The Paradigm Conspiracy

What’s going on? Why are systems betraying their service to us? Instead of performing their rightful functions of educating (schools), nurturing (families), promoting public good (governments), managing the shared household (businesses), and inspiring us to find and fulfill our life’s purpose (religious institutions), they’re abusing us and turning us into people we never wanted to be. Why?

Enter “paradigms.” Back in 1962—so long ago John Kennedy was still alive—historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn gave an analysis of how systems change (or don’t) in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that rocked the intellectual world. He wasn’t talking about addictive systems but about the system of scientific research, which has its own brand of obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Introducing the term “paradigm,” Kuhn said that scientists operate from mental models—paradigms—that shape everything they think, feel, and do. How scientists perceive and interpret experience is shaped by their internal structure of beliefs and concepts—their paradigm. If something is wrong, the paradigm is the place to look to find out why.

To raise paradigm issues is to reflect on the ideas or concepts we’re using as our map of reality—our world view, life perspective, philosophy, or mental model. Whatever we call it, it’s powerful stuff. To look at our paradigm is to look at the blueprint we’re using to build our worlds.

How do paradigms start? They usually begin with some exemplary model—“Newtonian science” or “Einsteinian relativity”—that weaves together theories, standards, and methods in a way that makes better sense than anything else. To share a paradigm is to share a commitment to rules that define how a scientist acts and reacts. No part of scientific activity is outside the reach of the paradigm’s influence. It’s as if scientists’ energies get poured through the paradigm’s mold, and whatever comes out is stamped by that all-encompassing model.

In the decades since, Kuhn’s paradigm-concept has been applied to every discipline, from the arts to business. And rightly so. We experience our lives the way we do because of the paradigms we carry around. In computer terms, paradigms function like the central operating system of consciousness—the supra-program that transforms undefined perceptions into something we call our experience. They give us the mental tools to make sense of life and survive in it. We may not be able to summarize our paradigm in ten words or less, but our every thought is paradigm connected, even paradigm created.

Development within a paradigm. Given the power of paradigms, two kinds of development follow. The first occurs within the paradigm’s framework. The second chucks the paradigm and forges a new one.

“Normal science,” as Kuhn calls it, is the first kind of development. Practitioners operate within their mental model and pursue its implications to the nth degree. Working inside the prevailing paradigm is the secure, accepted, and well-rewarded way to do science.

In fact, the paradigm gets so comfortable that scientists forget that it’s there; it becomes functionally invisible. They way they see things is just the way things are. For them, there is no paradigm between their ideas and reality.

Applied to life, the normal-science phase is business as usual, families as usual, politics, churches, schools, and professions as usual. When we’re ticking away within a paradigm’s framework, the norm is well defined, and we conform. Coping skills mean finding ways to fit into the norm, whether it’s healthy or not. In fact, “healthy” is whatever the paradigm says it is. Becoming healthy means adjusting to the paradigm’s definition.

Paradigm shifts. The revolutionary development comes when the paradigm reaches a crisis. It doesn’t solve problems the way it once did. Anomalies—things that the paradigm can’t explain—start accumulating. Paradigm-health starts making us sick. More and more, the paradigm doesn’t work. That’s when scientists are challenged to shift paradigms by moving into a phase Kuhn calls “extraordinary science.”

But “extraordinary science” isn’t easy. In language suited to academia, Kuhn describes how scientists freak out. Everything they ever learned is called into question. During the revolutions in physics early in this century, even Einstein, no slouch in forward-thinking, wrote, “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.”

The more the paradigm fails to do its job, the more old-paradigm scientists try to make it work. The paradigm is ripe for a revolution, but because they’ve forgotten that they even have a paradigm, scientists conclude instead that their world is falling apart. Solutions—alternative ways of doing science—don’t exist. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve explored all the possibilities, and the only options they see don’t help. They’re too paradigm-bound to notice that they’re stumbling over the limits of their own models.

The paradigm cause of soul-abusive systems. “Extraordinary science” describes the situation we face today. We’re not experiencing paradigm-norms as healthy, either personally or globally. The blueprint for our families, schools, businesses, and governments isn’t working. It’s causing our shared social systems to function abusively and to make us sick as a result. Happy people and healthy systems don’t turn addictive, life-destroying substances into the biggest growth industry on the planet.

We’d think changing a paradigm that’s not working would be easy, but it’s not. As Kuhn observed, the paradigm-cause of crises remains invisible to old-paradigm practitioners. We don’t need a new paradigm, they believe, we just need to make the one we have work better. Nothing is wrong with our social systems, since that would call the underlying paradigm into question.

Instead, when things don’t work, something must be wrong with us. “Blame certain people and label them as the troublemakers. We need more discipline, more restraints,” old-paradigm experts advise us, “more tests and tougher grading systems, more hard-nosed business-management practices, more God-fearing, sex-repressing piety, and more laws with stricter enforcement.”

In other words, according to the prevailing paradigm, coming down hard on people isn’t abuse. It’s how we create healthy families, schools, businesses, governments, and churches, because it rids us of the sinful, ignorant, or otherwise unruly souls that muck up the social machinery. If things don’t work, the solution is to take away more rights, stifle more creativity, intimidate more people, build more prisons, and bring back the death penalty. More fear keeps people in line.

This paradigm touches every part of our lives—but invisibly. We don’t realize that the paradigm is there, which means we don’t recognize its role in creating our social institutions. As long as the paradigm remains hidden, we don’t see what’s causing system-wide suffering, which means we can’t stop it.

The paradigm of control and power-over. What kind of paradigm requires that we blame individuals, intimidate, and punish them in order to keep our social systems “healthy”? Like a complex tapestry, the paradigm has many threads, but the overall pattern has to do with control: Who has power over whom, and how is a power-over relation maintained? Riane Eisler, in her pioneering work, The Chalice and the Blade, calls this the “dominator model,” contrasting it with “the partnership way.” Domination is the paradigm’s driving issue, and for a reason: in this world view, top-down control is necessary for social order.

According to the power-over model—what we refer to as the control paradigm—if somebody doesn’t control us, our social systems will fall into chaos. Archaeologist John Romer notes, for instance, that the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in an attempt to hold “a ramshackle empire” together, “made a state where animals, land and people were all tightly organized and controlled.”ÉLike Diocletian, authorities of today believe that nothing would work if we each did our own thing. To have order, we must do what the authorities tell us to do.

Soul: the big threat. Now come the threads: to be controlled, we have to be unplugged from competing sources of control. The major threat to external control is our internal guidance system—our souls.

A clear definition of “soul” isn’t easy to come by, since it’s not an object we can measure or photograph. But “inner identity” or the “core of who we are” are good places to start. “Soul” refers to our deep presence. It’s our inner connectedness to whatever we take to be Being, God, the One, the whole, or the ground of creation (to paraphrase theologian Paul Tillich). Physician Larry Dossey describes the soul as “some aspect of ourselves that is infinite, beyond the limits of space and time.” It’s our direct link to reality.

This whole-connected core is the source of our talents and the wellspring of creativity. It’s also what gives us the conviction that our lives have meaning. When we live from our souls, we feel alive and vital, and we take seriously the idea that we’re here for a purpose.

To us, our souls are our best friends and most trusted guides. But to the control paradigm, they’re the enemy—what has to be removed in order for external control to work. Only when we’re sufficiently disconnected from our inner compass will we follow outer demands.

“Get rid of the troublemakers.” For fear of chaos, social systems adopt the control paradigm and run with it. Through all sorts of institutionalized policies, we get the message that we’re unacceptable as we are, but that if we surrender ourselves to the social system (the family, school, business, profession, or religion), we’ll become acceptable. Our souls are sloppy and unmanageable troublemakers; they clog the system’s efficient workings, and we’re better off without them.

This isn’t reality talking; it’s a paradigm—an old one. Maybe sometime in the dim, dark recesses of human evolution a control-based paradigm may have served the species—we’re skeptical about that—but it’s not serving us now. The more power-over systems zap our inner lives, the less social order we have. It’s a paradigm in crisis, and it’s creating neither personal nor global health.

Two paradigm conspiracies. As long as the paradigm remains invisible, we’re stuck. The prevailing model stymies change. Every time we try to move in a new direction, the old paradigm kicks in and intimidates us into doing the same old, soul-diminishing stuff.

That’s the first paradigm conspiracy, the one that blocks our best efforts to confront crises and change.

But one paradigm conspiracy deserves another—the leap into “extraordinary-science.” True, paradigm shifts are full of uncertainties, trials and errors, hiccups and false starts, not to mention soul-searching forays into the unknown. We never know if we’ve come up with the “right” paradigm—or even if there is such a thing. In extraordinary science, we let everything go into flux. Yet nothing conspires to change our world so completely as doing precisely that.

The most conspiratorial part of a paradigm shift is that it lies within the power of each of us to do it. Paradigms aren’t Godzilla monsters; they’re ideas. Their power comes from our shared commitment to them. The minute one person starts to explore alternative models, the paradigm no longer holds the same power.

As Marilyn Ferguson explained in The Aquarian Conspiracy, the word ‘conspiracy’ comes from ‘conspirare,’ which means ‘to breathe together.’ A new cultural paradigm begins with each person stepping out of the old and daring to breathe something new. The “movers and shakers” are powerless to prevent a paradigm shift, once we together breathe a paradigm-revolution into being.