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The Happiness Purposeby Edward de Bono (includes links to many of his other books)
Contents
… snip, snip … illustrations coming later — see ScrivenerLinkDeleted [The proposed religion]
The proposed religion is based on the belief that the legitimate purpose of life is happiness and the best foundation for happiness is self-importance.
What do you want to be remembered for? The happiness purpose is to be achieved through the use of thinking and humor and dignity.
The ideal of love is to be replaced by the more reliable practice of respect. The new religion may be used as a framework or as a philosophy. It may be used as a way of living or a way of looking at things.
The new religion may be used on its own or in conjunction with any other religion.
Unlike some others, the new religion focuses on the positive aspects of man’s nature. It may of course be that ‘religion’ is the wrong word. Introduction
The world may need a new religion simply because it intends to find one anyway. The old religions, including Marxism, were designed for a world of suffering. Buddhism sought to relieve the suffering by encouraging man to detach himself from his earthly self which was seen to be both the cause of the suffering and the sufferer. Christianity offered happiness in the next world and this salvation was to be gained by enduring the suffering in this one and using it to improve one’s soul. Marxism suggested that man should look to the happiness of the state rather than his own and if the state seemed to require him to suffer then this was necessary for the happiness of the state. Today boredom has replaced suffering in the larger communities of the industrialized nations. Boredom includes confusion, lack of direction and a depression caused by the complexity of modern life.
The relationship of the established religions to modern society will be discussed in the next section. New religions are developing. They take two forms. Both forms are simple and direct but dangerous because they add nothing to the well-being of the world. The first form is the religion of opposition. Opposition has always been a most effective basis for a religion. Opposition offers a direction, a mission and a role. It offers self-importance and palpable achievement. It offers comradeship and organization. Above all it offers a definite value system against which to judge each action. The success of Christianity may have been due to the opposition that was forced upon it in the early days. The success of Judaism may have been due to the permanent opposition that has been its destiny. The success of Marxism is certainly due to its emphasis on the struggle against established capitalism. Indeed, so much emphasis was rightly placed on this opposition stage that little thought was given to what would be done if the opposition were too successful and removed what it opposed.
There is always something to oppose, and those with a religious zeal can always find a cause to shape that zeal into a mission. The second form of religion that is developing is that of self-abdication. Since the self is so boring and so much trouble it should be abandoned. This abandonment can itself take two forms. The first form is the handing over of the self to some outside power that is to run it for you. Let the stars run your self for you, or the party or your guru. The second form is that of ecstasy. By-pass the self and switch straight to the pure pleasure of ecstasy and mysticism.
Drugs are an easy way of doing it and in time, perhaps, direct electronic stimulation of the brain. Both the opposition and the self-abdication type of religion are anti-world in so far as they do not seek to make the world a better place or the individual a better individual. Many of the major religions had elements of both opposition and self-abdication. There was continual opposition to evil and especially to the earthly self with its greed and selfishness.
There was also the element of self-abdication in mysticism, detachment and ‘not me but God’s will through me’. Astrology requires no belief beyond the initial belief that the stars will run your life for you. Religions of opposition require no belief beyond the initial belief that there is a ‘cause’. Once these initial beliefs have been acquired then there is an outside reference system that gives point and enjoyment to life. This outside reference system reduces confusion and makes decision easy. Man has always sought such a reference system outside of himself. Without such an outside reference system decisions are appallingly difficult and complex. The only solution is drift and moment-to-moment opportunism. In fact, any system requires a system outside of itself to act as a reference framework. This framework is called a meta-system.
The purpose of meta-systems is described in another section. Religion has always provided man with his meta-systems. Is there likely to be a revival of the established religions? If so, it is likely to be of the zealous and charismatic variety which will inspire some and alienate others. In its evolutionary progress, is the trend of man’s thinking and feeling likely to crystallize at some point into a new religion? It may do.
But it may also be leading away from that point of departure, as shown in ED859C8F-B13A-46DF-B6F0-398134660289 ScrivenerLinkDeleted. In this book is described a new religion that is not based on truth or on a belief in God and salvation. Love is discarded and replaced by something less wonderful but more workable. It is a low-key religion based on humor and good humor. Instead of denying the self it seeks to enhance the self and to emphasize self-importance.
Because it does not rely on absolute truths it is possible to make a god of man’s mind. The book is divided into four parts. The first part deals with the nature of the new religion. The second part deals with the application of the basic principles to ordinary living. The third part deals with the action steps that would be taken to put the principles into effect. The fourth part is quite separate and independent of the other three parts.
This fourth part deals with a network organization which can exist in its own right and requires from its members no acceptance of what is put forward in the other parts of the book. An essential feature of the new religion is a positive and constructive attitude of mind. The nature of the new religion Religion and Change A religion that changes is dissipated and one that does not becomes unusable Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism are all over two thousand years old and Christianity almost that old. Islam is a later religion but still over a thousand years old.
The only successful recent religion is Marxism which never set out to be a religion at all. Is it possible that religions that were based on simple peasant communities can be of help to modern man living in a megalopolis of more than a million people? The direct answer is that they can, since they were based on an understanding of man’s universal nature rather than his particular circumstances. Yet man was seen as man within himself and man within a small society. Man as an anonymous creature in a large urban society may be rather different. In a small community there is a community of belief which sustains doubters and puts social pressure on backsliders. More important, there is a defined social system of behavior and roles. There are expectations and rewards and penalties. In a way, any small community provides its own meta-system to guide behavior. If this social meta-system derives its validity from a higher meta-system the effect is even stronger. And religion provided this higher meta-system. Teenage urban gangs and motorcycle gangs are attempts to provide a community meta-system in large cities. Churches no longer have the same functional effect when you no longer know most of the people in the church.
Today, instead of a religion moving down through a community to an individual it may need to move up through an individual to form a community. Religions that are based on watertight belief systems do not suffer the atrophy that comes from continual adjustment to circumstance (since at each adjustment more is lost than can ever be gained). On the other hand, a watertight belief system carries with it the danger that one difficult belief or requirement may puncture the system for many. For example, the Catholic opposition to artificial forms of birth control may put many Catholics in a position of incomplete obedience. The dilemma is one that will come up again and again in this book: how far does one seek to hold the present position and how far to change it for a better one? The dilemma is simply that of stability and change. True evolution requires stable states and the possibility of change to a new stable state. Technological change, such as the development of the contraceptive pill, puts pressure on the change process. Technological changes require reactive changes from religions—for example, food taboos may prevent the full utilization of agricultural developments. Religions dislike reactive changes because this seems to open the way to change on demand—for example, with regard to abortion. And a religion that is run on a temporary consensus basis is but a political system. In short, a religion that changes on demand is no longer a meta-system that is outside the system.
A religion that does not change may provide a meta-system that is no longer usable. Traditionally religions have operated to protect man from himself and from his circumstances. It seemed that man had to be protected from his greedy, opportunist self that looked always for self-gratification and never at higher things. Enjoyment was a danger since it would lead at once to self-indulgence. Self-indulgence was bad for the person concerned (like a surfeit of ice-cream or alcohol) and also for society. Today man is somewhat more civilized and aware of his own nature.
It should now be possible to allow enjoyment as a legitimate aim of existence and to encourage the self to develop patterns of enjoyment instead of abolishing a self which had any such inclinations. Man is also able to change his circumstances in a way that was not possible two thousand years ago. For this reason the passive endurance of suffering is not the only mode to be encouraged. We can try to develop a positive and active outlook towards change. It is hardly possible to achieve happiness purely by changing circumstances. But change is possible and it can help.
We may need to advocate both change and acceptance—instead of just acceptance. Man is so much larger a part of the world than he used to be that his activities affect the survival of the entire planet. The world is no longer a vast universe in which man’s camping made no difference. The world is a limited spaceship (to use Buckminster Fuller’s term) with limited resources that require skilled management. Too many religions have urged man to look only to the next world and to save his soul rather than risk losing it by getting too involved in this world. Even today the drop-out dreams of a small country farm on which he is going to grow his own food while he forgets about the mad, frantic world outside.
So who is going to get involved in running the world and its limited resources? None of the defects outlined here implies real faults in the established religions. The defects arise from the very nature of a satisfactory religion. A religion deals with the nature of man, but its interpretation is effected by men living in particular circumstances.
In time the interpretation takes over as the essence of the religion. It can be said at this point that the particular view of truth that lies at the heart of the new religion makes it unnecessary to attack or criticize established religions or even to effect comparisons. Nor is the new religion an alternative: it can coexist alongside whatever belief system is in use. The new religion is like a table on which different foods may be served. Meta-Systems Meta-System definition A meta-system provides a reason for doing something which does not lie within the immediate situation itself. A meta-system is a higher system outside the immediate system in which one happens to be operating. Examples Perhaps the most striking example of the operation of a powerful meta-system is the way Christian martyrs went singing to their deaths in the Colosseum of Rome and elsewhere throughout the ages. Their meta-system of belief was so powerful that they were willing to give up life itself: the meta-system required that the operating system close down.
A meta-system can make no higher demand. Not very different was the fervor with which the Janissaries and other soldiers of Islam hurled themselves into battle with a disregard for their personal safety. They knew that once a jehad or holy war had been declared, death in battle meant instant access to heaven. Suicides (lack of a meta-system) In contrast to the Christian martyrs and the Islamic soldiers there is the opposite example of suicides or people who end their lives not through the operation of a meta-system but through the lack of one. From this must be exempted ritual suicide such as the Japanese hara-kiri which is another example of the operation of a powerful meta-system (though this time a social one and with no reward of heaven). I have known many people who have attempted suicide and several who have succeeded. If we leave aside the gesture type of suicide attempt there seem to be two mechanisms. One is a sort of temporary madness or rage and fury at life itself and especially at oneself.
Though the end-point is different the process is probably not any different from any burst of destructive rage. The other mechanism is a sort of blankness or emptiness of the will to live. There seems to be nothing to look forward to and no point in life. The spirit appears to have died and so the body might as well follow it. It is sadly characteristic of depression that at the depth of depression it does not seem possible that anything can ever change or get better. It does not seem possible that there should ever be any enjoyment again in anything. No matter how many up and down swings a depressive may experience, in each down-swing he cannot believe that it will pass. The depressive exists from moment to moment. There is no meta-system of belief which allows him to get outside of himself and outside of the moment. Figure 2 shows how in the moments of depression a meta-system can provide the needed continuity and hope. A device for reacting A meta-system is a device for reacting to something other than what is immediately under one’s nose. Left to himself a child would eat poison berries (or medicines) because they were red and pretty. Human children would have difficulty in surviving if there were not the meta-system of parents who provide instruction that goes beyond the gratification of the moment.
Because of his freedom of action a human child needs such an outside meta-system.
A bird, however, avoids the poison berries because instinct has programmed him against them. Instinct provides an inbuilt meta-system—except that the bird probably does not feel attracted to the berries in the first place since he is not free to be attracted unless his instinct program includes such attraction. Gödel’s theorem
To the delight of philosophers and mathematicians, Gödel showed that no system could prove the axioms on which it was based. For example, Euclid had to take for granted, and could never prove, the parallel-line axiom which stated that two parallel lines would never meet (on a plane surface because, of course, they do meet on a spherical surface).
The axioms have to be provided by an outside system or meta-system. Christianity was built on such axioms as the kingdom of God and universal love. These axioms were not developed from within the system but supplied by Jesus. Judaism was based on axioms supposedly handed by God to Moses directly. In the Koran, Muhammad provided the axioms from which the meta-system of Islam was to develop.
Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital provided the axioms from which the religion of Marxism was to develop.
There might seem to be a big difference between meta-system axioms handed down personally by God, since God is the supreme meta-system, and those generated by a man such as Marx browsing through the British Museum Reading Room.
Gödel’s theorem, however, states that a system cannot prove its own axioms, not that it cannot produce them.
The authority of the axioms handed down by God seem to prove their validity, but only if one already believes in the infallibility of God and in his personal transmission of the axioms.
The basic Marxist axiom that the happiness of the state is more important than that of the individual is unprovable. Since there is no way in which a system can prove the axioms on which the system is based it is open to anyone to set up a series of axioms and then to react to them as though they provided a meta-system.
It is the belief that is invested in a meta-system that makes it work. The nature of a self-organizing system will be discussed in a later section. It may be said that a self-organizing system comes about by chance and the laws of organization followed by the laws of evolution. Once the system is in being both processes can be much influenced by the development of meta-systems which, once created, become part of the evolutionary process. Self-organizing systems have no purpose except to exist and drift. That is why man has felt so strongly the need to receive or construct meta-systems. The use of meta-systems Once the meta-system or framework has been set up it can be used in a number of different ways. Meta-systems are not usually designed specifically to satisfy different human needs. Meta-systems arise from belief, myth, legend and revelation. Once the meta-system has gelled into a definite form it can serve the following purposes. Explanation Meta-systems provide a framework of explanation for the world and the heavens. Whether the explanation be in terms of monster gods or theological entities it serves as a usable philosophy for linking things together. It provides the total answer to the never-ending ‘why?’ of a child who is trying to link his experiences into a whole. Whereas religion is an operating framework for man, philosophy is the understanding framework. Origin and destiny Man is interested in knowing where he has come from mainly because he wants to know where he is going. A majority of religions (including primitive tribal cults) believe in ancestral spirits which hang around after death because it seems absurd that something as important as man should cease with physical death. Other religions provide heaven and hell, both as a finite destiny and also as a reward and punishment system to control behavior. The interesting thing is that once a destiny has been set up—even for no other reason than mental tidiness—it comes to exert an influence on behavior. The ancestors come to watch over what one does and may require respect and sacrifices if they are not to breathe harm. The system also serves to ensure a proper respect for elders usually lacking in systems that do not arrange a special destiny for ancestors. Origins are more usually clouded in myth and legend, but the mystery of life provides a solid base on which to build a god-system. Purpose Man seems to need a purpose because his energy is too abundant to be satisfied by drift and a cow-like munching of experience. Man is so successful that too little of his time is taken up with eating and so more time is left for wondering about his purpose in the world. One of the prime functions of a meta-system is to give him a purpose even if it is only the teeny rebellious decisions of Existentialism. Value The most important function of a meta-system is to provide a system for value reference. Animals tend to have values programmed into them by their instincts which dictate what they like, what they avoid, what they fight and what they do to each other. Man, in his multi-potential freedom, has no such programs. But the price of freedom is decision. So man needs a meta-system to which he can refer in order to read off the values that are to affect his everyday life. In this way he retains both his freedom and a program to make his value judgements for him. If he is a Christian then the Christian ethic and the road to salvation give him his values. If he is a Marxist then he has two value systems: the transition stage or struggle values while capitalism is being overthrown, and then the supremacy of the state value system. Decision Decision is the application of values to action. Decision is easy when a powerful meta-system provides the values. The Christian martyrs and the Islamic soldiers were able to decide that the value of heaven and salvation was superior to that of betrayal of their faith and continuation of their lives. A terrorist has easy decisions to make if his meta-system tells him that all government forces are evil, just as the Nazi meta-system indicated that all Jews were of a sub-human value. It is in this area of simplifying decisions that meta-systems tend to be most powerful in action. And it is this practical power in action that gives meta-systems their appeal. People tend to take up a belief or meta-system because it reduces the confusion of their lives by making decision so much easier. Judgement If decision is the application of values to action, then judgement is the application of values to reaction. Something happens and a person is called upon to react or give a judgement. He may of course be inclined to give a judgement even if none is really required of him. Social groups maintain their cohesiveness by a certain uniformity of approval or disapproval, shown most dearly in the English and Japanese concept of a gentleman. This uniformity of judgement, usually exercised as condemnation, is provided by the group’s meta-system. Outsiders are kept outside and insiders are thrown out (or threatened with this) by reference to the values of the group meta-system. Action When children are asked to draw machines (for sausage-making, haircutting, etc.) they equip them with buttons instead of mechanisms. You press one button for one effect and another button for another effect. This is a reflection of their world in which television sets, vacuum cleaners and motor cars are all activated by the right button. In primitive societies incantations or sacrifices to the right god had the same effect. A meta-system which put these gods into positions of operating power (like making it rain or making the crops grow) gave the users of the meta-system an apparent power of action based only on knowledge of the meta-system. Knowledge was power as it is today with science. Achievement Man needs achievement almost more than anything else. Achievement gives him a tangible basis for self-approval and also for the approval of his fellows. Achievement is the currency of life. Without the direction, purpose and values given by a meta-system, achievement is difficult if not impossible. A child who is caught between the joy of building bricks into a house and the joy of knocking it down often finds that he is unable to build the house at all because of the conflict of achievement. Meta-systems not only clarify achievement directions but actually create achievement opportunities. The proselytizing and missionary opportunities offered by the Christian meta-system contributed very much to its success. The rituals and laws of Hinduism and Judaism offer tangible areas for achievement. There is as much achievement in carrying through a prescribed ritual as in opening up a new area. Meta-systems provide things to be done and ensure that these things are worth-while. Man is a busy animal but needs to feel that business is not an end in itself. Simplicity Without a meta-system man would have to react directly to the many influences that press upon him from moment to moment. Today man is suffering from an immense information overload. He is bombarded with information: through education, through magazines and newspapers, through television, through advertising and through his fellows. There is a feeling that if some information is useful then one hundred times as much will he one hundred times as useful. In fact dilution and confusion occur and ultimately a sort of depressive apathy. A meta-system can he used to simplify the information input by providing a framework of priorities. The hump effect One of the main purposes of religion has been to cope with the hump effect. Like the child and the poisonous red berries, man often finds himself in a position where his immediate self-interest is to act in a certain way: eat the red berries, steal a camera, tell a lie, seduce someone else’s wife, etc. Religion provides the meta-system which tells him that in the long term such behavior will not be in his best interests or, if this seems untrue, in the best interests of society as a whole. So the religious meta-system carries man past the temptation of immediate self-gratification in order to reward him with higher things. That is why the major religions have been so concerned with attacking self which is recognized as the source of selfishness and immediate gratification. Conversely a man may be required to do something which goes against his own nature in order to reap a long-term benefit. This might include such things as turning the other cheek to an enemy or giving money to the poor or studying at school when it is more fun to leave school. A meta-system is needed in order to make man do things which are not attractive at the moment. If we look at man’s care for the attractions of the moment as ‘now-care’ and his care for the future as ‘future-care’, then a very important function of religious meta-systems has been to turn man’s attention away from now-care to future-care. As will be seen, the meta-system outlined in this book is designed to change the balance back and to make man more conscious of now-care though still being concerned with future-care as well. With traditional meta-systems the balance was almost entirely in favor of future-care. The hump effect is so called because a person may have to climb over a hump before he can enjoy something. This effect is described more fully in a later section. The community as a meta-system Culture and religion are usually so closely intertwined that separation is not possible. Like religion, culture can provide a meta-system (a reason for doing something which does not lie within the immediate situation itself). The operating meta-system for many people today is no longer the Christian religion but the Christian culture. Tradition and culture are also difficult to separate, but tradition, like culture, provides a sort of meta-system. A meta-system covering some parts of life can also be provided by a political creed or doctrine. Where this acquires the status of a religion-of-opposition then the meta-system comes to cover matters outside the political sphere as well. In history the most powerful meta-system has been that provided by the small community. The expectations of behavior, rules and roles set up within a small community provide a powerful meta-system. In part such a meta-system is derived from the background religious meta-system of the community, but the operating meta-system also includes the expectations of the community as such, including its individual social structure. Today when strong communities are being destroyed by ease of movement and communication, and mass cultural influences (advertising, records and television), the community meta-system disappears, carrying with it the religious meta-system. The community meta-system was extremely effective, even if it did have one major fault. This major fault was the implicit axiom that ‘being found out’ was the key failing. This was not a matter of hypocrisy but practical operations: a community could survive so long as its rules were not openly flouted. Internalized meta-systems Most religions have tried to avoid the flaw in the community meta-system (‘Do what you like but do not be found out’) by creating internalized meta-systems based on the soul and conscience and an all-seeing God. The self-improvement of Buddhism puts the emphasis entirely on the internal self, and so cheating is impossible. Where adherence to a meta-system has had a definite external and visible form, like Christians going to church on Sundays, there is always the danger of hypocrisy inasmuch as the external application of the meta-system may suggest an internal application which is not there. As suggested earlier in this book, the need today is for an internalized meta-system that can then become externalized and this is what the book is about. Astrology Astrology provides a nice example of a meta-system package which is easy to adopt. There are supposed to be specific personality types which are related to the birth signs. This gives both an element of individuality and also a reinforcement of belief, since personalities which fit the stereotypes reinforce the beliefs and those that do not are ignored. The stars control destiny and the future unfolding of events giving rise to a sort of fatalism. This is not a fatalism of despair but one of irresponsibility. Future-care is not worth bothering about since it cannot be altered. Moreover, there is the advantage that one can look into the future and see what is likely to happen (then using this as a framework-myth to be lived into much as a patient uses the psychoanalyst’s interpretation as a framework-myth or mini-meta-system). The astrology meta-system is internalized in the sense that there can be no cheating since everything has already been determined by the stars. A person may, of course, conveniently pay attention to the stars when he wishes to and ignore them at other times - but that is no different from any meta-system. The interest in astrology indicates the strong yearning for a meta-system. As a meta-system astrology is anti-life and negative since it treats life no differently from the ocean tides. It is determinism in its most extreme form with human life affected by the stars much as iron filings are affected by a magnet. But this determinism indicates a need for a meta-system that can simplify life and reduce the burden of decision while at the same time enhancing the self. Ping-pong ball Without a meta-system an individual’s life is like a ping-pong ball on a jet of water at the fair. It bobs about passively, totally dependent upon and trapped by the demands of the moment. Elements of a New Meta-System We can call it the happiness religion because it recognizes happiness as the legitimate purpose of man’s existence Some of the elements of the new meta-system described in this book are outlined here, and are dealt with in more detail in subsequent sections. Other elements which require more explanation are described elsewhere. So also are the practical operations which distinguish a religious meta-system from a purely philosophical one. Happiness and enjoyment Happiness and enjoyment are acknowledged as the main purpose of human life. Instead of being a sin as in the puritan ethic, enjoyment is regarded as one of the main routes to happiness. There are other routes involving activity and achievement. Happiness is regarded as something positive and not just the absence of pain and suffering. Happiness is also regarded as something which may have to be worked at and achieved rather than something which surfaces only occasionally like a porpoise in a quiet sea. Positive aspects of man’s nature Religions have traditionally concentrated on the weak, greedy and selfish aspects of man’s nature because man has been regarded as essentially sinful or at least too attached to earthly desire. The new meta-system acknowledges these aspects of man’s nature in so far as they exist but puts the emphasis on the positive aspects. It is said that a state can generate any number of criminals it likes simply by creating laws that are likely to be broken. Similarly, religions have tended to test their adherents with laws and belief requirements that seemed designed to emphasize to man his sinful nature. In the Christian church in particular, St Augustine created the concept of original sin expressly to underline the role of the Church in leading man to salvation. There is some evidence that man grows to fill the nature that is ascribed to him. That is why the new meta-system emphasizes the positive and constructive aspects of his nature. Life-enhancing Life is something to be enjoyed and lived rather than a well of suffering to be endured on the way to better things. Life is not to be hurried through as a means to an end with our eyes on heaven rather than the flowers by the wayside. Life is to be enjoyed on its own terms. We can coin the term ‘biophilia’ meaning love of life. The new meta-system is definitely biophilic. Involvement in the world The new meta-system does not require a man to turn his back on the world. In its complexity and problems the world needs talented people to run it. For people with the right nature running the world is part of that activity which leads to involvement, achievement and fulfillment. Others are expected to make their contribution just as a lad is taught to make his own bed in the mornings. The new meta-system is world-accepting rather than world-rejecting. Total emphasis on the internal world of one’s own self and self-awareness is not enough without a balance of external involvement. Now-care and future-care As part of the re-focusing of man’s attention there is an emphasis on now-care: on the enjoyment of the moment. Future-care or investment in the future is also important but no longer has the exclusive emphasis it had in so many religions. The moment is to be enjoyed. The future is to be considered because such consideration will give in the future more now-moments to be enjoyed. Self-enhancing The new meta-system is definitely selfish. The self is the most important focus of attention. The meta-system encourages self-importance and self-valuation. The aim here is dignity which is the quiet worth a person gives to himself and as a result is accorded by society. Many religions such as Buddhism and Christianity are opposed to the earthy self that is involved in the world and capable of enjoying life. As will be shown later, they adopt different methods of subjugating this self and talk of the rapturous moment when man’s soul detaches itself from his earthy self. In the new meta-system the aim is to integrate soul and self. Humor Humor in its most profound sense is the key metaphysical concept at the heart of the new meta-system. The focusing symbol (the biodic symbol), which will be described later, illustrates the implications of the humor process, especially as regards the behavior of mind. In a less metaphysical sense the new meta-system is good-humored and easy-going. This does imply a high degree of tolerance and individuality, but it does not imply drift, passivity, permissiveness or lack of direction. Balance As might be expected from the emphasis put on humor, balance is important. This is not the all-round balance of the perfect man but a conscious decision to operate at the most satisfactory point between extremes. It is not only a matter of balance between the ends of a spectrum, but a balance of attention when different things have to be considered: for example, a balance between now-care and future-care. Balance is one of the major areas for conscious effort. A god of man’s mind The new meta-system makes a god of man’s mind. It is man’s mind that through the process of perception creates the world in which he lives. This is as surely a creation as the traditional god-created universe. Man’s mind is the tool with which he re-creates the world to enhance his self and to obtain happiness. The emphasis is not on ecstasy whether induced by drug or mysticism but on the ordinary natural behavior of mind as a patterning and re-patterning system. It is recognized that man’s mind is immensely fallible. New thinking system In place of the traditional dialectics which sustained Greek and, later, Christian thought and provided (through Hegel) the basis for Marxism there is a new type of thinking based on positive evolution of ideas rather than improvement through polemic and clash. The emphasis shifts entirely from critical thinking to constructive thinking. Truth The new meta-system dispenses with absolute truths and hence with a belief system based on absolute truths. In place of absolute truth there is something called ‘proto-truth’ which is usable but improvable. Like humor, to which it is related, the switch from absolute truth to proto-truth is a key element in the new meta-system. Once absolute truth is discarded, a world of possibilities explodes in front of us. Arrogance and righteousness disappear and with them persecution. The switch from one proto-truth to a better one may be a matter for lateral thinking. Concepts are no longer traps but become stepping-stones to better concepts. Respect Respect replaces love as the operating basis of the system with regard to social intercourse. Love remains as a bonus and an ideal but no longer a working device. It is better to have a practical working idiom like respect than to have an ideal idiom like love which is fine in theory but rarely reached in practice. As with many other aspects, the emphasis is on usable and attainable goals, not on ultimate destinations and ideals. In this regard the new meta-system is low-key. Activity and achievement Being alive means being active. There is an emphasis on activity rather than on passive drift and time-filling. There are different sorts of activity, some of which are directed inwards (awareness and sensitivity) while some are directed outwards (altering the world). There is a balance between adjusting to circumstances and seeking to change them. There is a balance between improving oneself and improving the world. Achievement is recognized as one of the fundamental routes to happiness. This is not the achievement of competition and pressure but the simple achievement of setting out to do something and doing it. Structure The emphasis is on freedom and on plurality, but this is achieved through structure rather than through structureless mess. The structures are liberating structures that make it easier to do things rather than restricting structures that confine activity. Focus is an important part of the operating side of the meta-system. System cheats Because man is himself a system and because he lives in a social system the main condemnation of the new meta-system is directed at those who are able to abuse the system so long as everyone else is keeping it going: the smart-alec who is able to avoid paying his bus fare because everyone else is paying theirs. In the new meta-system the sins are system sins. Arrogance is another of these because it takes advantage of the proto-truth system. Organization The last part of this book describes a definite organization that bears the same relation to the meta-system described in the first part that water bears to a glass. You can drink water without ever using a glass. You can also use a glass even if you dislike water—there are other things to drink. There may, however, be a relationship of convenience between the two. New words From time to time it has been necessary to coin new words as I had to do when I invented the term ‘lateral thinking’. This has been done with reluctance because new words are confusing. There are, however, concepts which cannot always be described with existing words without having to use a cumbersome phrase that is awkward to use and easy to forget. If the established word nearest in meaning is used then the special difference of the new concept may never emerge. For example, there is a fundamental difference between truth and proto-truth. There is also a fundamental difference between proto-truth and pragmatism. The elements listed here are described in fuller detail in the appropriate section. A meta-system is only a framework. A framework cannot impose itself,’ but, like an idea, once it has come into existence it is there for anyone to use. The more effort and attention we invest in a meta-system the more valuable does it become. A meta-system is really only a mirror that reflects back effort as value. God, Belief and Meta-Systems The belief base of the new meta-system is the self-organizing principle as applied to the patterns of human perception. Not all religious meta-systems have a god basis. And those that do have such a basis do not necessarily treat God in the personalized way that Christians do. For many religions God is the organizing principle of the world, or the spirit of life, or self-knowledge of one’s own being. But meta-systems that dictate types of behavior and values tend to have a solid belief basis. The more difficult or unnatural the behavior the stronger the belief base has to be. A Christian martyr really does have to believe in salvation and heaven. An Islamic soldier may have been conscripted anyway or be fighting as a job but to throw himself into battle with reckless abandon he will have to believe that death in a holy war means instant salvation. Buddhism does not have a god basis but there is a strong belief basis in the cycle of life and the need to free oneself from the continual cycle of birth and re-birth into a painful world. Religions which have not had a strong belief basis have tended to atrophy.
The more sophisticated amongst the ancient Greeks did not seem to take their gods and goddesses seriously except as a basis for myth and poetry. A religious meta-system runs the risk that if belief wilts then only ritual, habit and social pressure can keep the meta-system operating. Fortunately belief is an emotion rather than the result of intellectual activity. Astrology, like many ancient religions, relates its belief structure to something that can be seen and measured: the position and movement of the stars in the sky. But belief is still necessary to form any connection between this visible process and man’s destiny.
The same sort of belief jump was necessary to link the physical characteristics of a sheep’s entrails to the destiny of a general about to go into battle. Man has a hunger for belief because he has a hunger for order. Ordinary science and explanation are not able to satisfy this hunger and so belief has to create systems instead, just as a mother often has to invent explanations to satisfy the explanation hunger of a child.
Once created, the belief system may takeoff on its own if it supplies other emotional needs as well—for example, hope or alleviation of suffering. Like astrology, Marxism can point to something finite and measurable in the behavior of an economy. The next step is still a matter of belief, since the preferring of state happiness to individual happiness is a matter of choice based on a belief in the role of the state. The Confucian system of ethics was based on a sense of the ‘proper’ functioning of society but did not seem to have a strong belief base. God as creator Most religious belief systems establish God as the creator, organizer and operator of the world. The world is his handicraft. He has to be appeased and also asked to do things which man cannot do for himself (like making it rain). Amongst God’s other creations there is man. Because God has provided him with an origin it seems likely that there is also provision of a destiny. At any rate man created God enough in his own image to suppose that God would be interested in how man was doing.
It was also socially useful to believe that God was interested in the behavior of each individual, who was therefore obliged to obey God’s laws as interpreted by his priests. Darwin’s theory of evolution was never proved in any way. It was just a theory and a speculation. But it did provide a plausible explanation to show how the different species could have evolved without each one having had to be created by God. The defenders of God’s creation quite sensibly pointed out that there did have to be at least one original species, that the God-directed infusion of soul into the appropriately readied ape was what mattered, and that God himself must have designed the evolutionary process anyway. But the fuss was not about this. The fuss arose because many recognized that God had his origins in man’s need for explanation and that if plausible explanations could be provided, then, even if the explanations were unproved, the need to believe in God was weakened. The crisis passed and it was realized that man’s emotional need to believe in God and the relevant meta-system was more important than the intellectual need to believe in God purely as explanation. Self-organizing systems St Thomas Aquinas, in his monumental work that provided a thinking base for Christianity right up to this day, put forward five proofs of God’s existence. One of them was based on ‘causes’. Every effect had to have a cause and so on back until the first causer, who was himself uncaused, could be called God. It is natural to think that things will happen only if we make them happen. We tend to feel that anything complex has to be deliberately constructed or organized. But it need not be.
There are self-organizing systems which operate by chance and yet produce an organized end-product which seems to have been put together deliberately. You can make a chain of paper clips by attaching one to another in a deliberate fashion. You can also put a number of paper clips into a cocktail shaker and shake them up. At the end you will have a pile of separate paper clips quite unlike the chain that you had deliberately constructed. But if you now slightly open out each paper clip and put them back into the shaker for another bout of shaking you may get a surprise. At the end you may find that the clips have now organized themselves into a chain. The chain is nowhere near as neat as the one you made deliberately but nevertheless it is a chain of sorts—and quite distinct from a pile of separate paper clips.
You have created a simple self-organizing system. The basis of a self-organizing system is what we might call ‘stickiness’. With the unopened paper clips one clip could as easily break free from another as come into contact with it. But with the slightly opened clips there was an element of stickiness. Once something had happened (two clips intertwining) it was much more difficult for it to unhappen—in other words, there was some event stickiness.
As you continued shaking more events (connections) would happen and they would not unhappen until all the clips were fully occupied or at least not free to make further contacts. It is suggested that life may have arisen by a somewhat similar process. Under certain conditions, such as those created by the electrical discharge of lightning, gases like ammonia and carbon dioxide can link up to form simple amino acids and these in turn can form protein and the elements of life. The appropriate gases have been detected in space. Like Darwin’s idea, this provides a plausible explanation for the origin of life.
It is also possible that, for inanimate matter, different forms of energy and fundamental particles interacted and self-organized to give the atoms and chemicals we know. Once a basic self-organized system has come into existence then it can evolve and interact with other such systems to form larger systems. Evolution is a form of self-organization. A random mutation causes a gene change and the result provides the organism with a new feature. This new feature ‘sticks’ if the creatures carrying the feature are more successful at surviving and so pass on the gene to their offspring.
It is also possible that the changes are not caused by random mutation but by spontaneous reorganizing of the gene material on a self-organizing basis. As we shall see in another section, our perception of the world also operates on a self-organizing basis. Our brains provide a means for incoming experiences to organize themselves into definite patterns.
These patterns then determine how we look at the world and with what concepts we think.
Society itself with its political and organizational structures also tends to progress in a self-organizing and evolutionary manner nourished by a soup of ideas and circumstances. It is characteristic of self-organizing systems that they reach a plateau of stability which is held for a long time. Then, under suitable circumstances, the stable state may change to another stable state just as chemicals interact to produce new chemicals. With regard to the physical world of atoms and molecules, the plateaux last for billions and billions of years. With the self-organizing system of living organisms the time scale is shorter but measured in millions of years. With the self-organizing system of our minds the time scale may be measured in centuries. But technological change may have speeded this up so that it is measurable in decades rather than centuries. The same may apply to our social and political structures. God and self-organizing systems The principle of self-organization might seem to make God superfluous as a creator. Yet it could be argued that it was God who designed the system to be self-organizing. In any case, in many religions God is regarded not as a personalized entity but purely as a principle of organization. The Greeks paid a great deal of attention to mathematics because they saw something divine in its organizing principles. Pythagoras started a religion that was closely connected to numbers and geometry. Religions that refer to God as the principle of life may be said to refer to him as the principle of self-organization. For Hindus there would be nothing strange in regarding God as the principle of cosmic organization. One of St Thomas’s five proofs of God’s existence referred to him as the ultimate designer, and this is very close to the principle of design or organization. Belief and the new meta-system The new meta-system rests on a belief in the principle of self-organization and evolution—especially as applied to the perceptions of man. Principles of self-organization can be investigated mathematically and experimentally as can the principles of perception, so the belief is not a difficult one. Although the principles of self-organization do actually provide the basis for the meta-system, this is just as capable of operating from a different belief base (just as the Christian meta-system can operate from a base of divine revelation, historical scriptures, scholastic theology or pragmatic ethics). Truth
A proto-truth is usable and believable—but only if you are prepared to change it for a better one Truth is so central to human affairs that every religion and every philosophy has had to consider it before anything else. This is hardly surprising because, just as a navigator needs his map of the oceans, so we need a map of the world in which we have to live. Like a navigator we want this map to be as true and accurate as possible. A navigator with an incorrect map will never reach the destination he has chosen: he will arrive at the wrong place or end up on a reef. We want our explanations of the world to be true because that makes them usable. Science is a continual search for truth. It was our true understanding of the nature of bacterial disease that allowed us to conquer it. If we arrive at a true understanding of cancer we might be able to do the same for it. In matters of religion it is the truth of what we believe in that has given strength to the actions based on that belief. We feel that we can build if we have truth as a foundation—but without truth any building will crumble. The need for absolute truth Because we can understand falsity, lies and errors we are able to understand truth as the absence of these. Once we can understand truth then we can make that truth better and better until we arrive at absolute truth. Absolute truth is perfect and unchangeable.
We need such absolute truth as the basis for our religions and philosophies. We imagine that we believe in what is truth, but more often we hold as true what we want to believe in. It is the strength of our beliefs that gives strength to the truth on which they are based.
Faith is more likely to create the truth than truth is to create faith. We need absolute truths to give us decisiveness for action. In science we have tended to accept truths as absolute, and when they turn out not to be absolute we just shrug and move on to the new truth which we again hold as absolute. There almost seems to be no point in using the adjective ‘absolute’ since we accept that truths should be absolutely true. Types of absolute truth There are many different varieties of absolute truth, and some are listed below. Mathematical truth For the ancient Greek philosophers this was the perfection of truth. In a right-angled triangle Pythagoras demonstrated that the sum of the squares on the two short sides would always equal the square on the longest side. This would always hold true and could never be contradicted. It was in emphasizing the continual search for this sort of truth which he held to underlie surface appearances that Plato set the trend for the truth-search that became the basis of philosophy and science in the Western world. What we tend to forget, however, is that mathematical truth only holds under a very particular set of circumstances that are defined carefully in advance. For example, the Euclidean truth that the angles of a triangle always add up to two right-angles only holds on a plane surface and does not hold on the surface of a sphere where the angles add up to more than two right-angles. When we state the truth that two plus two equals four, we know that this only holds within the constructed system that we have set up. If three is obtained by adding one to two, and four is obtained by adding one to three, then it automatically follows that two plus two equals four. Mathematics is a constructed universe in which the truths are implicit in our construction or in our definition of the universe in which they hold. Logical truth Until quite recently philosophers spent a great deal of time with logical truths. On the whole these consisted in relating words in such a way that a new truth seemed to be obtained. It is now generally understood that these logical games were really word games and that nothing was proved that had not already been accepted in the original definition of the words used. The logical arguments only served to make clear what had been taken for granted. The classical syllogism was invented by Aristotle and re-packaged by St Thomas Aquinas. A classic example of the syllogism might run as follows: John is a man; all men are mortal; therefore John is mortal. The fact is that we only recognize John as a man because he has ‘man-like’ characteristics. So the syllogism is really saying: John is mortal and therefore John is mortal. So logical truths are similar to mathematical truths in that we set up a universe and then explore to see what is implicit in what we have done. Scientific truth Science is set on a continual search for the true laws of nature. Unlike mathematics or logic, science is not working in a constructed universe but in the real world. Science is the art of description and explanation. The truer the explanation the more useful it will be in allowing man to control his world. A description will seem true because it fits the available facts and then new facts are generated by experiment and a new truth is arrived at. Science is quite used to having its truths altered—even though they may have seemed absolute at the time. For example, the truth about the circulation of the blood in the human body was only arrived at a few hundred years ago. Scientific truth is rather like the truth that is used in law courts: the explanation seems to fit the facts best—if new evidence turns up we may have to find a new explanation that fits better. Mystic truth This is almost a pure experience of the sensation of truth. The mind of an individual is put in such a state that it experiences something which seems to be pure truth. This state can be arrived at by contemplation, by taking drugs or by prolonged starvation which has a chemical effect on the mind not unlike that of drugs. A mystic truth need bear no relation whatsoever to reality. It is almost as if the truth centre in the brain had been stimulated directly. We can electrically stimulate a part of the brain which can give a pure sensation of pleasure—even though nothing pleasurable has been experienced. Similarly mystic truth can give this end-result sensation without any real-world basis for it. Revealed truth St Thomas Aquinas distinguished between truth that was arrived at by human reason and that which arrived direct from God as revelation. If we already believe in the authority of a source (such as God) then it follows that we must believe in what is offered as truth by that source. Dogmatic truth Dogmatic truth is truth that we create as such. Dogmatic truth is truth that is decided upon and then set up as a truth. In order for it to be workable as truth there must be a general agreement to treat it as truth rather than to explore its basis. Dogmatic truth may at one time have had a basis in experience but the truth has acquired a momentum of its own, fueled by the belief-emotion, and need no longer be based on experience. Dogmatic truth is not unlike logical and mathematical truth inasmuch as it sets up its own universe of perception. Dogmatic truth requires that we look at the world in a certain way—and when we do look at it in that way then our view supports the dogmatic truth. It is this circularity that gives dogmatic truth its strength. Freudian psychology offers a nice example of dogmatic truth. Sex is put forward as the basic human drive. If some action is recognizably sex-based then that confirms the hypothesis. If it is not recognizable as sex-based then the explanation is that a sublimation process is in operation and has disguised the sex-drive as something else. Either way the dogmatic truth is supported. The process of truth What happens to truths?
We can consider several possible scenarios. There are truths which cannot yet be shown to be wrong. Scientific truths of all sorts fall into this category. Further evidence or experiment or exploration may show an established idea to be quite incorrect.
These temporary truths tend to be descriptive truths. There are truths which can never be shown to be wrong. These are truths which hold in constructed universes and specially defined universes. They tend to be circular in nature in that if the universe is accepted the truth must be accepted as well. For example, if I construct a special universe in which ‘a’ equals ‘b’, and ‘b’ equals ‘c’, then in that universe ‘a’ will always equal ‘c’. Mathematical, logical and dogmatic truths fall into this group.
These are all special-universe truths. There are truths which cannot be shown to be right or to be wrong. If you choose to believe that the planets do not move in set orbits because of the laws of gravity, but because each planet is supported by an angel that acts in that particular manner, then you are unlikely to be proved wrong even though you can never prove yourself right—except by reference to a special universe of belief. The problem is that one sufficient explanation cannot exclude other sufficient explanations. The adequacy of the gravity explanation does not disprove the accuracy of your angel explanation. All it can do is to make it unnecessary. Proof and truth The scientific tradition seeks to overcome the problem created by superfluous truths (truths which cannot be proved right or wrong and which seem superfluous to an established truth) by requiring proper proof of any truth. The attempt to extend this principle to all aspects of truth neglects the subjective nature of human experience. It also neglects the validity of circular truths. If I believe that a certain pill is going to do me good and it does me good then it is no use claiming that scientifically it only contained chalk. If I believe that suffering and deliberate starvation will get me to heaven then I have created a special universe in which the suffering and starvation do have a definite value. The consequences of absolute truth Religious meta-systems tend to be based on absolute truths. This means that the truths have to be defended at all costs. It also means that conflicting truths must be wrong. Righteousness and arrogance follow: ‘I am right and you are wrong.’ There often seems to be a duty to impose the truth on those who have not yet been able to see it for themselves. As a practical spin-off this duty of imposition strengthens belief in the truth that is being imposed.
Persecution and intolerance tend to follow—but not necessarily, since there are many religions which jealously guard their own absolute truths but make no attempt to impose them on others. The Greeks used absolute truth as a destination: something to be worked towards even if it could never be reached. This is the way a scientist uses truth.
Christians have tended to use it as a way of life. The main problem created by absolute truth is that it is perfect and unchangeable and hence arrogant. Since any person or group of people is entitled to consider as absolute any temporary or dogmatic truth, this arrogance can lead to trouble. The arrogance of Marxism equals that of Christianity—and why should it not, since both are possessed of absolute truths? Proto-truth What would happen if we discarded the concept of absolute truth?
What would happen if we threw out absolute truth from its central position in philosophy and in religious meta-systems? We could replace absolute truth with temporary or contingent truths. In areas such as science this would only seem to be acknowledging what any proper scientist knows to be the position anyway. Karl Popper has suggested that the purpose of an hypothesis is not to be proved but to be disproved so that a better one can emerge. Scientific truths are temporary truths which may seem absolute at the time but are later replaced by others. Newton’s truths seemed a perfect and absolute explanation until Einstein came along and provided a different explanation.
In time Einstein’s concepts will certainly be replaced by an even newer truth. We can look at the evolution of truths in the same way as we can the evolution in any self-organizing system. There is a stable state which continues for some time. Then there is a period of change to a new stable state which again lasts for some time. This gives a series of plateaux as shown in E211F3FC-A96E-4859-AFA5-C1FD5ECC4AB8 ScrivenerLinkDeleted.
All the time the truth is ‘improving’. We can call these plateaux or stable states ‘proto-truths’. We can treat them as truths in all respects except one: a proto-truth is always held to be changeable and is never regarded as absolute. A proto-truth is only changed for a better prototruth. There is a constant readiness for change but at the same time a willingness to use the proto-truth as if it were absolute. It is very important to realize that the rejection of absolute truths does not mean that no truth is possible and that we should not try to find any. On the contrary, it means that we can freely believe in and use truths because we no longer fear being trapped by them. We often reject absolute truths because we fear the consequences of accepting them.
The same fear is not present with proto-truths. Proto-truths satisfy the dilemma that has become more and more obvious in our scientific age. In theory we should be unable to act until science had given a full explanation of the world and a scientific basis for action. In practice we do have to act and in many areas we have to act on the basis of little information and little scientific understanding. A proto-truth is a working truth with which we can proceed. The distinction between a proto-truth and an hypothesis will be discussed later in this section. Proto-truths and absolute truths It should now be clear that there are two systems of truth. Both types of truth are believable and usable. The sole difference is that proto-truths are capable of being changed to better ones whereas absolute truths are not. Absolute truths hold sway in special universes and in circular situations. An absolute truth cannot be changed unless the universe in which it operates is changed.
Proto-truths hold sway in ‘open’ universes. The meta-system suggested in this book is based on proto-truth rather than absolute truth. In particular it is realized that the world created by the perception of man’s mind is entirely a world of proto-truth: one way of looking at things is capable of being replaced by a better way. Most religious meta-systems are based on absolute truth. Practical varieties of truth We can now put proto-truth in its proper context amongst the practical varieties of truth: Absolute truth Obtains only in special universes and in circular situations; may be deliberately set up by belief or dogma. Proto-truth Obtains in open universes; an evolutionary type of truth which is usable as truth in every way but which is capable of replacement and change. Hypothesis A temporary arrangement of experience to be used as a framework for exploring that experience further. Pragmatic truth Something which is held to be true because such a belief is useful. Proto-truth and hypothesis It is important to make a clear distinction between the two. In its essential meaning an hypothesis is a sort of guess which creates an explanation of events which can then be used to design experiments. Any hypothesis is a provocative tool of science. For example, I might have an hypothesis that certain species eat their young when upset in order to keep the population constant in an area. My hypothesis would suggest that in conditions of overcrowding there would be changes in the brain leading to production of chemicals that made an animal more easily irritable. Such animals would be easily upset and so would eat, their offspring. Such an hypothesis would lead to a variety of experiments:
After thorough research there might be enough evidence to support a conclusion. This conclusion would become a proto-truth. The proto-truth could itself be used deliberately as an hypothesis by someone else who would confirm the proto-truth or replace it with a better one. The essential difference is a matter of use: a prototruth is a conclusion (even if short-lived) whereas an hypothesis is a provocative experimental tool. Proto-truth and pragmatism This is another important distinction. Pragmatism was developed by the American philosopher William James who derived the idea from Charles Peirce, another American. Pragmatism holds that there is no truth except the ‘cash-value’ of an idea. In other words, a statement is true only if it makes a practical difference to life. This is generally interpreted to mean that a statement is true only if it is useful. At once huge dangers open up. The Nazis may have found it useful to consider the Jews as sub-human because this gave their followers a feeling of superiority which was important for the functioning of the Third Reich. The Catholic Inquisition may have felt that it was useful to burn apparent heretics because it kept others in line. Truth can usually be rationalized around actions which seem useful. A proto-truth does not have to be useful or even usable. It may make no difference to life at the moment. It is simply a truth which is acknowledged to be replaceable. The consequences of proto-truth Once absolute truth is replaced by proto-truth a number of possibilities at once explode into being. Defense It is no longer necessary fiercely to defend the truths one holds, as is the case with absolute truths. A proto-truth does not have to be kept intact. It can be changed or replaced if an alternative is shown to be better. At once this replaces polemic, clash, debate and dialectic with a mutual exploration of the situation. Instead of two people each trying to prove the other wrong there can be an exploration of the situation and the proto-truths involved, with the intention of constructing a better proto-truth. This makes use of the process of ‘exlectics’ rather than dialectics (the process of exlectics is discussed later). Persecution and intolerance Persecution no longer makes sense. It is replaced by tolerance and a readiness to accept alternative proto-truths. Proto-truths do not have to be unique in the sense that absolute truths need to be unique. Proto-truths may indicate different stages in the evolutionary thinking of another person or group or different evolutionary pathways. Just as there are different competent animal species so there can be different competent proto-truths. Man’s mind The new meta-system suggests that we make a god of man’s mind. In the past this was never possible because it was realized that man’s mind is very liable to make mistakes and also to be deceived by illusions. Man’s mind was rejected because it could not generate satisfactory absolute truths. But if we accept fallibility and proto-truths then we can accept that man’s thoughts can evolve through one proto-truth to a better one. So long as we know that proto-truths are always replaceable by better ones, fallibility does not matter. At the same time we can use the positive, constructive aspects of man’s mind. The practical use of proto-truths There can be personal proto-truths, group proto-truths and cultural proto-truths as well as more universal ones arrived at by consensus. Proto-truths are ways of looking at the world, and the experience-histories of different people will lead to different proto-truths. There may seem an obvious danger here that an individual or group may have arrived at a rather peculiar proto-truth which constitutes a danger to other people (like the Manson cult in the USA). If such a person or group is entitled to its own version of truth, does this not open the way to anarchy? The answer is that because a proto-truth is only a temporary truth it cannot be held with sufficient intensity to interfere with the rights or proto-truths of others. Subjective truths are valid so long as they are not objectively imposed on others. In any case a person or group who have considered their own version of truth as absolute are not going to be made more dangerous by being told that it is not absolute but only temporary.
The trend would be towards reducing such dangers along with the reduction in arrogance and intolerance. Like any other truth, a proto-truth should be free of deliberate error or deception. It should also be based on a full consideration of the situation, not just on a tiny part of it or a special point of view.
The requirements for a proto-truth are no different from the requirements for truth as we now accept them—the only difference is the acknowledgement of the possibility of improvement or replacement. The Buddhist meta-system insisted that the human mind can only perceive illusion, not reality. The mind has to be trained away from illusion until it is released into a state of contemplation of pure reality. The new meta-system insists that illusions are usable and workable and may be regarded as proto-truths. This does not mean that every illusion is a proto-truth but that some illusions may be regarded as proto-truths and others will still be regarded as illusions.
The distinction is based on the application of the usual criteria of evidence, proof, fit and consensus. The same distinction can be made between subjective proto-truths and objective proto-truths as is now made with truth.
The only difference is that the arrogance of absolute truth is removed from both. It may be suggested that if there is no such thing as absolute truth then it is better to dispense with the illusion of truth entirely. This attitude would mistake the functioning of a self-organizing and evolutionary system. Animals are ‘definite’ enough even though they may in time evolve into better animals. It is only because we are so used to considering truth as absolute that proto-truth seems worthless. In fact proto-truth is of more value than absolute truth because it is evolutionary. We can use proto-truth with confidence because we know that we are not going to be trapped by it. Proto-truth is not another word for doubt or indecision. On the contrary it makes for definiteness and decisiveness: we must use the proto-truth we have at the moment as we have to do in science.
Without proto-truth life is a meaningless drift of confusion.
The essential point about a proto-truth is that we can use it and believe it—so long as we are prepared to improve or replace it with a better one. A proto-truth may seem intangible in the way water is intangible. It cannot be handled and attacked because it is so fluid. But there is nothing intangible about the way water supports a boat. Just as a boat makes its way over water so we can live our lives supported by proto-truths that are fluid and changeable. The Mind of Man as God Man’s mind creates the perceived world in which he has to live as surely as God created the external world Most religions have firmly rejected the mind of man.
This has been because his mind is seen to be subject to deceptions and illusions or else because his mind is seen to serve the earthy-greedy self that has to be suppressed before salvation can be achieved. The new meta-system suggested in this book treats the mind of man as god. Traditional religions of all sorts are agreed that God created the universe. Whether this was done directly in six days as suggested in the book of Genesis, or whether God is the principle of life and organization as believed by the Hindus does not matter: the fact remains that God created the world and therefore we worship him as God. Man has to live in the world created by his mind. Through the process of perception the mind of man creates his world just as surely as God is credited with creating the physical world. If we regard God as the principle of organization and even as the principle of self-organization then the mind of man is the principle of organization that allows him to perceive the world and so create the internal world through which he is going to live. It is the map-maker who actually creates the world in which the navigator is going to navigate. This world may or may not correspond exactly to the real world.
In the same way our minds create our worlds and these may or may not correspond to the real world, depending on the organizing characteristics and knowledge of our minds. The mind of man has no inbuilt program of instincts which offers a ready-made map of the world. That is why the human infant requires years of self-education before it can cope with the world, whereas a new-born fawn can cope almost at once. The mind of a child has to create its own world through experience organized by perception into an internal world that is an ever-improving map of the external world.
Education and second-hand experience are only devices to enrich the field in which this self-educating process happens. A five year-old child refuses to drink his milk at breakfast. His mother explains that just as a car needs petrol to go, so the milk, is his petrol and it will make him swim better in the pool. The child drinks the milk at once. Has the mother fooled the child? Not at all. The petrol-car relationship is a more accurate description of the milk than is the physical appearance of a glass of milk. The important point is that a change in the child’s perception of the milk has made a definite difference to his behavior. Jean Liedloff in her account of her visits to the Yequana tribe in South America tells how the tribesmen seemed to treat the irksome job of portaging a heavy dug-out canoe as fun whereas the Europeans made a great fuss about this tiresome chore. Again the perception of the situation changed the attitude and the behavior. A group of thirty children aged between ten and twelve were doing the first lesson in a program devised to teach thinking as a direct skill. The children were asked if it would be a good idea for each pupil to be given a weekly wage for going to school. Every one of the thirty children was delighted with the idea—they could buy more sweets and comics and have fun. The children were then asked to consider, quite deliberately, the plus and minus points arising from the suggestion (this exercise was the object of the lesson). They now looked at a broader picture and wondered where the money would come from; they suspected they would be no better off because parents would withhold pocket money and schools would probably raise charges; older boys might beat up the younger ones to take the money.
Twenty-nine out of the thirty children had now completely changed their minds about the idea—simply through being given a direct strategy for broadening their perception of the situation. Although traditional religions distrust the mind, they do rely on the ability of perception to create the internal world in which man is going to live. For example, a Christian’s acceptance of suffering, and self-infliction of suffering, arises from a perception of the world that has been completely altered by Christian beliefs. The Buddhist is expected to develop a perception of the world in which his self belongs not to him but to nature. Man acts according to his perceptions. Religious meta-systems succeed by altering these perceptions. The new meta-system treats perception directly as being all-important: as the creative god of man’s being. Perception as a self-organizing system The eye (or another sense organ) is only part of the perception process. It is the brain that does most of the work to organize the signals from the external world into recognizable patterns that have meaning. To be more exact, the brain simply provides a structure within which the incoming sensory signals can organize themselves into meaningful patterns. The nerves in the brain convert the sensory signals into a form that can self-organize itself into stable patterns. The brain is quite passive in this respect. It is not a matter of an ego choosing, sorting and organizing information. The information does its own organizing. The process is described in detail in my book, The Mechanism of Mind. The outline given below is necessarily brief. Towel and gelatine systems
The difference between the two fundamental types of information system can be illustrated with a towel model and a gelatine model. In the towel model an ordinary towel is spread on a flat surface such as a table. Alongside the towel there is a bowl of ink. From time to time a spoonful of ink is taken from the bowl and poured on to the towel. An ink-stain results. The towel corresponds to the receiving or memory surface that records the incoming information. The spoonful of ink represents the incoming information or experience. After a while the surface will bear a number of ink-stains, as shown in 3D055F91-2212-4656-8A55-8A46FCD01B2B ScrivenerLinkDeleted. The ink stays where it was put and does not fade or alter in any way. Thus a good record is kept of all that has happened to the surface. If we wanted to use this stored information we should have to use a separate processor which would measure or relate the ink-stains in some way. This towel model is the classic view of a computer: perfect memory storage and then a separate processor. It is also the traditional view of the human mind: a memory storage system and then a thinking system. The gelatine model is different. The receiving surface is not a towel but a wide shallow dish of gelatine (table jelly or jell-O). This time the bowl of ink is heated up. When a spoonful of hot ink is poured on to the surface it dissolves the gelatine. But the ink soon cools down and stops dissolving the gelatine. When the fluid (ink and melted gelatine) is poured off, a shallow depression is left as the record of what has been done to the surface. This depression corresponds to the ink-stain on the towel. A number of spoonfuls are poured on to the gelatine surface in exactly the same way as was done with the towel surface. But the effect is quite different. At the end instead of there being a number of separate depressions corresponding to the ink-stains on the towel, there is a channel eroded in the surface of the gelatine ( F5A62374-E307-4CD8-97E0-8C3D475C82E2 ScrivenerLinkDeleted). What happens is that the second spoonful of hot ink tends to flow into the first depression. The third spoonful tends to flow into the second depression and then on to the first. In this way a channel is formed. Once a channel has formed the recorded information is now no longer separate: it is linked up. If we were to pour on some ink in the fourth-spoonful position it would flow along the channel and end up in the first-spoonful position. In other words, a pattern has been established so that the information is linked together.
It is as if when we see a glass we know that it is suitable for drinking from, because the two things have been linked together. The gelatine model simply offers an ‘opportunity’ for the incoming information to organize itself into patterns. In the section on self-organizing systems it was mentioned that ‘stickiness’ was a characteristic of such systems: if something happened it was less easy for it to unhappen. In the gelatine model the incoming information attaches itself or ‘sticks’ to preceding information to create a pattern. Further information will tend to flow along these established patterns, making them deeper, just as water flowing through a river makes it deeper. The gelatine model and the brain As explained in The Mechanism of Mind, the functional relationship between the gelatine model and the process of perception in the brain is quite close. Instead of gelatine there is a mass of interconnected nerves along which electrical excitation flows. The junctions between nerves are called synapses. Excitation will only spread across the synapse if the conditions are right. A sensory input to the brain should cause a spread of excitation over all the surface giving rise to a sort of epileptic fit. But the excitation is limited because each excited nerve feeds into a central pool as well as to its neighbor. From this central pool an inhibiting influence is fed back to prevent the excitation spreading across a synapse. This inhibitory influence is proportional to the total number of nerves that are in an excited state. There comes a time when the inhibitory influence is just great enough to prevent a further spread of excitation. This leads to a limited and single area of excitation rather like the single spoonful of ink. If a particular junction or synapse is easily bridged (because it has been bridged before) then excitation will tend to flow that way. In this way the area of excitation flows over the network much as the ink flows over the gelatine model. Patterns are also formed in the same way.
Readers who find this explanation inadequate are urged to read the book referred to at the beginning of this sub-section. What is important is not the detail of the mechanism but the formation of patterns in the process of perception. All the available evidence suggests that this is how perception works. Indeed, it is difficult to see how a self-educating system could work except by allowing incoming information to organize itself into patterns. The importance of patterns The simplest definition of a pattern is that if one state tends to follow another state with a probability greater than chance, then a pattern is present. We call a wallpaper pattern a pattern because once we have recognized the design we expect it to continue:
that design is more likely to follow itself than is any other. The simplest way to show a pattern is as a track or road.
Anyone going along that road is more likely to stay on the road than jump over the side (we are more likely to perceive a glass as a vessel for drinking than as a missile). If the mind did not use patterns we should be unable to use language. Language is a code system in which a word indicates a whole pattern of meaning. The word simply identifies the right road and then our mind goes down that road to use the meaning attached to the word. If I hear or read the word ‘glass’ my mind explores the attached meaning-pattern at once. When you visually recognize a particular person your mind explores the pattern of what you know about him. A pattern is a sort of filing system in which one thing follows on from another. Alternative patterns A pattern is only a convenient way of linking up or grouping together features in the environment. Just as the same classroom of children can be grouped in a number of alternative ways (by age, by height, by color of hair, by place of residence, by the first letter of the surname, etc.), so different minds can come to see the same thing in different ways. The pattern shown in CF1604F3-6EB8-42B5-B009-D4DBF8341B6B ScrivenerLinkDeleted can be described in a number of different ways, all of which are right. A bottle may be described as half full of milk or half empty.
A cow may be seen as a sacred animal by a Hindu, as a source of profit by a cattle-breeder, and as giving life to a landscape by an artist. When we look at a glass we see it as a drinking vessel. How, then, could we come to use it as a missile in a bar brawl? The answer is that we are looking round for a ‘hand-sized throwable object’ and this leads us to a glass. The process is shown in 0237E993-24EE-473B-BB33-9373ED192B11 ScrivenerLinkDeleted. The wide track leads from glass to drinking vessel. The narrow track leads from glass to missile. The narrow track cannot be taken at first because the other track is wide (more strongly established by experience). But if we start at ‘missile’ then it is quite easy to move down along the narrow track and end up with a glass. Puns are based on alternative tracks attached to the same words: ‘Vice’ as something used in carpentry or as some evil habit;
a ‘golf-club’ as something with which to hit the ball or as the place where golf can be played. Humor is based on the process of switching tracks: of suddenly seeing something in a different way. This is also the basis of insight and creativity. It is also the aim of lateral thinking. That is why the humor process or pattern-switching process is such a key element in the new meta-system. This aspect is discussed in detail in another section. Changing patterns We have seen that perception is a self-organizing process that creates patterns. A pattern is only one particular way of looking at things and does not exclude other ways. A pattern is a prototruth. We treat it as true and we use it until we replace it with another pattern. In the evolution of our thoughts, both as individuals and as society, we may go through a series of patterns or ways of looking at the world. Each one represents a stable plateau in the self-organizing process. Life would be quite impossible if we did not have stable patterns of perception:
you would be unable to jump out of the way of a motor car in time unless your perception recognized its horn at once. So we have to use our stable patterns of perception as proto-truths, realizing that they are not unique and also that they are capable of being replaced by better patterns. As usual, there is the balance problem: how far do we adjust to the patterns we have and how far do we try to replace them by better ones? An idea is a pattern or way of putting things together. We have to be able to maintain a balance between using and enjoying ideas and creating new ones. Influencing patterns As we have seen, patterns are formed by the self-organization of incoming information. This is a passive process. In what way can a mind influence the patterns that are formed? Although the pattern-forming is passive and self-organizing, the circumstances in which this happens can have a great effect. If you take a course on cooking then you are more likely to form cooking patterns than if you do not. If you choose to go to France you are more likely to form French language patterns than if you do not. If you focus on a problem you are more likely to develop further patterns than if you do not. When you put different things together by a deliberate effort of attention new patterns are likely to emerge. The deliberate use of lateral thinking can provoke new patterns. Logical analysis can clarify issues and direct attention and so encourage new patterns to emerge. The use of notation as in mathematics can conveniently exteriorize complex matters so that new perceptions can be made. Mental or physical models can help in the same way.
Thus although patterns form passively from the self-organization of experience, man can affect that experience and so influence patterns. The new meta-system is concerned with the use and change of the perceptual patterns that create the world in which each person lives. Thinking Wisdom is a broad ability to look at the world and to look at one’s looking If a man is to be master of his own enjoyment of life he is going to have to do some thinking for himself unless he is content to let circumstances and other people do it for him. Bertrand Russell claimed that man was more frightened of thinking than of anything else. This is because many people believe that thinking involves having to solve a complicated mathematical or logical problem. But that is only a tiny part of thinking. Thinking is having to decide whether you want a chocolate ice-cream or a vanilla one. Thinking is telling a funny story. Thinking is going over in your mind a pleasant experience.
Thinking is imagining what might happen next in the television thriller. Thinking is the exploration and use of experience. That use includes enjoyment, problem-solving and the setting of objectives. Thinking is like moving your finger over your own, personal, internal map of the world. The roads are the patterns created by perception. Some roads are more clearly marked than others and there may be areas with too few roads. Purpose of thinking Apart from direct enjoyment the purpose of thinking is to adjust oneself to the circumstances or to adjust the circumstances to one self. Thinking involves active planning as well as passive contemplation. Thinking is like using a telescope or a microscope or a sketch-pad or a screwdriver. Happiness is a problem that is solved by developing an understanding of the world and of oneself, and then making use of that understanding in a practical manner. Misconceptions about thinking It is often mistakenly supposed that thinking requires a high IQ. This is not the case. Children with relatively low IQs (about 80) can still be effective thinkers.
When people are dealing with their own experience they can be much better thinkers than when they are required to absorb new experience before they can start thinking. People with high IQs are not necessarily good thinkers. In fact the possession of a high IQ can often be counter-productive. Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers because they can never allow themselves to be wrong. They often take up an instant judgement position on a subject and then use their thinking to support that position rather than to explore the subject area before making a judgement. The more effective they are in support of their instant judgement the less inclined will they be to change this.
The result is clever argument but ineffective thinking. There is a very dangerous misconception that has been encouraged by education, and this concerns the use of the critical intelligence. Education has fostered the notion that the critical intelligence is the highest use of the mind. This notion arises from the days when education was controlled by the Church and it was necessary to put a high emphasis on critical skills since it was the criticism of heresies that would have to preserve the integrity of the Church. Criticism is a relatively easy form of intellectual achievement and much used by mediocre minds who are unable to be creative or constructive. You cannot grow a garden just ‘by pruning: there has to be some planting and fostering of plants as well. We are apt to dismiss an idea because 10 per cent of it may be in error, ignoring the 90 per cent that is worth-while.
The meta-system suggested in this book is much in favor of the positive and constructive attitudes of thinking rather than the negative destructive ones. Many people open a learned book on philosophy and find that they can understand very little. They ascribe this to their own poor level of education or thinking. This is an unfortunate mistake. The writer of the learned book on philosophy would, himself, have been just as lost had he opened a book on electronics or polymer chemistry. Each specialized field of knowledge has its own concepts and its own jargon, and there is no shame in not knowing the jargon of all possible fields. It is rather up to the writer to communicate if that is the purpose of his book. Many learned people are experts in their own field because the depth of their focused knowledge does much of the thinking for them.
Outside their own field such people may be rather poor thinkers. Intellectualism has deservedly got itself a bad reputation. It is possible to play logical word games in which one concept generates another in a sort of virtuoso ballet of ideas. But it does not add up to anything except an amusing game played with the mind. Intellectualism is like a steamer with its propeller out of the water and churning the air: there is much happening but not much progress.
Thinking is definitely not reserved for intellectuals. Scholarship is too often the triumph of form over content. A small and usually unimportant area is explored in great depth and detail. Larger and more important areas which cannot be treated in the same way are ignored.
The emphasis which universities have placed on scholarship has contributed very much to their losing their once central role in the thinking of society. Traditionally thinking has been put in terms of debate, clashes and polemics. This has arisen from our dependence on dialectics as the only form of developmental thinking. The dialectic process tends to be negative (extremely so when converted into action) and can be replaced by a more positive process that is part of the new meta-system and is described in a subsequent section.
This new process of ‘exlectics’ seeks to draw out and improve what is good in an idea rather than to attack what is bad. Because philosophers have largely been involved in word games or mathematical games, logic has come to assume a dominant position in thinking. In practice, when we are thinking about the real world rather than some artificially constructed world of words or numbers, perception is very much more important than logic. Most thinking is a matter of dealing with perceptions. Only a small part of thinking requires special logical manipulations. The insistence on logic has a dangerous spin-off: we assume that if an argument is free of logical error it must be valid. This is nonsense. Bad logic does make for bad thinking but good logic does not ensure good thinking unless the perceptions on which it is based are sound. We would do well to pay much more attention to perception (the way we see the world) than to intricate logical skills. The same thing applies to mathematics: we often pay all the attention to the correct manipulation of the symbols and none to the initial translation of the world into symbols. Ignorance and information No one can know everything. Thinking is usually based on incomplete information. It is sensible to try to get as much relevant information as possible, but impractical to expect to get enough information to do your thinking for you on every occasion. Thinking often involves guessing and speculation.
It is an impractical habit, fostered by education, to refuse to think unless information is complete. There are four different types of ignorance: not having the information in the first place; having the information but not using it because of inadequate scanning of experience; having the information but putting it together incorrectly; an arrogance which refuses to look beyond an apparently satisfactory solution based on only part of the situation. The arrogance type of ignorance is the most culpable, the most dangerous and the most common. Beauty and feeling There is a notion that there is a divide between thinking on one hand and beauty and feeling on the other. It is sometimes believed that thinking destroys spontaneous emotional response and also kills beauty by analysis. It is imagined that the thinking person stands in front of a painting and instead of appreciating its beauty and responding with an emotion, analyzes the style of the painter. This is a silly misconception fostered by those who equate thinking with intellectual games. The appreciation of beauty and feeling itself are types of thinking. The only difference is that they are not carried out with words or fixed concepts. To be able to feel about something is as important as, or even more important than, being able to think about it. But feeling should not exclude other forms of thinking since each can enhance the other. The new meta-system in no way suggests that everything has to be reduced to intellectual formulas. Thinking, in the ordinary sense of the word, is only a tool of feeling.
The tool is used to create those situations in which enjoyment and happiness can best be felt. There is a classical story of the centipede that was proceeding quite comfortably until someone asked it which leg followed which. The result was that the centipede became unable to proceed further as it lay distracted in the ditch wondering which leg came before which. There are those who feel that thinking will destroy their ability to feel or appreciate in an unintellectual way. Again it must be stressed that there is a big difference between thinking and intellectual analysis. Thinking enlarges the area in which feeling can take place and generates more opportunities for feeling: there is no antagonism between the two. A man who cooks brilliantly by ‘instinct’ is not made to follow an instruction book but benefits from being brought into contact with new ingredients to which he can apply his skill. Mistakes No one makes mistakes on purpose, but mistakes do get made. The human mind is fallible and it is ridiculous to suppose otherwise. Once this is realized, then thinking can be combined with the sort of humility that is described in the section on humor. It is because the new meta-system replaces truth with proto-truth that people can be allowed to think for themselves. Unless a person is capable of making mistakes then he is not capable of thinking. The mistake does not matter. What does matter is the attachment of arrogance to a mistake on the basis that no mistake could ever have been made. A person gains a great deal from a mistake and even more from an admitted mistake. He gains a new way of looking at things. The ego and thinking Thinking is too often regarded as an extension of the ego. Clever children in school base their egos on being clever and on being right all the time. They dislike group work because they cannot then show the rest of the class where the good idea originated. When the ego and thinking are treated as the same thing there is a reluctance to be wrong and a need to defend a point of view rather than to explore the situation. A person should be able to treat his thinking much as a tennis player treats his strokes:
he should be able to walk off the court complaining that his backhand was not working very well on that occasion or that it required more practice. The new meta-system is very much in favor of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self. Unsolved problems There will always be problems that cannot be solved. No thinker should pretend that he can solve all problems. Sometimes a problem is not solvable because it is posed in a self-contradictory manner which makes solution impossible. Here, attention to the problem is more important than attention to the answer. Other problems may have a solution which cannot yet be found by a particular thinker or by any thinker. There is nothing wrong with defining unsolved problems and coming back to them whenever one wishes. This should be done in a relaxed manner and not with a sense of anguish or frustration. The world will not be saved by the solution of a tantalizing problem. Such problems are best treated as friends or ‘pets’. Wisdom and cleverness It must have become obvious in this section that the new meta-system is against cleverness and in favor of wisdom. Cleverness is a sort of intellectual games-playing which is enjoyable for those who enjoy it but not necessary for everyone (any more than a liking for fishing). Wisdom is a broad ability to look at the world and to look at one’s looking. Wisdom is based on robust commonsense and humility—not on winning arguments. Exlectics
Whereas dialectics seek to batter an idea into a better one, exlectics seek to build it into a better one Marxism claims to be based on dialectical materialism. The dialectic process assumes that in time everything breeds its opposite. This opposite splits off and there is then a clash between the two. From this clash arises something new or a new idea. In formal terms a thesis breeds its antithesis and then thesis and antithesis clash and from this arises a synthesis. So capitalism gives rise to anticapitalism and from the struggle between the two there arises the utopia of Marxism. The dialectic process was much considered by the German philosopher Hegel who became a strong influence on thinkers and doers of the nineteenth century. There was, however, nothing new in dialectics. The Greeks, and Socrates in particular, had based their discourse on the dialectic process, and the theologians and churchmen of the Middle Ages had done likewise. It seems a convenient way in which to work from one idea towards a better one.
The evolution of better ideas is based on clash and struggle, rather as Darwin assumed the survival of the best-fitted species was based. The danger with dialectics is that the negative and destructive elements too easily become dominant. Negativity becomes an end in itself. The best brains become involved only in negative criticism and consider this a sufficient endeavour. Destruction becomes an end in itself. Destruction and opposition provide sufficient direction to become the basis of another religion-of-opposition as described in an earlier section. Marx and Lenin were quite conscious of this and placed their full emphasis on the ‘struggle’ of the transition stage during which capitalism was to be destroyed.
They were right to do this because this is what has given Marxism its practical fervour—just as trade unions have been most effective when in opposition.
We recognize the same dialectic process in politics in a democratic country with the added absurdity that an opposition feels duty bound to disagree with whatever the government proposes even if it makes sense. The emphasis on opposition and clash rests on the assumption that the system is robust enough to somehow produce something new and better. But a system can only do this if it has derived a considerable momentum from somewhere. For example, the Catholic Church thrived on the opposition that caused it to tighten up both its doctrines and administration. But this easy assumption of a positive, constructive force, somewhere, may be mistaken.
Where Marxism has succeeded in its anti-capitalist struggle the new utopia is nothing like as splendid as was the struggle stage. So the major weakness of the dialectic method is the concentration on criticism and destruction on the assumption that ‘somewhere’ there is a constructive element. Exlectics and dialectics With the new process of exlectics suggested in the new meta-system the emphasis is on the positive, constructive aspects of the evolution of new ideas instead of on the negative clash aspects. In Darwin’s evolutionary model the emphasis has shifted from the struggle-for-survival stage to the mutation stage. ‘How do we change an idea into a better one?’, instead of ‘How do we batter an idea into a better one?’ It is a matter of building on ideas, improving them and perhaps changing them rather than criticizing them. The exlectic process recognizes that construction will be slow to happen unless someone sets out deliberately to be constructive. It is not suggested that negatively minded people are incapable of being constructive but that they need to be pointed in a constructive direction. The process of exlectics The process is illustrated in 94966DE7-DE7C-4CD5-B666-5349768461F7 ScrivenerLinkDeleted. The first stage is the exploration stage. This is a cooperative exploration with both parties exploring the situation or idea. Together they construct a sort of map. This map will indicate their points of agreement and disagreement. Disagreement may be based on fact, on interpretation and on different value systems. There will be agreement on some positive points and agreement on some negative points. There will be disagreement on some points which one side holds to be positive and the other to be negative. The second stage is to extract a key-point from the situation. This key-point is chosen because it is crucial. It may be a point of agreement or of disagreement. The third stage involves the ‘re-clothing’ of the key-point. This can mean adding to it elements from the old situation, or new ones. The new ones may have to be created or borrowed from other situations. Only points on which there is an agreed positive attitude should be added.
If the total idea ends up by being incomplete and unworkable then a deliberate effort is made to complete it or the whole process starts again with a fresh key-point being chosen. ‘At this third stage there is an alternative route. Instead of the key-point being ‘re-clothed’ it can be changed deliberately to a new concept by the application of lateral thinking. In practice this can mean a cooperative generation of new concepts until both sides agree that they have one with which they can work in a constructive manner. The new concept would then have to be clothed as described above.
The fourth stage is the modification and development of the new idea to make it workable. In formal terms the extracted key-point may be called the ‘exthesis’. The exthesis may be changed to give an ‘alterthesis’. The clothing of the exthesis or alterthesis gives rise to a ‘neothesis’ and the final acceptable idea is a ‘proto-thesis’.
But the formality of these expressions is unimportant. It can be seen that the process of exlectics is one of building rather than knocking down. Since it is impossible to build on an already complete idea some key-point is extracted and used as something upon which to build. Both sides are now concerned in the building process. If the starting-point proves unsuitable a new one is chosen or it is changed by lateral thinking (moving sideways to look at things in a different way.) The lump effect Words and concepts cover many meanings. Quite often a dispute arises because one party is focusing on one aspect of the concept whereas the other party is focusing on another aspect. For example, the expression ‘cow-like contentment’ seems to be a derogatory one if we look on cows as being stupid, unimaginative creatures that allow themselves to be exploited. Who wants to be called a cow? But if we focus on the simplicity and harmony of a cow’s life in a world with which it can cope then we can see some positive and indeed enviable features of cow-like contentment. Similarly with the word ‘profit’. This lump word can be attacked as meaning greed and exploitation because the early capitalists were only interested in what they could get away with. This cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that profits do often come from exploitation of the worker or the consumer. But if we escape the lump effect we can look on profits as a source for a reinvestment that can create new jobs, as a source for new ventures that may benefit new workers or consumers, as a measure of the efficieRcy with which an organization is run, as an incentive for people to save and invest their money in businesses capable of raising the standard of living. All this is also correct. The dialectic process would insist on a clash between the two opposing points of view. The exiectic process might pick out the efficiency measure as a key-point and then in re-clothing it try to avoid the possibilities of greed and exploitation. The attitude is one of building on the good points and leaving the bad ones behind instead of attacking the whole idea on account of the bad points. If it proves impossible to build on any of the good points then an attempt is made to develop a new concept: for example, in the case of ‘profits’ the new concept might involve reward for the investor based on the number of livelihoods he supports. Changing ideas An idea is an organization of features just as a pattern is an organization of features to give a perception. It is quite likely that the features can be re-grouped or restructured in a different and better way. It is possible that adding some features or dropping others can lead to a better idea. It is possible that the change of a crucial feature can lead to a totally new idea. All this can be done by a process of positive reconstruction supplemented by lateral thinking.
The critical and negative approach to new ideas is by no means the only method we have traditionally assumed it to be. The new meta-system, in putting the emphasis on positive aspects, would seek to develop the idiom of exlectics in place of dialectics. The change-over may not be easy for those who can only think in terms of dialectics and clash.
Summary The new meta-system could be said to be based on the nature of perception and the pursuit of happiness Having looked in the preceding section at the general mood of the new meta-system, we can summarize the structure of the system before we move on to consider in the following pages the application of the meta-system to daily life. Belief The new meta-system is not derived from or dependent upon a particular set of beliefs. As a working background it is assumed that man is a functioning biological system who usually lives in an organizational system called society. The meta-system requires no explanation of man’s origins or destiny. An explanation of man’s origins may, however, be found in the behavior of self-organizing systems and the self-organization of basic chemicals into higher and higher orders of organization until man is the culmination. The emphasis is on the here and now rather than on some after-life or release from the cycle of life. The purpose of the human system is identified as the proper functioning of the human system, and this is defined as happiness. The pursuit of happiness therefore becomes the main purpose of life. Man’s mind Man’s mind creates the world in which he lives. Man lives according to his own map of the world, his own way of seeing things, which has been created by his perception. The process of perception is a self-organizing one in which signals from the external world received through the senses are converted into nerve excitations in the brain. These excitations organize themselves into recorded patterns. The patterns are individual and depend on circumstances, past experience and the particular sequence of arrival of the information. It is quite possible for the same information to be put together in another pattern by a different brain or by the same brain in the process known as insight or creativity. Lateral thinking is a provocative process used for changing the patterns of perception. Thinking, in general, is an exploration of the map of the world created by perception. The purpose of thinking is either direct enjoyment or else a change in the world map intended to increase happiness. This change in the world map may take the form of an adjustment to circumstances or an alteration of circumstances by means of activity which follows the thinking. The balance between adjustment of oneself or alteration of circumstances is emphasized. Proto-truths The new system replaces absolute truth with proto-truth. Absolute truths only exist in circular systems or special universes. Proto-truths exist in the sort of open universe with which science and life deal. A proto-truth is as free from conscious error or deception as any other truth, but it is never held to be unchangeable. A proto-truth is believable so long as it is realized that it can be improved or replaced by a better one. Proto-truths are regarded as relatively stable states in the evolution of ideas. The self-organization of experience forms such stable states both in the mind of individuals and also in society as a whole. There are individual proto-truths or cultural proto-truths. Proto-truths are not dogmas but acceptable and sensible ways of looking at the world that fit experience. Proto-truths may be changed by new experience or by the restructuring of existing experience. Because proto-truths are not regarded as absolute there is no effort to impose them on other people, and this gives rise to the tolerance of the new meta-system. Nor is there a need to defend the proto-truths at all costs, and this gives rise to the positive and constructive attitude of the meta-system. Improvement in the proto-truths is brought about by the process of exlectics instead of dialectics. Dialectics seek improvement by a process of attack and clash whereas exlectics seek improvement by reconstruction of the initial idea. Biodic symbol The main track and the side track of the biodic symbol refer to the possibility of changing patterns in a patterning system such as perception. The symbol therefore symbolizes perception, change, possibility and hope. It symbolizes the possibility of escaping from a particular way of looking at things. Humor is a key element in the new meta-system because it is the characteristic of mind that arises directly from the biodic process. Humor indicates a switch in patterns: a sudden change to a different way of looking at things. Humor is also tolerant, easy-going and good-natured. Self The new meta-system is definitely self-centered. Instead of denying the self, as do so many religious meta-systems, the new metasystem places self at the centre of concern. Man’s first priority of consideration (though not necessarily in a conflict of interests) is his self. If a man is at ease with himself then he will be at ease with the world and he will be happy. Life-space Life-space refers to the total pressures, demands and expectations that are made upon an individual by himself, by others and by circumstances. For this reason life-space may also be called demand-space. Life-space is also the space in which an individual will be operating - to meet the pressures and expectations. So life-space may be called the operating-space. Self-space Self-space is that part of the life-space with which a person can cope with ease. Self-space can also be called cope-space. Cope-space or self-space includes that part of the demand-space that a man has as it were ‘under control’ or ‘under his skin’. Within his self-space man must be his own master. The self-space may be affected by outside influences but must not depend on some outside thing or person for its functioning. When a person is within his self-space he is free and independent. Cope/demand ratio When self-space enlarges to coincide with life-space that is happiness. The usual gap between the two is the opportunity-space or the pressure-space, depending on how it is seen by the individual. An unfulfilled opportunity is, however, a pressure of sorts. The cope/demand ratio refers to the amount of life-space that is filled by self-space. If self-space completely fills life-space the ratio is unity. If self-space only half fills life-space the ratio is one half. If self-space fills only one quarter of the life-space the ratio is one quarter. An increase in the cope/demand ratio (for example, from one quarter to one half) means either that the self-space has increased or that the life-space has shrunk—and it signifies a move towards happiness. Dignity The ego refers to a person’s self-image or the image which he wants others to have of himself. When the ego corresponds exactly to the self-space then there is dignity. Dignity is the destination for the self. When a man has dignity he is at ease with himself. When a man has dignity he can respect himself. The degree of dignity is determined not by the content of the self-space but by the closeness of fit of ego and self-space. Respect Respect replaces love as the operating idiom of the meta-system on the basis that respect is more workable. There are three basic respects: respect of an individual for himself; respect of an individual for others; respect of an individual for society. Happiness The pursuit of happiness is the legitimate purpose of the human system. Happiness is based on enjoyment of the self and dignity. Happiness includes ingredients that can become counter-effective unless used with care and balance. These include pleasure, excitement and enthusiasm. There are other, more dependable, ingredients such as peace, joy, interest and achievement. Activity Activity is important and so is involvement. Activity can be directed inwards at the internal world or outwards at the external world. There can be the activity of action or the activity of awareness. Activity involves achievement: the achievement of destination or the more preferable achievement of performance. Activity is of value because it enlarges the self-space. Key elements The key elements can be summarized as perception, humor, self, dignity, respect and happiness.
Application Application Man is ultimately in control of the inner world formed by his perception of the outer world The following sections will deal with the application of the new meta-system. Application involves mood and attitude, strategy and principles. Some people require matters to be spelt out in detail. Others prefer to be given broad principles which they themselves can work into strategies. The meta-system can put an emphasis on self and on happiness and can encourage people to do likewise with their own lives. This can serve two purposes. It can overcome people’s inhibitions about paying attention to self and happiness if this has been discouraged in the past. It can also offer them a goal towards which people can move in their own way. It is not possible to spell out in detail a path or procedure that will guarantee dignity or happiness. But it is possible to indicate the sort of things that will increase the possibility. If you throw a pair of dice you cannot determine which numbers will come up. But if you do not even attempt to throw a pair of dice then you can be sure that no numbers will come up. Moreover, if you decide to be satisfied by alternative pairs of numbers, then this decision of yours will make it easier for you to be satisfied even though you still cannot guarantee success. Life is like playing tennis. There is no formula for winning but there is room for the development of a definite skill that will make happiness more likely. You can get better at tennis and you can practice different strokes. Happiness can be treated in the same way. The meta-system offers a framework for looking at things, for putting things together. For instance, it can be seen that the problem of self can be treated in a way different from that of the self-denial insisted upon by some religious meta-systems. The concept of a proto-truth can solve the problems created by an insistence on absolute truth. The process of exlectics can lead to a tackling of problems in a new way. It is not just a matter of moving in the right direction: as the biodic symbol suggests, it may be a matter of stopping moving in a wrong direction. We may need to go back and change concepts rather than use the old ones more fervently. Avoid The preference is for what is life-enhancing over what is life-cramping Hindus do not define God. Instead they list all the things which he is not. Animals flee from a forest fire, their direction determined only by what they are fleeing from. A swimmer uses the end of the swimming pool in order to push off in a new direction. The attitudes listed in this section are not meant to be ‘sins’ to be avoided, because anyone who was guilty of them would never admit to the guilt. Instead they are attitudes to flee from or to push off from. With honesty one may notice them in oneself—on occasions or as a life style. It may be easier to notice them in other people and by observing them determine to avoid them. Imagine that someone is observing you even as you observe them. To some extent the attitudes listed here are the negative image of the attitudes listed in the mood section. That is inevitable. For example, the attitudes listed there were positive and life-enhancing whereas those listed here are negative and life-cramping. In practical terms, on a day-to-day basis, and as a start in the use of the new meta-system, it is easier to know what to move away from than what to move towards, since the latter is less tangible. In practice one may catch oneself falling into the trap of one of these attitudes and by noticing this—and without feeling any guilt—build up an aversion to negativity. Negativity In most situations it is much easier to pick out the faults because these are more obvious since they are based on what we think a thing should be. That is to say, being negative is based on our past experience whereas being positive requires us to look into the future to assess something new. A man who designs a new dress is likely to be told that it is old-fashioned because a comparison with the past is always possible—to assess the dress’s virtues requires more effort. Anything new seems to involve effort, therefore it is easier to be negative. Criticism Negative criticism is easy because it is always possible to find fault with anything if one looks hard enough. It is quite easy to concentrate on the faults and ignore what is worth-while. But the main and overriding attraction of criticism is that it at once makes the critic superior to what he is criticizing. A man who criticizes a play implies that he has seen better plays and that he knows what a better play is like. A girl who criticizes a party wants people to know that she is used to going to better parties. A book critic wants his readers to know that he has not been taken in. Praise, on the other hand, seems to imply subservience and naïvety. If one person praises a restaurant and another criticizes it then the critic feels that she knows what good food is really like whereas the praiser is satisfied with any old thing. Because criticism is so easy it is often the refuge of mediocre minds who cannot be interesting in any other way. Too often a critic forgets that he is not criticizing the situation but only his understanding of it. A book critic may be indicating his lack of understanding of the book as much as its deficiencies. In practice you do not have to understand something to criticize it—indeed, criticism is very often a camouflage for lack of understanding. Opposition There are those who derive their vigour, mission and direction in life only from opposition and complaint. There are those who believe that improvement can only come about through clash. There are those who feel that any discussion should become a polarized argument. There are those who feel that all situations are battles in which one side loses and the other side gains. There are those who feel that their egos depend on battling and winning. Put-downs As a variant of criticism there is the put-down which involves the pushing down of someone else in order to obtain a feeling of superiority. There are those who feel that the most palpable gain must be at someone else’s expense. This may be due to a perversion of the competitive spirit or just socialized aggression. It may also be the expression of weakness that fears discovery and has therefore to strike first. It may also, innocently, be a vehicle for wit. Sneer A sneer is too easy. All it requires is that you have within earshot someone similarly affected with jealousy. To sneer you choose your frame of reference to fit the judgement you wish to make. Language has an ample supply of words to suit a sneer. If a girl is well dressed she is prissy or pretentious. If she is badly dressed she is a slob. If she is neutrally dressed she is nondescript or mousy. A sneer has no social value whatsoever except to self-label the impotent. Superiority The elitist, the snob, the holier-than-thou, the cleverer-than-thou may well have genuine grounds for their feeling of superiority. There are people who are cleverer and holier than others just as there are people who are richer than others. Is it possible that the flaunting of these superiorities is no more than an enjoyment of them? If so why should anyone else mind? What is resented is the implication that because a person is superior along some dimension he is generally superior. This is a special form of egotism and pretension. A properly fitting ego would evoke respect and even admiration rather than resentment. Pretension A pretension is a make-believe act both for the person offering it and for those towards whom it is directed. Unfortunately only one of the parties usually knows this. True style and eccentricity are not pretension but a genuine ego and self-space fit. The usual sort of pretension is an ego too large for its self-space—with the obvious lack of dignity as a result. Egotism It may seem strange that a meta-system that places so much emphasis on the self and self-care should regard egotism as something to be avoided. It must be obvious, however, that egotism is the opposite of dignity. Dignity is when ego and self-space coincide. Egotism is when the ego is much larger than the self-space and can therefore only be sustained by a demand on the approval of others. We do expect false modesty as a social gesture from those whose self-spaces may be large enough to support large egos, but we have no right to expect it except the right of jealousy. Bullying This is the derivation of pleasure or achievement directly at the expense of another. It is a parody of the stag or bull who fights the strongest in the herd in order to establish his superiority. Bullying is a totally unnecessary intrusion into someone else’s life-space in order to enlarge one’s own self-space. Bullying goes against the basis of respect and as a result a bully forfeits respect. What you can get away with This is the system-cheat or parasite who operates an ethic completely devoid of respect and considers himself smart on that account. He is a man who feels that only fear makes people obey the requirements of the system, and since he believes himself too smart for fear he despises those who seem to show it. It never occurs to the system-cheat that a system is only operable if those using it respect it in terms of acknowledging the need for it to function. Violence The display of rage or force in order to achieve an end is a combination of bullying and the system-cheat. Those who derive pleasure from violence place too high an emphasis on excitement. Just as a crime involving violence tends to be a badly thought-out crime, so violence is an alternative to thought. Cynicism Beneath the face lies the skull. It is usually possible to look for, and find, an explanation of something that will fit a prejudice. The cynic believes himself to be a realist, but a realism that destroys values is too negative to be worth having. As Oscar Wilde put it, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Cynicism is rampant negativity. World-weariness The world-weary, know-it-all, lived-out individual has usually done everything and enjoyed nothing. A person who ‘knows’ all there is to know and has done all there is to do can only be a myopic mental cripple. A world-weary person is someone who has relied entirely on excitement and pleasure and has proved them to be counter-effective. Boredom Boredom is the hallmark of a taker: someone who has invested nothing in happiness but insists on a right to be excited and entertained. Most people are bored from time to time and it is unrealistic to expect otherwise, but a person who declares himself to be habitually bored with life is either a poseur or sleep-walking. Apathy Apathy is the most anti-life of all the attitudes and yet the most understandable. If a person has no hope and no feeling of control, then apathy is but the soothing of despair. A person who is apathetic has given up trying because all problems seem insoluble. Yet there must be some small area of achievement on which it is possible to build. Apathy is an opting out of life. Drift Unlike apathy, drift is more a matter of laziness—of refusal to make any investment in life. Drift takes care of the need to make decisions. Drift precludes the possibility of making a mistake. A certain amount of drift is useful to open up possibilities that could not have been planned. A drifting through circumstances may be the deliberate choice of an individual and therefore his right. A drift of spirit or self is a form of self-abdication. Self-pity There are few people who do not have cause for self-pity at some time in their lives. But it is neither consoling nor effective. It tends to be an indulgence which grows upon itself until it precludes action and makes ever-increasing demands on other people. One has only to see the different susceptibilities of people to self-pity to realize that it arises more from the self than from circumstances. It is a form of egotism. Props The use of drugs, alcohol and other props for the self is a direct form of self-abdication. The self is unlikely to develop unless it is given a chance to do so. Such props are usually an attempt to shrink life-space to manageable proportions or to obtain ecstasy without effort. Passivity A person who is not prepared to do anything on his own behalf denies his self and his being alive. A person who is passive is badly in need of the new meta-system. There has to be a will to do something, no matter how ineffectively it may operate. Applied Thinking Thinking is the tool with which man appreciates, explores and changes the inner world and plans the actions that can change the outer world Thinking plays a central role in the new meta-system because it is the tool with which the mind can act both on the inner world of perception and on the external world through action. The two processes of adjustment and change have an origin in thinking. Thinking of the high-powered intellectual sort is not required. Wisdom is much more important than intelligence. None of the problems are difficult to solve. What is required is a consciousness of thinking as the tool of mind and a confidence and enjoyment in its use. Being wrong is not important so long as there is no arrogance. Like the exhaust gases from a motor car, being wrong now and then indicates that thinking is taking place and not just ego-prancing. The purpose of thinking The purpose of thinking can be listed under the following headings. Enjoyment The exploration of experience for pleasure—nostalgia, day-dreams, reveries, reading, passive entertainment, the exploration of an interesting subject and in general the pleasures of exploration of the past or the present. Thinking is a perfectly legitimate source of pleasure, quite apart from playing chess or doing crossword puzzles. Those who dislike thinking do so because they equate it with frustratingly difficult situations or the ego-involvement of argument or intellectual gymnastics. Problem-solving Bringing something about. Most thinking situations can be put in terms of a ‘problem’. If there is a desire to bring something about (solve the problems created by inflation, or design a new toy) then thinking can be applied in a problem-solving way. The definition of the problem can make a difference to the ease with which it is solved. Review Audits and an examination and mapping of the status quo. This is a descriptive use of thinking which may he directed inwards or outwards. It may involve simplification and clarification. When directed inwards it requires objectivity and honesty. The descriptive use of thinking is the only one taught in schools, and that is only outward directed description. In the new meta-system inward directed description and auditing are important. Perceptual change A deliberate attempt to change not the world but the way we are looking at it. This usually involves lateral thinking. Perceptual change is the basic tool of adjustment. It may also be of value in problem-solving. [Preceding overlap each other] These are broad categories of purpose and there is considerable overlap. For example, review and understanding can be part of enjoyment and also part of problem-solving. Perceptual change can be part of problem-solving and problem-solving can be part of perceptual change. Starting-point The starting-point for thinking is always an exploration of the inner world created by perception. The perception may be of something which is immediately present (but we only understand it in terms of experience) or of matters which are not present at the moment (like financial planning or budgeting). The main problem here is one of drift. People wait for ideas to come into their minds and then drift from point to point. The examination of each point may be excellent, but the points are only an arbitrary sample of the whole situation. If you rely on one point to generate the next one you will have the characteristic point-to-point thinking of young children. To avoid this there is a need for a definite framework of attention which includes scan, focus and analysis. Scan This involves a deliberate framework for carrying attention over the whole field. This broad perspective does not happen naturally, but is essential for effective thinking. All the factors have to be taken into consideration - it is not worth buying a car that does not fit your garage. Can also include a process of mapping. For example, in a conflict situation both sides could cooperate to produce a map of the conflict area showing the areas of agreement, and the areas that were agreed to be irrelevant. There could then be a reaction to this map instead of the usual polemical confrontation. Focus The ability to focus directly and purposefully on some aspect of the situation. This is much more difficult than it seems, and most thinkers only have a general idea of what they are thinking about. Focus is not the same as identification of the problem. It is the deliberate isolation of a small part of the general situation. With comparison, judgement, assessment of priorities and other such situations it may be necessary to hold different things in focus or at least to be able to switch back and forth from one focus to another. Analysis An analysis turns a focal point into a whole field by looking in detail at what has been focused upon and breaking it down into even smaller areas each of which can become a point of focus. Analysis is particularly useful in overcoming the problems created by the ‘lump effect’ in which attention is paid to a word or concept that includes several sub-concepts. It must be emphasized that analysis is by no means the whole of thinking, and analysis by itself will not solve problems. In the past rather too much attention has been paid to logical analysis as the only required tool of thinking. Framework The two biggest problems with the initial or starting point of thinking are confusion and drift. Both can be overcome by the application of an artificial and external framework. The framework allows the thinker to direct his attention to one area after another instead of trying to deal with everything at once. The framework sets up a sequence of stages and allows the thinker to concentrate on each stage in succession. One such framework is used in the CoRT Thinking program (CoRT stands for Cognitive Research Trust).1 FootnoteBodyDeleted (CoRT Thinking: Action (Direct Education Services, Blandford, Dorset, UK).) This is the TEC-PISCO framework and is made up as follows: [TEC] Target (T): focus directly on some target. Expand (E): expand and elaborate and say as much as you can about the target including the creation of alternatives. Expansion in depth and in breadth. Contract (C): extract the important point, narrow down, come to a decision or conclusion. This TEC process is a general framework tool that can then be applied during any one of the actual problem-solving stages of the PISCO process, which is made up as follows: [PISCO] Purpose (P): definition of the objective or purpose of the thinking, the end-point that is desired. Input (I): all the information, factors, considerations that have to be taken into account. Background situation, surrounding situation and future situation are included here. Solutions (S): alternative solutions to the problem. If there is a ‘sticking-point’ in the way of a solution, this can be defined as a new problem in itself and tackled with the whole process. Choice (C): decision and conclusion. Judgement, priorities, evaluation criteria are applied in order to choose one from amongst the alternative solutions. Operation (O): the steps required to put the solution into operation. Thinking does not end with a solution but with a way of putting that solution into action. There needs to be a plan of action. The above framework is only an example of the sort of framework that can be used to avoid confusion. It happens to be the one that is used in an extensive program for teaching thinking as a skill in schools.1 FootnoteBodyDeleted * Teaching Thinking, Maurice Temple Smith, 1976; Penguin Books, 1979. Such a framework is not a restricting structure but a liberating one because it frees the thinker to think within each area instead of having to keep everything in mind at once. Being wrong No one is ever wrong on purpose, but in general the following seem to be the most common faults in thinking. Instant judgement This includes prejudice. An instant judgement is either brought to the situation or is made from a preliminary glimpse. Thinking is then used not to explore the situation but solely to support the conclusion that has already been made. This is a fault that is obvious in politicians, but it is also very common in academics and other clever people who use their thinking as a means of support for their egos rather than as an exploration. Unfortunately it is also what many pupils are taught in school in essay-writing or in debates. Inadequate scan This means thinking or arguing from only part of the total situation. This is by far the most common fault in any thinking anywhere. Obviously no one can know all the information or see all the field, but the deliberate selection of only a small part of the field is inexcusable. By carefully choosing only part of the situation and deliberately ignoring other parts, a thinker can construct a perfectly logical argument and then rest his case on the logicality of that argument. A person who starts out with a negative attitude of mind will concentrate on those features which are capable of being attacked. This inadequate scan or ‘partialism’ is of course the basis of our hallowed dialectic process. Magnitude effect This involves a train of cause and effect where the magnitudes involved are quite inappropriate. The magnitude effect may be seen in remarks such as ‘A great deal of money could be saved if the social security system was tightened up so that there were fewer cheats.’ This sort of remark would follow a newspaper revelation that someone had cheated the system out of £30,000 over two years. Yet in proportion to the total amount of money going through the system this is insignificant. Another remark might be: ‘British Industry would have no problems if strikes were made illegal.’ In fact the number of working days lost through strikes is very much less than the number lost through minor illnesses. As usual in the magnitude error the effect is going in the right direction but the size of the effect is neglected. Another example might be: ‘We must preserve the stock exchange because it is an efficient means of supplying industry with the money it needs.’ Certainly the stock exchange does this efficiently but in fact no more than 3 per cent of the finance required by industry is raised by the stock exchange. ‘There would be enough to go round if some people did not make excessive profits’ is a commonly heard remark. Yet if inflation is taken into account many industries are running at a loss and not even generating enough money to maintain their working capital. There may well be a small number of profiteers especially in such areas as property speculation but this must be set against the whole of industry. Point-to-point Here the mind follows along an apparently logical connection, but this is usually based on a very limited view of the situation. For example, it may be argued that since the moon affects the tides and since the human body is over 90 per cent water then it is likely that the stars should affect human destiny. Point-to-point argument consists of a series of jumps of this sort and has been much used in the past for political and religious purposes. Being right Being right is the point of satisfaction at which we ‘rest’ our thinking. There am various ways of being right. Being right is almost an emotion (just as is the ‘rightness’ of belief), and this emotion can be based on some of the following circumstances. Error-free An absence of logical error as perceived by oneself or by an opponent. There seems to be a fit, or the thing seems to ‘click’ together with a sense of satisfaction and rightness. The belief that error-free thinking is necessarily valid has been by far our biggest cultural block to effective thinking. This is because it has put all the emphasis on logical processing rather than perceptual adequacy. Error-free thinking based on inadequate perception may be dangerously misleading. Emotional rightness The thinking has done nothing except provide a framework of respectability around emotions that were there all the time. In this type of thinking we are apt to use value-laden words which prejudge the issue. We refer in contempt to ‘cow-like’ contentment if we wish to argue against contentment. Unique rightness We feel that the solution we have found is the only possible one. Outside of mathematics where a ‘right’ answer is a right answer there is no reason to suppose that the first solution found is the only one or indeed the best one. Nor is there any reason to suppose that our solution is any better than someone else’s. Unique rightness is based on our personal inability to see or even imagine any other solution or explanation. In descriptive sciences like anthropology proof is often no more than lack of imagination. Unique rightness also gives rise to arrogance which is of course the enemy of all thinking and totally inappropriate when we are dealing with proto-truths. The above idioms of thinking, which are described more fully elsewhere,1 need to be kept in mind both with regard to our own thinking and also with regard to the thinking of others. FootnoteBodyDeleted * Practical Thinking, Penguin Books, 1976. Decision Decision is a very important part of thinking, and it is the aspect of thinking that is lacking in the descriptive thinking taught in schools. Much of the thinking in real life has to end, some time, with a decision, because action is based on decision. It may be a decision to do the easiest thing or it may be a decision to make no decision or a definite decision to do nothing (just avoiding a decision is a definite decision to do nothing even if it does not seem so). No decision is perfect. Most decisions have to be based on inadequate knowledge and some guesswork. In particular it is very difficult to know what will happen in the future, and most decisions affect the future. Decisions are always emotional in the end. And so they should be. Ultimately it must be the feelings of the person making the decision that matter most. The purpose of thinking is so to arrange the situation that the emotional decision is the right one. Aids to the rearrangement include the following: Priorities The thinker draws up a list of priorities and evaluation criteria and then sees which of the alternatives best fit the requirements. This is not as easy as it seems because no alternative will score in one area while another scores elsewhere, and simply adding up the scores usually does not work. It is best to reduce the priorities to just one or two and to add to them the reason, or pressure, for making the decision. Then you see which alternative comes out best. Review Imagine you had chosen one of the alternatives, and then describe to yourself, in words or on paper, just why you made that decision. See if it seems plausible. Usually it will not. If you can describe in advance, with honesty and with conviction, the reasons for a decision, you will probably not regret it. You may be surprised how often a very appealing choice turns out to be feebly supported by reasons. Do this for each of the alternatives. Consequences Imagine you have chosen one or other of the alternatives. Draw up a list of plus consequences and minus consequences and also include an area of ‘don’t knows’. This focus on consequences may make the decision easier because decisions are more often based on how something looks at the moment rather than in the future. Alteration In order to find out just why an alternative appeals emotionally, make a slight alteration to it. For example, if you have a holiday choice of a particular place you might say: ‘Suppose I went there and did not meet anyone new?’ You may find that the appeal of the place suddenly vanishes. In that case you have identified the source of the appeal rather than leaving it embedded in the general choice. This is a powerful way of examining the emotional content of alternatives. There is a psychologically recognized process known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ which states that a decision will become more attractive after it has been made than before. This protects the decision-maker. If a decision is very evenly balanced, then the toss of a coin should decide it. In practice this can be used. It does not seem very satisfactory because one tends to concentrate on the alternative that is being given up and is reluctant to abandon the potentiality of enjoying it as well. In most cases it is this reluctance to give something up that creates difficulty with a decision. A girl undecided between two suitors knows she would be happy with either—but is reluctant to give up the advantages peculiar to either of them. It makes decisions much easier if the thinker concentrates on what he is prepared to give up or ‘trade-off’ in such a situation. Lateral thinking The need for lateral thinking arises directly from the patterning nature of perception. Lateral thinking is concerned with changing perceptions, changing patterns and changing concepts. Instead of building on a particular way of looking at things you move ‘sideways’ and try to change that perception. By its very nature a patterning system requires a procedure for changing patterns, otherwise the same patterns will be used over again: patterns determine perception, but as we look through the patterns what we see confirms them. It is true that patterns can be changed by mistake and by chance, but that is a slow and unpredictable process. Lateral thinking is the deliberate type of thinking concerned with pattern changing. At first sight lateral thinking appears illogical. For example, you may use a completely random input or you may use as a stepping-stone a statement which is quite wrong. Logic demands that what is said must be consistent with and deducible from what has gone before. But the process of lateral thinking is provocation. If what is said is logically consistent with what has gone before, then the established pattern is being used and no provocation is taking place. We do, however, need a language indicator to show that a statement is being made as a provocation and not as a statement consistent with experience. The language indicator is the new word ‘po’ which is explained in detail in PO: Beyond Yes and No.1 It is derived from hypothesis, suppose, possible, and poetry, for in all these situations ideas are used in a provocative manner. The basic process of lateral thinking is to make a provocative step which takes us out of the main channel we would otherwise have remained within. We now proceed, quite logically, from the new position and see if we can journey to a useful new idea. FootnoteBodyDeleted * Penguin Books, 1974; Simon & Schuster, New York, 1974. [The three basic processes of lateral thinking] The three basic processes of lateral thinking are related to the biodic symbol. They are all designed to increase our chances of reaching the ‘insight point’. Once we have arrived there it is easy, with hindsight, to see the side track that led there all the time. So we use a provocative method to get to the new idea but then prove its value by the side track since the provocative step can have no proof value. Stepping-stone The first process involves the use of a ‘stepping-stone’ or ‘intermediate impossible’. For example, if we were trying to design a safer cigarette we might say: ‘Po, instead of trying to remove particles of smoke with a filter we ought to add something to them.’ At first this may seem to be going in the opposite direction. Normally we might reject such a suggestion, but in lateral thinking we see where, as a stepping-stone, it can get us. What could we add? We could add air. If you make a few pinholes just above the filter of a cigarette then air is sucked in, diluting the smoke with every inhalation. Because smoke particles are deposited in the lung by Brownian motion which depends on the concentration, this dilution does in fact reduce tar deposition. I did some work on this principle many years ago. In fact the air dilution principle is now the basis of the cigarettes judged as least harmful in the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany. There are specific procedures for obtaining a stepping-stone: the easiest of these is to reverse whatever is happening normally. Instead of asking people to come and look at new houses, ‘po, the houses go to see the people’. This stepping-stone was deliberately used by a builder in London who built a show-house on a barge in the Thames and towed it up and down the river to places to which people could easily get. Within three months he had 26,000 visitors to the house. There are also specific ways of using stepping stones. The main principle is to use an idea deliberately as a provocation rather than reject it because it is wrong or outrageous. Where can this idea get me? The process is shown in Figure 21. Concept-challenge This involves a deliberate focus on a concept, and a challenge not to its validity but to its uniqueness. Normally we challenge only those things which are inadequate or with which we can find fault. The challenge in concept-challenge is a way of saying: this is perfectly all right, but is it the unique and only way of looking at things? We can focus on the head of a match and challenge why there should only be a head at one end: this might lead to a concept of a match with two heads which could be reversed and re-used. It is possible to challenge the roundness of a wheel. It is possible to challenge the uniform value of currency: perhaps each country should have two currencies, one of which is adjusted to keep pace with inflation by a value expressed in increasing amounts of the other (like an internal gold standard not subject to the vagaries of international gold speculation). The concept-challenge process is more of an escape process than a provocative one. It can, however, generate an idea which in turn becomes a stepping-stone. The process is shown in Figure 22. The process, and attitude, of concept-challenge is summed up in the difference between 6+2=8 and 8=6+2. Both equations are right but the first is uniquely right since carrying out the addition operation can give no other answer. But with the second equation ‘8’ is not uniquely produced by adding z to 6 for it may be the result of many other operations. In concept-challenge we challenge whether something is merely right (amongst alternatives) or uniquely right. Random juxtaposition Here the process requires the introduction of a completely random stimulus which is juxtaposed with the problem in hand. The connection that develops between the two may serve to give emphasis to the side track, as shown in Figure 23. For example, the juxtaposition of ‘cigarette po soap’ gave rise to the idea of putting flower seeds in the butts of cigarettes so that man would beautify the surroundings with his waste instead of messing them up. This is not a specially strong idea, but it does illustrate the sort of idea that could not come directly from analysis of the situation itself—although with hindsight it makes good sense. The juxtaposition of ‘cigarette po traffic-light’ produced the idea of a red ‘danger’ band that would be about two centimetres from the butt end of the cigarette, since the last two centimetres are the most dangerous, as the smoke particles that have condensed there are re-evaporated. A person who deliberately smoked into the danger zone would be making a conscious decision to do so. There are many other techniques and processes in lateral thinking, and these are described in detail elsewhere.* The direct purpose of lateral thinking is to develop a new way of looking at things. For example, if we were to say ‘self po leaf’ we might develop the concept of several different selves all of which were separate but which depended upon and fed into the central self. Exlectics The exlectic process was described in an earlier section of this book. The contrast is between the dialectic process which depends on opposition and clash for the development of new ideas and the exlectic process which involves extracting a key-point and then rebuilding a better idea around it. For example, we could have a dialectic argument about the value of examinations in education or we could extract the key-point of ‘selection’. We could then consider that while we select for success we also select for failure at the same time. Perhaps there could be a whole range of examinations or assessments that tested for things other than academic skill: for example, application, perseverance, social skills, cheerfulness, organizing ability. Or we might allow people to assess themselves by selecting the type of work of which they considered themselves capable. If we were to look at medicine we could extract the ‘efficiency’ of doctors as a key-point. Around this we might build a two-tier concept of medicine with swift and efficient diagnostic methods which could be taught in a much shorter course (perhaps using flow-chart methods) and a back-up system of the more highly qualified doctor who would only be called upon occasionally. We could divide diseases on a frequency basis: about five major categories cover something like 80 per cent of surgery visits. One type of doctor could specialize in just these five diseases. There are problems and deficiencies in all these ideas, but in the exlectic process the aim is to modify, improve and evolve the idea towards a better one. It is a matter of building up a better idea from the old one (introducing new concepts when required) rather than trying to batter the old idea into a better shape by a clash between it and its opposite. Practical problems with thinking Complacency and arrogance are the two biggest problems. The arrogant thinker insists that he is right or that there is only one way to look at a situation. He spends his time defending his point of view or trying to impose it upon you. The complacent thinker acknowledges that he might be wrong but is not interested in exploring the matter further. Both attitudes cut off the possibility of any improvement.
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