With my website up and running it is time to spend some attention to my personal theme: truth versus interaction. This is the theme I expect to be orbiting around while writing upcoming posts. It is the theme I encounter over and over again while searching for answers on personal questions. Instead of truth versus interaction you might also say: hierarchy versus network.
My own background
I was born as the child of a high energy physics researcher. My father participated in large scientific programs, involving experiments with complex particle accelerators, that aimed to reveal the most fundamental physical laws. Physical laws, as you know, determine everything that’s happening anywhere in the universe. Newton and Einstein have done spectacular work by bringing down all the complexity we see around us to relatively simple mathematical formulas. But there were still a few different laws of physics around and they seemed to be unrelated so the urge to find even more consistency was there. It should be possible to fond, and prove, one single originating principle that explains all and everything: one diabolical point, one single truth and everything, anytime, anywhere could be deduced from that.
And now I am going to tell you this one truth does not exist.
I’m not talking about physics. Who knows, maybe sometime the CERN labs will actually be able to prove the existence of a Higgs particle and even if they can’t their theory might be valid. It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about life.
In my upbringing science and education were very important while spirituality, intuition and even some kinds of social behavior were mistrusted. I have been taught to suppress any emotional behavior and follow strict rational rules instead. Not only have I tried to live strictly following the rules, I also dreamed of a world where truth prevailed, bringing justice to everyone. My dreams translated into a passion for railways, the one-truth system par excellence, and I devoted much of my life in searching for innovations that could bring the role of the railways back to the importance they once had. I blamed myself when I didn’t succeed and just started trying even harder.
It just didn’t work.
One truth
Truth and hierarchy are very much compatible. You put the basic mathematical rules on top of the pyramid and everything else can be deduced from that, just by following logical rules and going down the pyramid. That’s why it is so important to find this infinitely small Higgs particle, it would really make all the natural laws fit in a comprehensible hierarchy.
The other way around, in an organizational hierarchy, truth is important. When you live in a hierarchy you simply have to follow the orders of the higher levels above you. It isn’t very useful to question these orders, you’ll have to carry them out anyway, so on a practical level they are just simply true. For the consistency of a hierarchical organization it is very helpful if these orders are not only perceived as ‘true’ on a practical level but on a deep moral level as well.
When your life depends on it, would you blindly listen to an ordinary peasant or carpenter? If you don’t sooner or later the hierarchy will fall apart. People in hierarchies that didn’t fall apart do attribute real truth to the information that comes from the top of the hierarchy. People attribute a higher level of knowledge to their kings and emperors and, above all, to their spiritual leaders. So truth is important in our culture and in our social system.
But how can I say there isn’t one truth when it is so obvious we do live in one reality? Point is: reality is infinite. It simply isn’t possible to attribute every single atom around is when we think or talk about reality. There is one reality but it simply isn’t containable. In order to get a containable perception of reality you need to make simplifications. In an ideal world there might be one single best way to make these simplifications, in the world in which we are living there are just so many different perspectives that can be used to look at the very same reality.
Interaction
Living in a reality that is too big to contain, even too big to simplify in one unified model, we have to deal with the fact that every person has his or her own model of reality. These models might be similar, especially for persons who are close to each other, but they are different nonetheless.
Different models means: different persons perceive different things, even when they look at the very same reality. Some specific details of reality might be pretty important for one person while not even noticed by the other. Each person has his own truth, slightly different from the truth of persons around him.
When each person has a different truth there always is a risk of misunderstanding. One person assumes the other perceives the same things as him, which, in fact, he doesn’t. Based upon this assumption he expects a certain behavior which doesn’t come and, whoops, something goes wrong. So can we co-operate at all when we have different truths? The answer is: yes we can, but it does require a certain amount of synchronization of our perceptions. This is where interaction comes in.
We perceive each other as part of the reality that surrounds us. The people around us are part of our model, we are part of theirs as well. We can send signals to other persons, we can receive signals back. We can send a signal to augment each others truth, for instance to warn an person for a danger he might not be aware of. But the possibilities reach far beyond that. Interaction can lead to highly dynamic and highly complex systems.
An organisation that is based upon exchange of information on an equal level, rather than following orders from a higher level, is called a network organization. Functioning in a network organization requires mastering the art of interaction with all its complexity and caveats.
The world is moving
The current trend is that the world is moving away from hierarchic organization style. When you look at a 19th Century army, it was one big hierarchy, as was the industry, as was social life. Todays organizations, even when they do have some kind of hierarchy, are much more hybrid. Network organizations do have a certain kind of strength that, in many cases, can outperform their hierarchic counterparts.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of this trend I found in Kevin Kelly’s Atom Versus Net observation:
“If twentieth-century science can be said to have a single icon, it is the Atom. [...] But the iconic reign of the Atom is now passing. The symbol of science for the next century is the dynamic Net. The icon of the Net, in contradistinction to the Atom, has no center.”
If this is really the trend, if network organizations are outperforming hierarchies, if one-truth is no longer an option, it might be a good thing to better understand the shortcomings of hierarchies and to learn how to deal with the complexities of interaction.
My way
In order to prevail a man must bend his weaknesses into strengths. My roots lie firmly in an age that used the Atom as a metaphor and that saw the construction of one universal truth as the highest achievable. And even without that, by nature, I might be more attracted to the clarity of a simple set of rules than to the chaos of everybody doing his own thing in a network society. It is a sad realization these values refer to an era gone by and offer little hope for the future.
However, having tried to live in a rigidly ruled system, or even to create such a system I do have experience with its limitations. I might be able to formulate why it doesn’t work and formulate an alternative approach.
What I am searching for is a thinking system that can be a reference for a new era, that builds upon our past achievements but can avoid some of the pitfalls many current thinking systems suffer from. There is a lot of good thinking out there. I want to connect the dots and formulate my own version, to make my own thinking more clear and consistent and to have something that I can refer to. That’s the reason why I started this blog.