![]() The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. ![]() ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. We find in our universities, political establishments and research institutes that funding is greatly skewed towards research and ‘innovative’ thinking that incrementally adapts the current paradigm rather than radically transforming it. He also explored how the inertia of social and educational institutions can cause ‘paradigm paralysis’ in blocking radical thinking that challenges the status quo. Handa introduced the idea of the social paradigm and he explored how social paradigm shifts cause significant transformations in the way societies are organised. As I have explored in the book The Nature of Business, we are increasingly asking what an overly mechanistic and reductive paradigm obscures from view and how it conditions our knowledge. In the Enlightenment’s noble quest for truth we have inadvertently cloaked our perception of reality. Enter the dog-eat-dog competition and selfish gene thinking of Neo-Darwinism, colonialism and neoliberalism. Yet, as well as this atomised way of attending corrupting sociality, it exacerbates an anthropocentric hubris. This creed is alluring not least due to the sense of certainty of knowing it breeds in an uncertain world. Rationalism is the view that reality is best understood through abstract mathematical propositions supported by rational logic and reductive scientific positivism which atomises one thing as separate and completely definable from another. Our prevailing paradigm – since the Era of Enlightenment – is hallmarked by ‘Rationalism’. ![]() Partial truths become accepted as whole truth. Pre-definition becomes belief – literally, pre-judice. This is where the danger lies, in the unquestioned knowing paradigms can engender. For that is when they become socially embedded as paradoxical belief systems inconsistent with actual experience and natural sense. It is vital to recognise the built-in limitations of paradigms and not to become overly confident in them to the point where they are accepted, without question, as complete truth. This is because reality in its raw, infinite, creative-destructiveness is beyond being tamed, tied-down or fixed within definable limits. The prevalence of the paradigm begins to sow the seeds of its own demise by fostering collective resistance to anything other than incremental adaptation to its embodied sense of reality.Īny fixed worldview invariably proves to be a partial, cut-down view of reality based on incomplete assumptions. Rather than nourish fresh shoots of exploration that healthily challenge and so evolve the paradigm’s inherent inadequacy, cultural embodiment can bring dogmatic entrenchment that creates an environment of inertia where those that challenge the dogma face transgressing the cohesive cultural conditioning of the collective belief-system. The comfort provided by the sense of knowingness tends to stifle the creative exploration it ought to spawn. Philosophical, theological, artistic and scientific explorations into reality contribute to the formation of paradigms when they engender value-sets and ideas which become embodied by the collective. ‘ is like a superstructure of ideas, a scaffolding upon which we hand our understanding, our ‘knowledge’ of reality.’ Christian de Quincey ‘A paradigm is a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions and practices shared by a community, which forms a particular vision of reality.’ Fritjof Capra Hence the paradigm becomes more than an agreed theory of understanding but a societal worldview that underpins collective beliefs in how life is attended to. A paradigm is formed when there is general consensus that the worldview is good enough for the collective to gather around and so progress from. For example, there can be economic paradigms, scientific paradigms and philosophical paradigms. It is a school of thought or framework which forms a world view – a shared way of perceiving aspects of reality. A paradigm is a certain understanding of reality.
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