To liberate people and organizations, first liberate them from YOUR ideas
Deep lessons from philosophy by Dr. Francisco Miraval
I have found that one of the best ways to liberate people and organizations from whatever is chaining them to their present situation and blocking them from fulfilment and transcendence, is to make the conscious decision of liberating them from your own ideas. In most cases these ideas are obsolete, immature, decontextualized, and superficial.
That’s a goal I am committed to accomplish myself, for reasons the following example will illustrate…
A teaching moment from my Mongolian student
A few years ago, I was teaching an Introduction to Philosophy class at a private university in Denver. The class was on Mondays at 8:30am, neither the best day nor the best time for young adults to develop their critical thinking skills.
Yet, to my amazement, all the students were consistently there on time, except one Monday when a young foreign student arrived ten minutes late, dressed as if she’d just returned from a party, and unable to keep her eyes open.
After seeing that she was struggling not to fall asleep (a common occurrence in my classes, but that’s another story), I stopped the class and politely told her she was free to go. She immediately left.
For me, the situation was obvious. I knew that she was from Mongolia and that she was only 19. I also knew this was her first time in the United States and, in fact, this was her first time away from her family. It was clear that the combination of all those factors has led her to enjoy a night of excesses. After all, why else would someone come to a philosophy class dressed for a party?
Later, she came to my office to talk with me. I had my speech ready. I told her, in my best fatherly voice, but still commanding academic authority, that it was OK for her to explore options that perhaps she didn’t have in her native country. I also reminded her of the dangers and risks she may face attending parties, given the fact she was a foreigner and she was young.
I also told her that any exaggerated indulgence with alcohol may jeopardize her status at the university and, therefore, her status in the country. Finally, I admonished her about being careful choosing her friends and accepting invitations to parties.
She was right. I was wrong.
She looked at me and said:
“Professor, you don’t understand. I wasn’t at a party.”
“What is there not to be understood?”, I thought. She was late, she was dressed for a party (no way to deny it), and perhaps she was even drunk. Regardless, I asked her to explain what I was not understanding:
“I am from a small village in Mongolia and I am the first one not only in my family, but in the whole village to leave the village. Yesterday was the day of our traditional annual celebration in the village.
“They insisted I should be there and that I should eat the same food they eat. So, I had to cook traditional Mongolian food and dress in traditional Mongolian dress and attend the party via Skype. But Mongolia is 14 hours ahead of Denver. So, the party was in the middle of the night for me. I had to eat a lot of food alone at my college dorm during the night. That’s why I was sleepy and dressed for a party. But it was not a party. It was a celebration with my family.”
She was right: I had understood nothing.
All my assumptions about a rogue teenager from another country “enjoying” her new freedom were wrong and baseless. They were just a product of my groundless imagination.
My student only wanted to be with her family and honor her traditions, regardless of the geographic separation and time difference. And that’s what she did. At the same time, I, the philosophy professor, miserably failed to challenge my own ideas and assumptions. My critical thinking skills did not stop my biases and prejudices.
At that moment, I realized that if I ever wanted to help liberate people and organizations from whatever oppresses them, I should first liberate them from me and from my ideas.
The lesson I learned
If I were allowed to expand and generalize the lesson I learned that day from the teaching moment presented by my Mongolian student, I would say that we should liberate people and organizations from our own ideas, because our ideas are obsolete, immature, decontextualized, and superficial. I will now explain those four characteristics if you solemnly promise to promptly discard the explanation.
Characteristic #1: Your ideas are instantly obsolete
First, your ideas are instantly obsolete. If you can think about something, somebody else probably already thought it and, in addition, it also means that many more ideas have been created and shared since the moment you thought your idea.
In 1966, the amount of information humans produced was doubling every seven years (that is, it took seven years for your education to become obsolete). By 1973, it was half that time. By the beginning of 2012, information doubled in size in less than 18 months. By the end of 2012, it was already a matter of weeks. Now it is probably just a matter of hours (details in this article by Leonard A. Schlesinger in Harvard Business Review).
According Bernard Marr in this article:
“More data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race,”
Granted, not all the new information now constantly created is of the same value. Not everybody wants to know what you ate for breakfast or to see the latest smile of your cute nonhuman companion. But the information is there, all 44 trillion gigabytes of it, including 158 million hours of videos added every year to YouTube, more than 16 trillion messages in Facebook, and trillions of images, according to Marr.
Among the mountain of mostly useless information, once you remove the ore, you might find a diamond of good ideas. And chances are that idea might be similar to yours.
So, because the speed of information creation and sharing is increasing at exponential rates, it is very likely your ideas are being instantly surpassed by new ones, in the same minute that you develop and share them.
Obviously, accumulation of new information doesn’t mean better ideas. And new ideas don’t necessarily diminish the quality and worthiness of your “old” ideas. But, if the context in which your ideas came is already old by the time you thought your ideas, then you are at risk of using your ideas for a context they were never designed for, thus “chaining” people and organizations to (your) obsolete ideas.
And because, as Albert Einstein allegedly said:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.”
Becoming trapped by obsolete ideas is really risky.
I am not proposing to run after every new idea or to assume that just because our ideas, like most of the products in our society, suffer from pre-programmed obsolesce, we should reject them or abandon them, like you dispose an old cell phone or an old printer. That would be absurd. What I am proposing is to critically recognize the limits of your ideas in the context of a world where we experience profound, constant, and irreversible changes.
In a few words: be humble, share your ideas, but don’t chain others or even yourself to them.
Characteristic #2: Your ideas are mostly immature
At the very beginning of his What is Enlightenment? (1784), German philosopher Immanuel Kant explained that:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.”
And he immediately defined “immaturity” as:
“The inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”
In other words, in most cases, your ideas are not even yours because they were developed in somebody else’s mind and, even though you are able to repeat them, you still don’t truly understand them, because it is not something you understood from within you, but on the bases on an external “authority”.
We can say, therefore, that most of us (probably the great majority of us, yours truly certainly included) live in immaturity. Even worst, we wilfully want to remain immature, or “asleep”, as Heraclitus already complained two and half millennia ago.
But, why do people choose to remain immature or, should we say, ignorant?
A recent study suggests that people simply don’t want to know. It is “deliberate ignorance”, as Gerd Gigerenzer and Rocío Garcia-Retamero said in their paper Cassandra’s Regret: The Psychology of Not Wanting to Know.
Basically, according to Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero , immaturity and ignorance are preferred because, in that way, you can avoid potentially bad news, you can keep the importance of “personal events”, you can profit from your ignorance (if you know how to avoid responsibilities and liabilities), and you feel you are being impartial for not having an unfair advantage over anybody else. See details in this article.
As Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero said, deliberate ignorance not only exists, but “it is a widespread state of mind”. Will you later regret your decision of not knowing? Probably yes, according to those two researchers, and the chances of regret increase the closer you get to the event you wanted to ignore.
In addition to self-imposed immaturity, there is another aspect of immature ideas we briefly need to explore, that of the “first half” of your life, as proposed by Fr. Richard Rohr in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.
Clearly following Carl Jung, Rohr explains that in the “second half” of your life (which is not a chronological time, but, in my words, an existential moment) you should “undo” much of what you created during your first half, that is, your “ego”, so you can truly achieve self-realization and self-transcendence.
Or, as Rohr says in ‘Falling Upward’…, if you are still “worshipping the status quo” and “protecting your present ego and personal advantage”, then you still live in the “first half” of your life and you are probably blinded by fear and fanaticism. In the “second half” of your life, the self, not the ego, rules.
In summary: if you truly want to liberate others, liberate them from your own immature ideas.
Characteristic #3: Your ideas are frequently decontextualized
In a globalized, techno-scientifically oriented world, where change (flux, as Heraclitus said) is the norm and changes are constant, unexpected, deep, and irreversible, there is always a disconnection between your ideas and your reality, because from the time you think an idea to the time you want to share or implement it, reality already changed.
In other words, the ideas you thought for one context should now be applied to a different context, meaning that your ideas are frequently, if not always, decontextualized. And if you try to implement a decontextualized idea, the results will be, at best, just a conflict, and, at worst, total failure.
This is certainly nothing new. Two millennia ago, a wandering teacher in the area of Judea taught that “no one pours new wine into old wineskins”. If you do so, you will lose both the wine and the wineskin, because the fermentation and bubbling of the new wine require pliable wineskins.
In the same way, the fermentation and bubbling of new ideas (or old ideas made new again) requires pliable vessels, or, as Dr. Ariel Orama López says, a “plastic mind”.
“The quality of (mental) plasticity will be the most valued metal in the context of the future workforce.”
According to Orama López, a Spanish clinical psychologist.
Unfortunately, it is known that watching television or spending long hours on social media sites significantly reduces our neuroplasticity, thus further decontextualizing your ideas, because you simply can’t adapt fast enough to a new context, to a new reality.
It seems that we are losing our “mental plasticity” at just the time when we will most need to use it. Therefore, if you are honest with yourself and respectful of others, you should not impose your decontextualized ideas on them.
Characteristic #4: Your ideas are patently superficial
When I say that your ideas are instantly obsolete, mostly immature, frequently decontextualized, and, I add now, patently superficial, I am saying all that about my own ideas because, even after more than four decades of philosophical studies, that’s what they are.
But, what do I mean by a “superficial idea”? I am not talking about “small talk” or other cases of almost irrelevant exchanges of almost irrelevant information in the context of almost irrelevant encounters with others in our everyday life.
A superficial idea is an idea that is connected neither with the deep roots of the present (that is, it is not connected with the past) nor with the better version of oneself in the future, to paraphrase Dr. Otto Scharmer.
As Dr. Scharmer explains:
A superficial idea ignores the “underlying structures, paradigms of thought, and sources that are responsible for creating the visible level of events”. As he says, superficial ideas keep us “locked into re-enacting the same old patterns time and again”.
The “iceberg model of current reality”, as Scharmer refers to what we call “superficial ideas”, causes us and every other participant in a system to “re-enact results that ultimately nobody wants”, because we fail to recognize the “structural disconnects” separating us from nature, from others, and from ourselves, and we fail to recognize that the evolution of modern society “mirrors an evolution in human consciousness”. (Quotes taken from the U.Lab Sourcebook of this class.)
In a sense, all superficial ideas, that is, wrongly assuming that the reality you know is the whole reality, are ipso facto obsolete, immature, and decontextualized. And, for that reason, superficial ideas are a trap, condemning us to an extended present.
Goethe already knew about superficial ideas when he said:
“He who cannot account for 3,000 years of history remains in the dark, living from one day to the next.”
(Quoted by Christoph Meinel and Harold Sack, in Digital Communication, page 17). Goethe himself acknowledged that his Faust covered “3,000 years of history” from “Classical landscapes and mythological figures” to “the capitalism and imperialism of the 1820s.” (See also Ulrich Gaier, Helena, Then Hell: Faust as Review and Anticipation of Modern Times, in Goethe Yearkbook 17, 2010, page 3).
Two hundred years after Goethe, we should be able to account for 200 more years of history. Yet, we are seldom aware even of what is happening in the present. Hence, the superficiality of our ideas and the need not to condemn anybody to accept them.
Having said all that, please, indulge me and allow me to pretend I have “proven” that most (and probably all) of our ideas are obsolete, immature, decontextualized, and superficial. So, now what?
Final thoughts / Forget everything I just said
In a world where the future is no longer a continuation of the past and where the only connection between the past and the future is each of us, and where the singularity (and trans-humanism) may happen within a decade or so, we need much more than just “new” ideas (or, even worse, thinly recycled ideas). We need self-generating, self-adjusting, mature ideas based on a commitment to life-long learning.
But first we need to liberate others from our own ideas, which means that we must be liberated from our own ideas. Is that possible? I will only say that Plato spoke about the light outside the cave and, more recently, Maslow suggested to add “self-transcendence” to the apex of his famous pyramid.
Finally, please be sure to promptly discard all my many obsolete, immature, decontextualized, and superficial ideas. As I always say to my students, “Forget everything I just said”. I also tell them to forget it before they even make it out to the parking lot of the university. In your case, please do it before you close this window.
Francisco is a bilingual writer, philosopher, and educator with 25+ years of experience, living in Colorado, USA. He’s a Partner in the Flux Cells network, a global network of changemakers working together to liberate people and organisations.
