Hunger, homelessness, poverty, sickness, illiteracy, fuel shortages, water shortages … the list of system-wide problems can go on and on. Therefore there is no shortage of matters to work on. They are legion, just waiting for our attention.
The second principle is that value is a function of agreement. Things are valuable because we say they are valuable. Most things in our lives are not inherently valuable. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Why is this important? Because it reminds us that doing a certain thing, like ending hunger or homelessness, is valuable because we say it is. So we should give up the effort to justify our projects on the basis of whether or not something is inherently valuable, cut through the confusion, and simply see that value depends on our say-so. It is up to us to say what work is valuable.
Let me give an example here. There are thousands of nuclear missiles sitting in silos. Do they have any intrinsic value? No. They usually just sit there until someone test fires one into the Pacific.
We spend billions of dollars on a system intended never to be used and actually never used (I realize that some have been fired in anger and then neutralized and that this information has been kept from the public.)
These missiles, their silos, their instrumentation, and their personnel have value because we say they do. What we need to do is agree on what projects we want to tackle and not waste time arguing over whether they are inherently valuable.
Thus did Kennedy create putting a man on the moon. Thus could we create projects to end pandemics, control the weather benevolently, turn animal waste into methane, create a car that runs on water, and so on.
The third principle is that alignment requires deadlines. Kennedy did not say we shall put a man on the moon “someday.” If he had, we could probably not have rallied a nation behind the project, raised the money, and created the organization that could accomplish the task.
He said we will do it by the end of the decade (the Sixties) and we organized ourselves and did it sooner than that.
Deadlines allow for society-wide alignment on and coordination of a large-scale project. Let us end homelessness in America by 2010. Let us end hunger in America by 2011. And so on.
The fourth principle is that only context-wide or system-wide solutions are ultimately workable. If we approach a problem at less than an overarching manner, we will simply create another problem. Win/lose, bandage, and ad hoc solutions approach a problem at less than a system-wide level. They may solve a problem for some but they will not dissolve a problem for all - and certainly not problems such as those we are facing today.
We have to aim for system-wide, win/win, complete solutions in a world that works for everyone if we want to avoid creating resistance, residue, and fresh problems.
The fifth principle is that paradigmatic breakthroughs come as a result of remaining with, rather than rejecting, dissonance. So often when confusion, paradox, or a clash of opposites arise, we lose heart and think that matters cannot succeed.
But all the really deep paradigmatic thinkers of history have known that remaining with the dissonance, embracing all sides of the problem, resting with the paradoxes, leads to paradigmatic breakthroughs.
The stories of the successes of Thomas Kuhn, Max Weber, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, three thinkers who created new paradigms in social science, rest on their ability to remain with dissonance until the distinction that transcended them arose.
So we, too, should not be discouraged by the rise of dissonance as we plan our large-scale employment projects in our modern “New Deal.”
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