In many respects, my life has been one long series of tests.
When I was in school, I took three kinds of tests - fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, and essay.
I did poorly on fill-in-the-blank questions because I don’t process information as individual pieces of information. I’m not a reductive thinker. My perception of information and the world at large is connectional, relational, and contextual.
I did poorly on multiple-choice questions because I could usually imagine each answer being the correct one. There was always some game of choice in play where the prof was trying to trick you in your choice of answer. My error was in believing the professors were honest brokers of knowledge instead of being a Gnostic priest with a secret code that only they knew to the knowledge that we were being tested.
I did well on essay tests because I could write coherent answers within the context of the subject. The same held true for term papers where I could creatively present a perspective that demonstrated that I had done the work throughout the semester. Of course, that didn’t mean a higher grade because I was also seeing things differently than the professor.
Of course, that last statement also goes for those thought-leaders who believe it is their course in life to direct knowledge and culture in a particular direction. Two examples.
Cartesian individualism based on Cogito ergo Sum - I think therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. I am, therefore, I think.
Why am I this person and not a plant or a machine?
Why am I something, rather than nothing?
Why does my life matter?
Why does any life matter?
We can only answer this question if there is something more than me.
Postmodern poststructuralist, deconstructionist, or ‘there is only the text.’ There is no metaphysical, spiritual, or separate existence. Reality is a perception and social construction. Ultimately, we are atomistic selves existing in a world of transactional exchange based on the acquisition of power for operating society. As a result, all meaning becomes socially constructed.
These two streams of thought are tests for each of us. They are tests of our humanity and tests for how we create a society.
To Be Free Requires Order
To pass life’s tests we need to create order. Not regimentation, but an order for the freedom to create, adapt, and respond.
We do this through the development of patterns of behavior that are centered in the preparation of knowledge and skills, by planning for mission impact, and for disciplined execution. These behaviors grant us the freedom to act. We become more agile, nimble, and attuned to our surroundings. We feel like we are on top of our game. When these patterns of behavior become our steady practice, we come to know who we are, what we seek to achieve, and how we must conduct ourselves.
The challenge is not the development of these behaviors. The challenge isn’t even preparation, planning, and execution. The real challenge is learning to see in an ever-widening circle the larger context in which we live.
When these behaviors are only perceived from a utilitarian or instrumental point of view our perception of the world becomes narrow and limited. We do what we do because we do what we do. Everything becomes a transaction and some sort of economic exchange. This is how people become mechanisms in the great machine of modern consumer society.
One way I have learned to see this is by watching and listening to podcasts. Now that I have recorded about 50 episodes of The Eddy Network Podcast. I recognize in other interviewers what in me looks very counter-intuitive. They drill in on a particular idea or feature of the guest’s world, seeking to discover some singular essence that explains everything. With that singularity comes an impression of inevitability or must-do-or-die necessity. As a result, we get caught in a binary trap. To follow this expert advice, I must comply.
We are witnessing in these instances the product of modern Enlightenment thinking. The pattern of behavior is one of reductive reasoning. Break a topic down into its component parts. Isolate the critical issue. Fix the critical issue. Problem solved. Except, we may not know how to reassemble the parts into the comprehensive whole they once were.
Problems rarely do exist in that way. The complexity of the world is increasing and with it the challenge to every systems thinker and designer of the past half-century. With it, everything we learned about planning and execution in the 20th century is fast losing relevance. Centralized planning, mastered by the Soviets, the Chinese, and all Western governments, is failing. I wrote about this in my short book, All Crises Are Local. Why is it failing? Because it presumes that we have captured reality in our plans.
As narrow, reductive, centralized planning has lost applicability, everything we believed about leadership, people, and society based on those philosophies is now being questioned. We see that we have been thrust into a hyperreality that isn’t real, but a simulation of reality intended to nullify human agency. Centralized planning means that we no longer choose, we comply.
We are at the beginning of an epochal transition. Most of our past learned preparation, planning, and execution will fail us because it was predicated on society as a mechanism and central planning as its agent for management. I saw this when I wrote Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change as I characterized this transition as the Two Global Forces. Even as I presented this larger picture of what is taking place in the world, still the question that begs to be answered is ‘What is the perspective beyond this problem?’
Missing Perspective.
Perspective is the recognition of connection and relationship within a specific context. Perception is what we see that provides us a basis for our perspective. Perception begins with how we think about our lives leading to a perspective of what we want for our lives.
If we take a trip, we don’t just toss some clothes into a sack, and toss it into the back seat. We contemplate every situation that we might encounter. Do I take a winter jacket, a swimsuit, or a business suit? Do I pack my golf clubs and my hiking boots? Do I go out of my way to see old friends? Our perspective includes not only where we will be, but who we may be with, and the circumstances of our meeting.
The problem with perspective is that it is often clouded with ideas and feelings that make it difficult to think clearly. Those are the products of our perception of ourselves, others, and the world around us.
I have had people tell me that they don’t believe reality is real, it is just our perception. In a certain sense that is true. They say this because they need to believe that they create their own reality. We can tell the degree of loss of human agency, but how important it is for people to reclaim it.
Ponder for a moment the thought that we create our own reality. If this is true, then all the problems in the world are intentionally created as someone’s reality. If you believe that to be true, then the COVID pandemic was a created reality by someone with the power and access to create a global pandemic. Or, inflation, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and other societal problems are the created reality of someone.
There is truth in the idea that we can create our own reality. But it isn’t the whole truth. Much more is going on. Our daily interactions are much more complex than the binary conflicts of the world suggest.
We go to dinner with a group of our business associates while away at a conference. One of the attendees may be a person with whom you had a contentious relationship with in the past. Seeking to gain perspective prepares you not only what you might say if challenged, but also how to manage your emotions when this person intentionally tries to trigger them in you.
Our perception should be like Ted Lasso, “Be curious, not judgmental.”
If we don’t perceive a person as a threat, then our perspective of the wider reality of the dinner party broadens. We see the rest of the people there as having greater interest to us. We no longer live in fear or anger. Instead, we are curious to see where the conversation will go, what I can learn from it, and how I can contribute to it.
Perspective is another way of talking about situational awareness. We grasp a wider picture of what is going on than we ordinarily would. We want to be as clear in our understanding as possible.
The Problem of ‘What is Real?’
The problem becomes more difficult when circumstances are clearly being manipulated to disrupt our perception of what is going on. This is where The Spectacle of the Real comes into play. At this point, we are not just trying to discern what is to happen, but what is reality.
I have at least 50 books in my library whose principal message is the denial of reality. They explain reality away as a perception by human beings. Everyone has their own perception. Therefore no perception is representative of reality. Of course, this explanation is based upon a belief that this perception of reality is the correct one. This mind game is a simulation.
In The Spectacle of the Real, I write about how reality has been replaced with a simulacrum, a simulated reality, as Jean Baudrillard describes.
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending. "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre'). Therefore, pretending or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces "true" symptoms? (emphasis mine)
The reason for this twisted form of logic is that it removes each of us from responsibility to a higher order of reality.
If there is a reality that exists beyond my perception, am I accountable to that higher reality?
If reality is beyond our capacity to know it in any meaningful way, then what is it that I perceive?
Is it some inner manifestation of my state of mind and emotions?
Are our thoughts and emotions real?
Are we responsible for our thoughts and emotions?
Is our need for meaning real or is it a socially constructed state of avoidance of those things that produce fear and anger in us?
This is the end point of both modernist and postmodernist thought. In an effort to socially and intellectually create a world where the individual is central and morally autonomous, we have ended up with a world without meaning or purpose.
With the denial of reality, science is now beyond our knowing, love is now beyond our experience, and the creation of a peaceful and prosperous world is beyond our capacity to create, and much easier to destroy.
If all reality is beyond our knowing, then we are left alone as savages living our own perceptions of reality, truth, and driven to desire power as the highest valued commodity for social exchange.
The transition we are in is focused on the need to reclaim reality.
The Reality Test
The reality test is not a fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, or essay quiz. It is a test of perception and perspective.
Can we perceive a reality beyond what we can think and create? Or, maybe we should ask the question this way.
Are we conscious or aware of a reality beyond our perception?
In order to do so, we need to be able to conceptualize what might be possible. I believe this is where consciousness exists beyond our awareness of it.
Perception fits into a field of philosophical and scientific interpretation called phenomenology. The simplest understanding of this orientation is that our perception of the world is received through our senses. As a result, we gain an embodied knowledge. It is not just an abstraction socially constructed. It is an engagement with the world around us.
The other day, I walked out of my house and I could smell the rain coming. It is a unique smell that is different than any other. Once you have smelled it, you’ll recognize what it signals every time.
My perception of the rain coming altered my perspective of who I am in the context of being outside at that moment. I turned and went back into my house to get my rain jacket. I could see clouds. But the clouds had been around all day without any rain falling. It was the smell of rain that change my perspective of what I must do.
Reality exists beyond our perception of it. It exists in an environment of connectedness. Because my body is connected to reality, it signaled to me that rain was coming. My perception came only after my body had experienced the smell of rain.
What if all of life is this way? By this, I mean that our conscious minds are always playing catch up with our body’s relationship to reality. To what degree is our body, and specifically our minds, operating outside of our conscious awareness? How many things do we learn to do that require no active thought about its actual function?
The reality test is a test to see how well we can function in the world.
Do we live in our heads?
Are we captives to our desires?
Are we extensions of other people’s expectations of us?
Is our sense of identity an isolated and empty feeling of not knowing our true selves and not fitting into any social or institutional context?
These are some of the questions that the reality test forces us to answer.
Having spent a long time reflecting on both the question of ‘What is reality?’, and the question of ‘Why does contemporary belief deny reality’s existence apart from our perception?’, I have concluded that we need to recover or reclaim that existence of reality as a part of our existence as human beings.
I have begun to see this as a hierarchical order called The Order of Reality. It consists of the following perspective. I will unpack this conception in my next post.
The Order of Reality
Spiritual - “the world where all is connected and in relationship with all.”
It is the context of all existence or reality beyond our knowing and experience. It is a transcendent realm where consciousness exists as more than a biological function in human beings. It is the realm of all that has been created.
Intellectual/Philosophical - “the world of human thought.”
This is the world of abstraction, ideas, and communication. This is where sensemaking begins. We articulate what we see and experience.
Culture - “the world of human-built culture.”
This is the world of concrete action where ideas have been turned into physical representations of the ideas of people. Here we find institutions, cities, art, literature, and every consumer product. This is the realm of personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.