2 – Wisdom vs. Power: A Brief History Part 2

Basket-Foot-Golf: How Paradigms Work In our last session, I teased you with some imagery. Imagine walking on an athletic field and seeing a group of people trying to dribble footballs through a sand trap. Take second to really visualize that. To our left, there is a coach talking about the proper golf club selections for the free throw line and goal line. To our right, we see a person wearing shoulder pads put a big orange ball on top of a small white tee, and try to hit it with a 5 iron. Behind us a person practices kicking a small dimpled white ball from behind the three-point line painted on a strip of grass. One coach is teaching a seminar on how to score the most strokes. Another is teaching a seminar on how to score the fewest baskets. Which one is right? As the participants go through this, they seem confused. Disoriented. Their activity doesn’t seem to have any particular purpose. It is just what they are doing. What the heck is going on? When we came upon this scene, most of us quickly recognized the orange ball as a basketball, the white ball as a golf ball, and the brown oblong ball with stitching as a football. The clubs people are using are golf clubs. The tees are golf tees and football kicking tees. Of course the participants are confused and disoriented. They’re trying to play three unrelated sports simultaneously. They are confusing football, basketball and golf. Watching this, we know quickly that whatever they are trying to do, it will never work. These three sports are all ways to understand and play a game, but they are very different. Each sport is a self-contained system independent of the other sports. Each sport uses the same words like rules, ball, team, playing surface, scoring and win, but the way each sport understands these words is very different. Sometimes the way each sport understands these terms is opposite. Essentially, each sport is a different paradigm for athletic competition. What’s a paradigm? A paradigm is defined as “A set of assumptions, concepts, values and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.” That’s the technical definition of paradigm. A much easier way of thinking about paradigms is the example we’re talking about. Football, basketball and golf are all different paradigms—different ways of understanding—how to play a game. In football, you use a large oval ball, run plays and hit people hard. There are 22 positions with 11 on offense and 11 on defense. You move the ball forward by running with it or passing it. You can make one downfield pass per play. You score by running or passing the ball beyond the goal line, or by kicking the ball through goal posts at the end of the field. You win by scoring more points than your opponent. In basketball, you use a large round ball and get kicked out of the game for hitting people. You move the ball forward by dribbling it or passing it. You are not allowed to run with it. You pass the ball repeatedly during play. The same five people play on offense as defense. Like football, basketball games have time limits. Unlike football, play is continuous through offense and defense. You score by tossing a ball through a hoop at the end of the court. Like football, you win by scoring more points than the other team. In golf, you use a small, dimpled ball and move that ball forward by hitting it with a club. You never touch other players and time is not generally kept. While passing the ball is fundamental to the game of football and basketball, throwing a golf ball down the fairway will get you disqualified. You can play as part of a team, but you usually play as an individual. While football and basketball go back and forth on the same playing area, golf is played on 18 different areas. You don’t win by scoring the most points, but by scoring the fewest strokes. Three very different paradigms for playing a game. Clearly, this basket-foot-golf activity that we’re watching is a mess that frustrates everyone because they are taught conflicting, even contradictory, things and don’t make any progress. Everyone is using the same words such as win, ball, team, score, rules and equipment, but are using those words in different and confusing ways. In this basket-foot-golf activity, players are being taught that you win by scoring the most points and other times the opposite: that you win by scoring the fewest points. It is crazy. Absurd. Why Paradigms are Irreconcilable So, what happened? What’s going on? In this imagined scenario, several generations ago, only one of the sports was being played. Over time, the other sports gradually started happening in the same space at the same time. The sports became entangled and eventually merged into this chaotic basket-foot-golf mess embodied in dribbling footballs through sand trap and using 5 irons at the free throw line. The participants don’t know that history. All they have ever known is this one merged basket-foot-golf activity. There are some important lessons in this. First, while these sports often use the same words, they mean very different things by those words. This makes everything very confusing. Each sport uses a ball, but the ball in each sport couldn’t be more different. Basketball and football use the same term—field goal percentage—but mean and measure very different things by it. Take the concept of moving the ball forward. Each sport has a different way of moving the ball forward. In football you pass the ball or run with it. You never put it on the ground. In basketball you pass the ball or dribble it. You never run with it In golf, if you move the ball with anything but a club, you’re disqualified. Now imagine the basket-foot-golf people having a discussion about moving the ball forward. Because each sport has differing—even opposite ways—of moving the ball forward, there is no common ground for discussion. Some are going to argue for dribbling. Others are going to argue that putting the ball on the ground is the worst thing ever. Others are going to insist that it’s all about stroke. If you try to have that discussion, you won’t get anywhere productive. You’ll simply have an argument that turns into an irreconcilable shouting match. And that’s the first lesson. When paradigms are confused, the same words mean very different things, and that eventually leads to confusion, disorientation and anger. Failure of the Paradigm Buffet Second, in our society we tend to approach things with a “buffet mentality.” We like to look at different things, and then pick and choose what we like best to create something new. So why not treat the sports paradigms like a buffet where we pick and choose what we like most from each sport and then combine them into something new and better? Unfortunately, that buffet approach with these sports will inevitably end in failure. The sports are self-contained. You can’t mix and match. You can’t try to maximize your score (basketball and football) while at the same time trying to minimize your score (golf). The concepts contradict each other. It won’t work. Think of it another way. Imagine an electric motor, a gasoline engine and a jet engine. The electric motor uses the interaction between the motor’s magnetic field and electric current in a wire winding to rotate a shaft providing power. The gas engine sparks a fuel-air mixture in a piston that moves the piston up and down to crank a driveshaft providing power. The jet engine ignites a fuel-air mixture creating tremendous pressure that is directed out a nozzle to provide power. All of these are engines. All of them provide power. All of them are designed using fundamentally different approaches. If you try a buffet approach to building engines, mixing and matching parts from the different engines, you don’t get a more powerful engine, you get something that doesn’t work at all. The same is true about the sports paradigms and life. Any attempt to mix and match pieces between the paradigms—any attempt to play basket-foot-golf—will inevitably end in failure. People trying to do that will become disoriented, confused, frustrated and unhappy. A buffet mentality won’t work with this. So, what do we do? Finding Anchor Points and Untangling the Paradigms When you understand what’s really going on underneath this basket-foot-golf activity, you can untangle the sports. You can untangle the paradigms. When the coaches and players see the anchor points of each sport—how that sport defines key things like ball, team, playing surface, scoring, winning, etc.—then they can use those anchor points to recognize and untangle the sports. They can use those anchor points to understand the sport and get really good at it. When you realize what’s happening, and use the anchor points to untangle the mess and find yourself, the disorientation, confusion and anxiety gets transformed into clarity, excellence and fulfillment. Why does life seem like an endless chase of pointless things? Why do we feel disoriented? Why are people getting anxious, burned out and depressed? Because we are being taught conflicting messages from three fundamentally different paradigms of life. We’re caught in a real-life version of the basket-foot-golf mess. We just don’t recognize it. Our society has the same problem. We’re yelling at each other—we’re even getting violent with each other—because we have different life paradigms telling us opposite things at the same time. One life paradigm says there is objective Truth versus another paradigm that says there is no objective Truth, only personal truth. One life paradigm says there are moral facts, like it’s a fact that killing a person for fun is wrong, versus another paradigm that says there are no moral facts, just moral opinions....