“What is dumbing so many people down?” asks Henry Mintzberg. His explanations 1 and 2 [quote below with my emphasis added] resonate with me, as I have promoted the idea that we need to connect our work, our communities, and our networks to make sense by engaging with people and ideas. The core of this is curiosity, especially about other people, as well as ourselves.
Explanations 1 and 2: Social Pressures and Social Isolation
Like rats in an overcrowded cage, the pressures of modern life, including the pace of change, can certainly be affecting our propensity to pause and think. Thoughtfulness is hardly encouraged in a society plagued with insecurity and anxiety.
Exacerbating this is the decline of community in contemporary society. When we lived in kinship groups, tribes, and clans, we maintained strong social ties. Then we got organized by establishing institutions that make many of our decisions for us. These came at the expense of community ties, with the consequence that many of us now feel separated, isolated, and alone.
And so we seek replacement affiliations — in a religious congregation, fan club, political party, whatever. Instead of deep bonding, these provide status by association. (“We played with passion!” said a soccer fan after his team lost a major game at the World Cup.) These are not communities so much as networks, with easy-come, easy-go relationships. (To understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house.)
Groupthink may be present in communities, but conformity can be greater in these networks. To join a political party, for example, you must leave your judgment at the door: think liberal, or conservative, or populist, whatever, just not nuanced. The group will think for you. After all, it has its dogma, which reduces complexity to category — some incontrovertible truth laid down by some authority, with the express intention of dumbing people down. (“Take back control” with Brexit. “Make America great again” by voting for the ultimate con man.) From white supremacy to neoliberal economics, dogmas are the blinders that block peripheral vision, and thus open the floodgates to mass manipulation, whether to sell cold beer or vile politicians. Eventually, we can hardly distinguish stark reality from blatant lying.
Welcome to our mindless society, poisoned by its own fake facts. —CEO World 2023-03-03
I wrote that media drive organization because I believe we are currently between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world. This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement. If we do not create better organizational forms that can help us think better collectively we may drift into a society that cannot “distinguish stark reality from blatant lying”. We need to get beyond our post-modern angst and retrieve the cooperative imperative.
So what can we do? I would like to share what Esko Kilpi shared in a series of tweets in 2012.
Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.
An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity.
The Internet transforms our understanding what “local” is, makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction.
All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts
The unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective.
Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.
Diversity > Learning > Trust — become the key elements in building better organizational structures that can help us differentiate between stark reality and blatant lies. These elements are how we should connect because it’s in the connections that we can make sense. The lack of diversity, the unwillingness to learn, and the lack of trust are what is dumbing so many people down.
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