Playing True with Thought
No matter where you stand in our current political landscape, it can seem like a fiasco characterized by anger, denial, and blame. But here’s a scary prospect: what if the way we are thinking about all this is helping to shore up a system that none of us wants. Could we be unintentionally colluding with those we disagree with simply in how we share our thinking, whether on facebook, in op-eds, or over beers with our friends?
David Bohm [physicist and philosopher] points to words like collusion as one of the ways we have to describe the falseness that traps us when we accept our thinking AS reality. The word collusion, along with illusion & delusion, share a root word, ludere, meaning ‘to play’. As Bohm describes it,
illusion implies playing false with perception;
delusion, playing false with how we make sense of things; and
collusion, playing false together in order to support each other’s illusions and delusions.
[Bohm — Science, Order, and Creativity].
It might seem odd to think that we would collude with the opposition, but our sense of self can be so wrapped up in NOT being on the other team that any gain for “them” feels like a loss. And so we are locked into a dynamic that drives the dysfunction of our mutually defining opposition.
So how did we get this way? Bohm suggests that each of us comes to our particular way of understanding and navigating the world in large part through play [pretending/imitating & discovery/invention]. As tiny humans, we tried on an idea about the way things work [hypothesis]. We played around with pretending it is true [test]. If the idea held up it became a habit of thought or unconscious belief about how the world IS [“truth”] — in other words we stopped playing.
While the knowing and doing that result enable us to function and can even be useful in managing anxiety and fear, there is a down-side: our sense of who we are ends up enmeshed with OUR way of knowing & doing — so much so that questioning them is a threat to our very identity. When we encounter conflict, we point to the problem “out there” where we have little power to change things.
In the case of our political landscape it might seem that we HAVE no power — but what if simply framing this as a fight, even if we’re the “good guys” means we are using what little power we have to maintain the status quo? Have we really thought through what winning looks like? What do we plan to DO with those we have cast as our villains?
While I’m not entirely comfortable with Bohm’s stark language of playing either false OR true with thought, the idea of thought as play has me considering how I might play around with suspending my understanding of the game, both the rules and the board. I don’t mean to make this sound easy — after all, even playing takes effort, but I have found tools & frameworks that can make it less uncomfortable:
· Otto Scharmer’s Theory U invites us to notice the internal voices of judgment, cynicism, and fear and to listen for what emerges when we play with an open mind, open heart, and open will.
· Barry Johnson’s Polarity mapping invites us to play with the inherent tensions of polarities rather than fighting against them.
If the political situation is getting you down, it might be time to muster the courage to play with what you think you know. If enough of us play together, perhaps we can make our political abyss a little less abysmal.
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