The Insufficiency of Simplicity. Welcome to Quantum Reality!
Friends!
This week I have been reflecting on how “stuck” we still are in Newtonian (vs Quantum) thinking. It’s time we let go of our over-simplified view of how life works. It causes so many problems. Living inside a narrative that is increasingly irrelevant is producing so much anxiety, fear, and frustration. The story that got us here has passed its expiration date. It has started to rot, smell and it’s time to throw it out. We must build a new narrative that is more relevant, inclusive and that can animate, elevate, and unite a fractured world.
I will try to not make this too complicated. Quantum thinking can be super difficult to grasp. I certainly make no claim to “understand” it. But that is kind of the case in point. To not be intimidated by a little complexity. Life IS complicated and in our quest to make it simple we are reducing truth to incomplete fragments of reality that no longer connects with our deeper sense of our shared human experience. Our happiness is so much determined by our expectations. As I have said many times. We are what we believe. So let us recalibrate what we believe and find new baselines from where we can build the kind of world we’d all prefer to live in. Rather than holding on to the world defined by long gone realities. Carrying that old world on our shoulders gives us so much back pain.
Simplicity is attractive. Clearly, we all prefer simple solutions. But you can be on the right or wrong side of simplicity. Dean Kamen, the famous inventor once riffed to a small group of us in Davos 20 years ago around the topic of simplicity. He said: Playing the violin is very complicated. Playing the kazoo is simple. But I prefer listening to the violin. So thank god there are people who go through the hard work of learning how to play the violin. Something like that. The point is that the juice of complexity is worth the squeeze of going beyond simplicity.
Early in my career, I was luckily introduced to Danah Zohar and her work. Her early book Quantum Self and many subsequent books like Rewiring the Corporate Brain and Spiritual Capital helped me better understand how stuck we all are in linear thinking. She writes:
”Since the seventeenth century, our dominant Western paradigm has been shaped by Newtonian science. This is true in management as well as in politics, economics, psychology, and education. Newtonian, or mechanistic, science is determinist, reductionist, and atomistic. Things happen because they have to happen; iron laws assure certainty and predictability. Any whole is best understood by reducing it to its constituent parts and looking at those parts in isolation. Reality consists of discrete, impenetrable particles relating to each other through forces of action and reaction. Newtonian truth is a simplistic either-or truth. There is one best, god’s-eye view of the universe. Nature is structured hierarchically, and there is an absolute split between the scientific observer and the world observed. Hence the stress on scientific objectivity, and the cult of the expert. The essence of quantum physics is that it describes an unfixed, both-and level of reality that thrives on ambiguity and uncertainty at something very like ”the edge of chaos”.
Danah Zohar in Rewiring the Corporate Brain
The language we use to describe and make sense of our world needs to be upgraded. Reimagined if you will. We talk about wars as if enemies could be killed. In some cases, they can but the new forces of threats and opportunities are not material. They cannot be conquered by armies. They are not visible. They have no loyalties to a God, a nation, or a particular culture. Viruses, emotions, data, information, culture, beliefs, etc are the new sources of threats and opportunities. But we are still stuck in a more mechanistic frame of mind. We need to move from hardware to software. We measure economic output via GDP which measures “old flows” rather than new. We measure “talent” in terms of tests designed for a world long gone by. We still audit companies and their balance sheets more by hard assets (cash, real estate, factories, machines, etc) than by soft ones (brand, talent, and culture). In health care, we happily prescribe and reimburse very expensive diagnostics which we know have limited healing powers while refusing to pay for a healthier diet or regenerative food systems which would have a gigantic impact on health, climate, and most things we care about. I can go on. But basically most of our institutions are measured, governed, and incentivized by “old” measures that no longer are good indicators of what we all want. That’s why many people have lost faith in those same institutions. Their goals are simply not aligned with ours.
Quantum living is more about recognizing the holistic, complex, interdependent, and circular aspect of life. Let’s try to reject the notion and tendency we all have for beginnings and ends, black or white, for or against, and perhaps most of all these days, left or right. Those are very poor approximations for beliefs. They simplify far beyond helpfulness. They don’t accurately reflect the necessary nuance, interdependency, complexity and might I add, beauty, of the world around us. I have long been fascinated by how difficult it is for some people to hold, with comfort, two opposing thoughts in their soul simultaneously. I for one, am a big believer, supporter, and card-carrying Capitalist. But I am, at the same time, someone who for long has expressed concerns about some of the shortcomings of capitalism. You can be for something but yet critical of what you are for. But our Newtonian story doesn’t give much room for such dissonance. It forces you to declare. Are you for OR against?
Below I am sharing some videos and interviews relevant to the idea of more holistic, integrated thinking. There you will also find a tribute to Sir Ken Robinson who we lost recently. He was an inspiring voice for re-imagining education. Moving to a more holistic, integrated view of our world would properly celebrate and honor his life’s work. I will for sure miss him.
I will end with one of my all-time favorite quotes.
”We cannot departmentalize our thinking…We cannot think of economic principles and ethical principles. Underneath all our thinking, there are certain fundamental principles to be applied to all our problems. I do wish that when a principle has been worked out in ethics, it did not have to be discovered all over again in psychology, in economics, in government, in business, in biology, and in sociology. It is such a waste of time.”
Mary Parker Follet (1868-1933)
Here’s to a messier but more beautiful and true world!
This is a good example of black and white thinking. Jerry writes in this NYC article a response to the claim that New York City will never return. Hogwash. Of course it will. Perhaps it will take longer. Perhaps it will not be exactly the same. But betting against NYC is same as betting against humanity. You will lose.
“There’s some other stupid thing in the article about “bandwidth” and how New York is over because everybody will “remote everything.” Guess what: Everyone hates to do this. Everyone. Hates. You know why? There’s no energy.
Energy, attitude and personality cannot be “remoted” through even the best fiber optic lines. That’s the whole reason many of us moved to New York in the first place.
You ever wonder why Silicon Valley even exists? I have always wondered, why do these people all live and work in that location? They have all this insane technology; why don’t they all just spread out wherever they want to be and connect with their devices? Because it doesn’t work, that’s why.”
Two other pieces if you are up for it.
A Wall Street Journal article which talk about lock downs and why they might not be as effective as we think. We will continue to debate and analyze the best way to respond to COVID. I think the truth is that no one knows for absolutely sure. But in the spirit of QUANTUM I think it is relevant. I think we have treated our COVID responses in too much black or white. Lockdown or not. Masks or not. The answer, as usual, is more nuanced.
A well worth read and a more philosophical take on COVID with Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It made me think. When a society loses its collective cool this way, the cost can be high. Rich, atomized, diverse, our society has a weak spot, and the coronavirus has found it. “For fear of getting sick,” Mr. Agamben writes, “Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything — their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.”