A Historical Perspective on Our Perception of “Reality”
The perspective of people has always been given by the reality WE “perceive” — the implication being that everybody’s reality is different.
[This story was originally published in Medium, May 15, 2023 - some updates were made]
Here is the story regarding our “perception of reality” that, when known by a common thread, becomes either the unifying rally point of people or the cause for their de-unification — This “Change of Age” has been running since the late ’60s — early ’70s. Related to us by one of the greatest thinkers of the Twentieth Century:
The things I learned from Russell Ackoff —
Our “perception” of reality comes about in the context of the “age” we live in. This being true says that “our” reality changes with time — excerpts from a presentation he made at the “System Thinking in Action” Conference in November 1993 where he professed we were in a period of change of Age, our understanding of the “Worldview.” What the Germans call “Weltanschauung.”
We ask, “Why does reality change?” Russell explained:
“All of our explanations rest on a set of assumptions, deductions from theories that we make, and every set of assumptions are based on larger theories; and, the most general theory of them all is the theory of reality — ‘a concept of our view of the world.’”
How did Ackoff come to that?
“This reality is absorbed by osmosis in the process of acculturation as we grow up. The reason we share a culture is because we share a worldview. This is the cement that holds the culture together; it characterizes what historians call an ‘Age.’ An Age is a period of time in which the culture has a single worldview of the nature of reality. Therefore a change of age is when the world view is going through a transformation, from one view to another.” For this and other reasons he discussed, he explained we are in an Age transformation because, he said, “world views don’t die, they fade away.”
A Preamble — The Burning of the Library of Alexandria
To understand change, we need to understand History. There has been no bigger man-created catastrophe than the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It contained all the knowledge of man since the dark ages. The burning of “The Library” was the single biggest triumph of ignorance over the very essence of civilization. It is not known for certain the year this occurred.
A common date is in 641. However, it did not happen in one day. The 200,000 to 700,000 books it contained may have taken organized burning over many years.
It took centuries to rediscover the knowledge of Algebra and Astronomy and the mapping of stars. I believe the Catholic church is to be held responsible for this. One of the reasons is the disinformation that exists today about what, who, and when it happened; typical of what the powers of the world do today, like the bombing of the Russian energy pipeline to Europe.
On August 27, 410, Rome fell to the Visigoths (Germanic tribes for the East) and was sacked for three days. This is considered the major event in the rule of the world; it started the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages (year 400). The Catholic Church filled the vacuum created because of its organizational capacity. In the year 800, the church Pope Leo III “declared” Charlemagne, the king of the Visigoths at that time, “The Emperor of the Romans.” Call it a marriage of convenience. The church needed to levy a 10% “tax” on all the people covered by the curate (most of the known world at that time). The “Rise of Islam:”
“After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph. At its height, the medieval Islamic world was more than three times bigger than all of Christendom.
Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. Poets, scientists and philosophers wrote thousands of books (on paper, a Chinese invention that had made its way into the Islamic world by the 8th century). Scholars translated Greek, Iranian and Indian texts into Arabic. Inventors devised technologies like the pinhole camera, soap, windmills, surgical instruments, an early flying machine and the system of numerals that we use today. And religious scholars and mystics translated, interpreted and taught the Quran and other scriptural texts to people across the Middle East.”
It does not stop there. The excesses of violence practiced “in the name of God” all over the world, like “The Inquisition,” tells us the capacity of man on earth to abuse power without control. it does not stop there. It was taken all over the world. After the discovery of the Americas, it was brought here.
In a story written after the fact, it was said that Pizarro, after landing in Lima (1533) and pillaging the area, learned that the Inca ruler “Atahualpa,” ruler of the empire, was visiting Cajamarca. He went North and, with a handful of cavalrymen armed with arquebuses (huge shotguns), ran into the plaza filled with thousands of natives causing such panic thousands were killed trying to escape the walled city. Atahualpa was taken prisoner after refusing to become catholic and was imprisoned and killed by Garrote the day he accepted the “faith.” This was the end of the Inca Empire. The Spaniards proceeded to use the (now) Peruvians as slaves to mine and send gold to the king, who used this gold to build the “Invincible Armada” that did not defeat Nelson in the battle of Trafalgar.
“Religion” is a creation of man organized on paper (the bible) to advertise the mystery of God, the creator of our Universe.
Carl Sagan, quoted in an article in “Time,” from the first episode of “Cosmos”:
“If I could travel back into time,” Sagan told his viewers, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because “all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls.” The destruction of the library was, he said, a warning to us 1,600 years later: “we must never let it happen again.”
A Change of Age Based on A New Reality
To explain how our reality changes, Ackoff went to history to describe the view of the world in the change of age called the “Renaissance.” This period of change (1300 to 1400) is what tied the “Middle Ages” to the “Modern Age.” A revolutionary period in the capacity of man.
The fundamental nature of the change is derived from several facts:
“The Renaissance” — Facts we know today:
The first was that the expected life was 27 years before the Renaissance.
40% of the children born did not survive infancy.
90% of the People never traveled more than 4 miles from their place of birth during their entire life, and they lived in abject poverty.
If you begin to amplify those statistics and imagine what life was like in the Middle Ages, it was miserable.
So, the fundamental question that was asked was: “What is the purpose of life?” “Life,” answered the Catholic Church (the World Power in those days), the only international entity at the time, provided an answer, “Life is preparatory for Death. If you live life correctly, you have heaven to go to.” So, why worry about 27 years?
The Middle Ages’ worries were about spiritual life and the afterlife, not this life. That can be seen in all the literature and art of that time. No realism of life as it was expressed in literature or art. The preoccupation was with the afterlife.
The “New Humanism” was born out of the Crusades when hordes of people moved through Europe, and differences in life were noted. The other was made during trading out of Italy, which went as far as India and China. They visited cultures completely different from ours.
This opened questions about what is responsible for those differences. And people became curious about man.
In one obscure Encyclical of the time, “curiosity” became a sin, but despite that, inquiring people ignored it. All of this increased the inquiry about the nature and purpose of man and his environment.
All of that led to the Renaissance- “rebirth.” The “re-entry” of man into this world.”
Ackoff continued by explaining the consequences of the Renaissance —
“One, “the complete understanding of the universe was possible.” Renee Descartes, probably the first philosophy of the modern era, writings are about the ability of man to understand reality and understand it completely. This was a reversal of the belief that man couldn’t understand anything and had to accept life as it was. An act of faith that God knew what he was doing, and we just had to accept it.
Second, “we could understand everything through analysis.” This is a three-step process. Curiosity can be satisfied, like children do, by taking things apart to their smallest parts and trying to understand what the parts do. Then, try to assemble the understanding of the parts into the understanding of the whole. Three processes,
Take things apart,
Understand what the parts do, to
Understand the function of the whole.
This concept still pervades us today. We believed that if we take the universe down to its indivisible parts would lead to an understanding of the universe.
Every experience is reducible to indivisible parts. That is manifested through every branch of human knowledge. The atomic theory is the reductionist theory of nature.
The Third was/is “cause and effect.” The cause is something that is necessary for the effect, and the cause is sufficient for the effect.
Two fundamental thoughts evolved from this thinking:
If we follow the chain of cause and effect explaining the universe, treating each cause as an effect to understand the whole, it follows that the original cause is God.
The second thought was just as profound; it enabled us to develop a theory of explanation that allowed us to exclude the environment as a factor.
We did not need the environment to explain anything.
Thus, the universal laws of physics tell us what happens when there is no environment, not when there is one.
The universality isn’t derived from the fact that they apply in any environment; it is derived from the fact that they don’t apply in any.
When the environment is taken into account, we only obtain an approximation as a result.
The conclusion of this thinking was that “everything that occurs is the effect of a cause.” This doctrine is called “Determinism.”
This type of thinking drove the machine age. It produced Isaac Newton, who said, “The universe is a machine.” He did not say, “It is like a machine,” he said, “it is…” He also said what type of a machine it was, “it is a hermetically sealed clock.” That is how he determined the “Laws of Motion.”
This type of thinking yielded the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This was a product of our view of the world.
The Industrial Revolution was about the mechanization of work, breaking down work into its natural parts that one person could perform.
The Change of Age
Today, many people believe:
We can change the weather with our behavior — i.e., we are the masters of the earth; however, not the whole world agrees, but “we” don’t care as long as “our carbon footprint is ZERO; “that’s the ticket!” (China’s carbon footprint is 3.5 ours)
1. One false move by the Sun and we are smoke
2. One massive eruption by the Yellowstone Mega-caldera, and we are smoke.We believe that cars don’t kill people, but guns do.
We believe that the color of the skin/hair, the form of the nose and lips, is the reason to “segregate” people. This is a “government” problem; therefore, “passing a law” will FIX THE PROBLEM.
We believe the above, contrary to the fact that Lyndon B. Johnson “solved” this problem! Look at all the laws he passed — all those laws did was to “institutionalize SEGREGATION by giving the 4th Branch of government the legal right to continually SEGREGATE people through regulations. Today, the “government” tells us “we are bigots!”
We believe the concept of “Family” is obsolete. This is why the Middle Class is on life support today. When the backbone of this country becomes meaningless in size, we can declare ourselves the slaves of the rich, corporate entities, and politicians.
We’d like to believe Lyndon B. Johnson solved the problem of poverty in America — he passed the most extensive and conclusive set of laws to do just that. This is why you and I can only condemn the government for the “tent cities everywhere, “while we” stop helping (remember, we don’t believe in Church and Family anymore).
That an individual can call themselves an orangutan if he/she/her/him say so; therefore, BEFORE we believe our “eyes,” we have to say — “Hi, I use orangutan as my pronoun, what are yours?” Who is to say that is not a pronoun if I make it one? This is like the verb “woke,” which is now used as an adjective.
We believe the government will solve all our problems if we vote for our selfish reasons while we hate our fellow man…name your cause.
Because we believe in government, we do not need a religion. Therefore, Churches are an obsolete necessity.
Because we believe in government, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are obsolete pieces of paper. Let’s go down that rabbit hole.
We believe we need a new and improved healthcare system, not knowing what we are maintaining is a sick and disability system (Ackoff).
We believe we need the “Education Department.” However, the “education system” is not dedicated to producing learning by students but teaching by teachers (Ackoff) — and “teaching” is a major obstruction to learning! “The teacher does NOT show until the student is ready (Victor Skoglund)!!!
In one of “Young Sheldon” episodes, Chuck Lorre Productions posted Vanity Card #726, which goes as follows:
I was taught that evolution was a process by which life improved on itself.
I now believe that's wrong. I now believe that evolution is a mindless dynamic
that is entirely unconcerned with making things better. If it had a goal,
that goal would be change. Endless, purposeless change. I think this helps
explain the recent surge in stupid people in charge (i.e. Trump, Putin, ...).I think we believe, like many people all over the world, that change happens “out there.” Once you get behind the locked doors of your house, you are king.
Today, you will have a hard time convincing any young or middle-aged Russian that this is true — Social Media is today’s system of “connection.” We are not alone…No matter where you are…
