, management, and work levels of the organization happens. In other words, the greater the authoritarian character of management grows, the weaker the organization becomes. Talent and character gravitate towards environments of freedom, not compulsion. This is the framework of simulation as it has developed.

The institutions that adopt a Culture of Simulation model represent “the global force of centralized institutions of governance and finance” from my Two Global Forces perspective. Become too immersed in the Culture of Simulation, our perception is altered. This is how we are seduced to believe in something that has no direct bearing on our lives. The social and ideological pressure to conform seduces us to believe that there are no options, no alternative belief systems, only compliance, and conformity. Experience it long enough, and a false consciousness takes over one’s personality. At this point, control by the cult of simulation has been accomplished.

The Antidote to the Cult of Simulation

This mass emotional manipulation does not happen only on a global scale. It has takes place in groups of all sizes. Here is a situation that I found myself in where the a group tried to take over the conference agenda.

Enter The Gang of Five

In the late 1990s, I was asked to present a two-hour workshop on community building at an all-day community leadership conference. I was the second presenter of the day. The first was the economic development director of the local Chamber of Commerce. I arrived as he was beginning to speak. What I saw bothered me.

Within the first few minutes of his presentation, members of this group begin to interrupt him. They would ask him questions and make critical statements about the Chamber’s strategy for economic growth. As it turned out, five people, who came to call The Gang of Five, took over the presentation. The young man was not able to present his entire speech. At the end of the hour, he apologized saying he had another commitment, and he left.

For members of a community leadership program to act with such incivility was shocking and disappointing. As for me, the next speaker, I had two choices. Ignore what had happened, and do my planned presentation. Or, I could lead the group of 45 civic leaders through a debriefing process to discover what had happened. In conversation with the organization’s director, we decide to take the latter approach.

Restoring Order and Respect

The first twenty minutes of our debriefing was a heated criticism of the Gang of Five. Seventeen of the forty-five participations spoke during this time. The Gang of Five tried to explain why they felt in necessary to do what they had done. No one was buying their rationale.

At this point, I realized that there were another twenty or so people who had not expressed their opinions. So, I silenced those who had spoken and asked the rest to offer their thoughts. One person said, “If I had known that this is what was going to happen, I would have gone to the office where I have more important work to do.”

After an hour of conversation, I led them through the community-building material that I had prepared. The crisis of that morning had become a perfect context for addressing the conflicting issues that every community has. Instead of the participants leaving at the end of the day with some new ideas. They left as a group that was forced by the actions of a few to work through what it meant for their group to function with trust and healthy communication.

Ironically, the following week, one of the Gang of Five reached out to me asking that I come to help his team. In the end, I spendt almost a decade doing various projects with him and the two organizations that he led during that time.

How Reality Presents Itself in the Midst of Simulation

The Culture of Simulation exists wherever there is the manipulation of the perception of what is true. The Gang of Five were adamant that they were right about the Chamber of Commerce’s economic development strategy. They thought that their passionate criticism of the speaker would win the rest of the group over to their side. Even if there were others in the group that shared their opinion, they discovered that the issue was not the most important to them.

Values, when shared, as they were with this group, provide a way to measure whether something is true or not. If there are no shared values or independent thought, only the mechanism of the institution, then it is much easier to be seduced into believing that whatever the institution says is true.

This story also illustrates how a leader has a choice about how their leadership is to be experienced by people. In my role as a workshop leader, I invited the group into a shared discussion about what had happened. We debriefed the experience. In many organizations, the leadership would issue a statement after the fact without any interaction or discussion. When people are not included in the analysis of a negative experience they shared, it is in effect saying, you have nothing to say or contribute. This is how leaders use the Culture of Simulation to create a false culture of inclusion.

The Truth is … Nothing is Hidden

There is an increasing recognition over the past forty or fifty years that business productivity and innovation have been in decline. It is only now beginning to be addressed.  If you are a well-paid executive, why risk it? As a result, a Culture of Simulation has grown to hide this reality. We live in an age where everything has exchange value, and real value is only now beginning to be recognized. Nothing is hidden. Everything can be seen. It simply requires the willingness to observe with an open and critical eye. Just as the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz could not hide, so too, none of us can hide behind the veil of Simulation.

What then are we to do? 

1 Don’t lie. Be Honest.

If nothing is hidden, it means every lie is out in the open. Why do we lie? The reasons are many. Generally speaking, we lie because we are unsure, we are afraid of being wrong, or we fear making a mistake that we don’t want people to know about. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We lie because it is expedient. We have an initial benefit from lying. We lie to gain leverage over an adversary. We lie to win.

We lose when we lie because we have to remember the original lie, and construct the sequence of lies to back it up. Our time is just a more sophisticated form of the sort that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn described when he was arrested by the Soviet government in 1974.

There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

“But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance! We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit.

We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.

2 Learn to Work with your Hands

The Culture of Simulation lives in the image on the screen. It is precisely what we were presented with when The Matrix appeared two decades ago. Most of us couldn’t imagine then that our world would resemble it so completely so soon. The problem is that we can know nothing for certain. If we cannot know anything for certain, we cannot know ourselves for certain either.

Accept when we work with our hands, we know something for certain. The bread dough rose. The engine starts. The chair holds up. Each of these is a moment of reality. They cannot be a function of simulation. If you prepare a party for friends, like I did last night, you know immediately whether they like the food that you prepared. Reality is the validation of skill, talent, and expertise.

Matthew Crawford writes about this. He is a guy who earned a Ph.D. in political theory, became the head of a Washington think tank, and then realized that there was an unreality to his work. He wrote an excellent book called Shop Class as Soul Craft: An inquiry into the value of work. In a New York Times article, he wrote,

“Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative …

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.”

It does not matter what you decide to do with your hands, just that you do it. I do not have hands that lend themselves to precise technical work. I admire people who can fabricate metal into custom automobiles or create beautiful tables and chairs. I marvel at the professional baseball player whose hand-to-eye coordination grants him the skill to hit over .300 and have over 40 home runs. I am amazed at the gardeners who turn the dry ground into gardens of Eden.

What I do is sit here and type. And I can cook and fashion cocktails that bring enjoyment to my friends and guests. Do something with your hands that balances the perception of the world that is forced upon us by the Culture of Simulation.

Do not be Seduced.

Do not casually accept the perceptions presented to you.

Don’t fall prey to the social pressures that turn us from human beings into sub-human automatons. It is a choice that you have and I have to make.

If you want to dig into this let me know, I’m ready to work this through with you.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Live Not By Lies, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies

Matthew Crawford, The Case For Working With Your Hands, NYT magazine,