It is important for us to become conscious of the specific aspects of paradigms that are at work - guiding our thinking, relationships and the society-at-large.
Each form of social order, as Duane Elgin has articulated, has been marked by a "perceptual paradigm." Robert Anton Wilson, following Timothy Leary, has labeled this our "reality tunnel."
Jean Gebser has called the full emergence of our next paradigm as the Integral (Structures of Consciousness by Georg Feurestein).
Creating space for the emergence of a new paradigms requires learning, action, and also faith the evolutionary process. To date, we as a species, have flowed from being hunter-gatherers to farming to city-states, to feudalism, to capitalism, and presently our technological society, which is rapidly moving toward an emphasis on communicative culture and beyond. Each social form is reflective of a certain kind of psychological reality, which limits what we can perceive.
Suggesting that this movement is already underway, a partnership model in business is beginning to grow side by side with more traditional military-based models of rigid top-down chains of command. A growing number of successful organizations are engaged in courageous efforts to make their values explicit - to "walk their talk." This is occurring due to a growing perception that authoritarian structures are simply inefficient in an era of rapid technological and economic change.
The command-and-control relationship between managers and employees generates institutional blindness that blocks, frustrates, and reduces the speed, extent, and effectiveness of change. Ineffectiveness and bloated hierarchies are protected by managers and other members committed to the hierarchy, who hold obsolete systems in place.
In organizations it is rare that we take time to reflect on our philosophy of management or consciously try to improve the values, ethics and integrity that lend meaning to our work lives. Yet without philosophical questioning, psychological self-examination, and ethical reflection, we easily slip into rationalizing our actions and justifying everything we have done, from minor ethical lapses to outright evil.
Above all, we need a long-term perspective - and simultaneously the scientific view called "punctuated equilibrium" - which asserts that evolution occurs primarily through short bursts of intense speciation, followed by lengthy periods of stasis or equilibrium. The model postulates that nearly 99% of a species' time on earth is spent in stasis, and change happens very quickly.
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