CHAPTER 2 THE TRUTH? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH

We’ve tried to give you an idea of the state the world is in. Covering every aspect would be impossible, but you get the gist of it: the world is complex and connected. Now that we more or less understand what makes it so, we can take a look at our reaction to this complexity, which is a rather panicky one.

To make our surroundings easier to grasp, our brains tend to simplify. We categorize, structure and reduce complexity so that we can keep on moving. Our mental capacity isn’t conceived to question everything and keep every exception in scope at all times, it is simply too much to process. As a solution to this shortcoming, we make up rules, agree on what is true and what is not. We divide and simplify. On the one hand, there is what we see as normal or acceptable, on the other what we define as an exception or an aberration. This segmentation is necessary to make the world a place where we can move and make decisions. In a word: live.

Together, these rules, truths and axioms form a paradigm; something that encompasses both a world view and the tools needed to navigate it. In the history of mankind, a lot of paradigms have come and gone. They work somewhat like religions, explaining to us how the world works, how we should inhabit it, what our role in it is and how we should play it. Just like religions, paradigms are pressured once they are faced with too many questions they lack the answers to. They become outdated as people outsmart them and become critical, curious and unwilling to passively digest every explanation served – especially when the answer clearly doesn’t weigh up to the question. Paradigms fade when people lose their faith.

The Earth used to be flat

We’ve spent a lot of time walking around on this Earth thinking it’s flat. For centuries, it’s what everybody knew to be true. Enter some critical thinkers. Adventurous, creative people with a curious and fearless mind, who challenged the dominant paradigm of their time. They pointed out a few anomalies in the flat Earth theory, the exceptions to the rule. As these non-believers delved into the topic, they found more anomalies, more questions that couldn’t be answered. At first, these critical voices were seen as exotic. Soon, they were perceived as merely annoying. Next, those who challenged the flat Earth truth out loud were being sentenced in an effort to shut them up. Eventually, though, the unanswered questions piled up too high for them to be ignored.

In time, a new paradigm provided answers to those questions and offered new rules which would clear up all those exceptions. The Earth, from then on, was round. Just like the paradigm shifted from geocentrism to heliocentrism, it shifted again some centuries later when Darwin showed us we were not a unique and special God-sent creature. Really, we were not much different from monkeys. No longer were we kings of the realm, the new truth taught us it was mostly coincidence that we had made it that far up the food chain.

A few decades forward and in comes Freud, teaching us free will is an illusion and man has no knowledge over his own emotions whatsoever. According to the psychiatrist, we are needy, hysterical creatures, badgered by intentions and urges unbeknownst to us. The reasons for our actions are hidden not only to our fellow humans, but even to ourselves. At a time when we were still recovering from the discovery that we didn’t master the universe, Freud told us that we aren’t even masters of our own bodies, nor our own minds.

It was a startling realization, but we were consoled by the fact that we were still the most intelligent creature walking the face of this earth. For a while, at least. Then came Big Blue from IBM, a computer that kicked our behinds playing chess. We may have lost the intelligence game to a bunch of ones and zeroes, or maybe just our dominance over technology: the jury is still out on that one. But we definitely lost something. With every one of these shifts, we’ve been propelled out of the center of our universe, losing our religion, re-arranging our truths and expectations. But we’ve always soldiered on.

The tragedy of being ahead

Truth be told, there were a lot of thinkers before Copernicus and Darwin who made the same statements in an attempt to pivot the paradigm. Timing got the better of them: people were not ready and so these novel theories didn’t resonate. Or maybe the alternative they presented wasn’t clear enough.

A tipping point is the critical moment in a situation where an unstoppable change will occur, often with catastrophic consequences. Influenced by myriad variables, actors and unknowns, tipping points are hard to pin down. Looking at climate change, 2020 has been dubbed as an important year to achieve key milestones. By that year, we had to achieve a stabilization of global CO2 emissions to stay on track. Failing to do so, an acceleration effect would take off, setting in motion irreversible changes to our natural environment. Beyond the tipping point, all our efforts would become pointless. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether or not we got the timing estimate right. Regardless of our calculations, a system reaches a point where it can no longer contain the effects it produces. Where we can no longer contain the effects of what we produced.

Another such tipping point is the 30 % rule. It states that if 30 % of the people – or the companies – believe the same thing or make a move in the same direction, there is a high chance of that idea being accepted and implemented, or a boundary being permanently pushed. Once an idea reaches the 30 % threshold, it stands a fighting chance to be widely adopted. 30 % is the point where the pioneers are rewarded for having stood on the forefront.

This makes sense. While even the most historical of revolutions can originate with just one person, in order to see real change and to harvest the benefits of your efforts to counter challenges, you need enough critical mass. One person cannot change the paradigm.

Nobody likes change

We can handle change, provided the pace is slow. Paradigms have always shifted, and it is in our nature to gradually move from one to the next. This movement happens incrementally and organically, provided we don’t fear the change. Had people feared change, feared the loss of truth and the transformation into a new paradigm, we would still think we were sent to a flat Earth in the middle of the universe by a God almighty.

We see the translations of paradigms all around us. On a societal level, we’ve installed law. We’ve structured our cities with everything from garbage pickup schedules to traffic rules. Even at the micro level, there are rules and we act accordingly. But not all the rules we live by are official. On a daily basis we ascribe certain stereotypes to people as a way to demystify the complexity of our interactions. This is how we cope with uncertainty, unpredictability and chaos in relations. That’s a good thing. Just imagine how slowly we would walk through our lives if we had to infinitely ponder every dilemma, nuance and question mark. However, this dynamic of rules and snap decisions can become destructive when it ignores the fundamental differences between people, denying moral dilemmas and eliminating any room for change. When rigid, it becomes oppressing. Ignoring reality might seem an attractive way out, but it means we stop evolving. And if we wish to impact reality, we have to at least understand it, and not just a watered-down version of it.

The unfortunate paradox

The world is a mess, and our old answers can’t save us anymore. When we feel pressured, be it by the speed of time, change, technological advances, societal movements or global emergencies, our world view and the image we have of ourselves tends to become binary, more reductionist. This is an unfortunate paradox, but we feel we need more order to face the chaos when the chaos increases.

A side effect of this need for simplification is that it nourishes polarization and makes us divide the world into opponents. Good versus bad, closed versus open, disruptive versus traditional, technology versus nature, man versus woman, us versus them. It feels more graspable that way. But in our minds, these ‘opponents’ become fundamentally incompatible. We can only look at the world through either/or goggles.

This serves us well to overcome the short-term downsides of complexity. In fact, it’s great if you want to move fast and thrive on your own. But a world constructed out of entities who are each other’s opponents is like a world in a constant state of war. A battlefield where everything is binary, and nothing is compatible. Such a world view is a source of conflict, misunderstanding and competition. Ignoring the variety, incongruencies and novelty our world holds is by no means fruitful. It is reductionist and frankly, it is sad.

Binary thinking has the advantage of making complex systems easier to grasp in the short term, but in the long run, it reduces them to unrealistic proportions, alienates us from reality and makes it impossible to interact with our surroundings in a humane way. When we divide our world into categories, we automatically assign some of them to ourselves. Man, Western, liberal, straight, catholic… Likewise, there are a lot of categories we don’t attribute to ourselves. They feel alien, different, opaque. Everything we are not becomes a source of uncertainty. And that’s a lot of uncertainty being added to an already pretty complex world.

As a species, we have long thrived on binary thinking. It’s been the crux of math, science, computing, law. Regardless, the black-and-white view is even losing grip in each of these domains. Take quantum physics, a domain of rapid progress that has introduced uncertainty and probability in scientific thinking. It shrugs off causality, linearity and binary thinking, happily adding some more uncertainty about nature than we already have. Quantum physics even challenges our concept of time, an idea on which we have based our entire societal and economic model. Quantum physics has shown us the binary model’s strengths are no longer outweighing its weaknesses. In other words: the model is up for review.

It’s time to shift the paradigm, just like we did with the help of Copernicus, Darwin and the rest. Right now, we see anomalies pop up in various sectors and layers of society. Traditional businesses are challenged like never before, our natural habitat is fighting not to collapse under the pressure we’ve put on it, and the symptoms of unease are felt in democracies around the world.

We were never meant to stay in one paradigm forever. We use the current one until we outgrow it, until we become cleverer than our books, strong enough to face uncertainty and move up a level. The gradual movement from one truth into the next is what maturing is made of. It demands confidence, creativity and self-relativity to let go of what you thought to be true, to educate yourself and move beyond. That is real progress.

You understand the world is increasingly complex. We won’t answer that complexity with the thinking of yesterday. So, let’s build bridges.