First Principles


The explanations and insights of this chapter are not dependent on laboratory research or psychological field testing. They can be derived just from thinking about them. They are accessible from thought. They are a priori , as philosophers would put it: not dependent on experience. Lets see how this is so by going on a little mind trip together.

First, lets get ready. Set aside thoughts about your friends and loved ones and all of your responsibilities. Think of yourself simply as a consciousness. You are awake. But, for this thought experiment, assume you know nothing. There is nothing you are thinking of. The lights are on, but nobodys home. Lets go so far as to say you dont even know that you are human. You can think, but thats about all. At this point you have no sense of ˜˜I. Everything seems as a dream and you dont know what is real. Its as if you have a serious case of amnesia. You are going to try to figure out what is going on. And you want to be very sure that what you conclude is not a dream.

The philosopher Descartes asked, ˜˜What can I know for sure? He came up with the dictum ˜˜I think, therefore I am. You say to yourself, ˜˜Okay, I dont know whats going on. I dont even know what is true. But I do know Im thinking, so one thing is for sure. I exist. I know that because somebody in here is doing the thinking.

So, from nothingness we can agree, ˜˜I exist. Now lets build on that by introducing the notion of time. Once you accept that you exist, you discover that you want to continue to exist. Living things, from amebas to zebras, seek to live. With continued existence in mind, we suddenly have wants and needs.

We turn now to psychologist Abraham Maslows ˜˜hierarchy of needs for a contribution to our logic. The desire to live introduces you to physiological needs that you very much want fulfilled. As Maslow would put it, you first want to fulfill your needs for food, water, and air because these are necessary for life. Notice that we have now established your existence and your wants. And that sets up the problem.

You discover that there are other people out there. They, too, are in this thought experiment. They are sometimes in the way of your satisfying your wants and needs. As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre suggested, ˜˜Hell is other people. Without much time going by, you know they are there because you bump into them as they deny you what you want from life.

So now we have you, your needs, and other people. You have to get along with the other people in order to get what you need. Unless you are stronger than everyone else, in which case you can just clobber them and steal what you want, some form of cooperation is called for. But thats not all. You also dont want to bully them because it turns out, according to Maslow, that in addition to your physiological needs, you also want their company. Babies are born this way. It makes sense, when you think about it. If babieseven the offspring of wild animalsdidnt seek the security of at least their mothers, then they would not survive. They could be killed by predators or they might just not get the nourishment they need for life.

You spend your life trying to get this security and trying to avoid insecurity. Along the way, things make you angry . Sometimes you read signals that tell you that you might not get what you want, so you feel worried. Or you seek the attention of others in order to feel secure. At other times you infer that they will only give you what you want if you satisfy certain conditions, so you adopt a habituated role to project the right image. Sometimes things go wrong for you. Rather than risk taking the blame in their eyes, you resist that blame and deflect it elsewhere. What else can you do? If you take the blame, it might result in more insecurity.

You have to be pretty quick on your feet to survive in this world. You cant be waiting for proof of things all the time, so you generalize. When one person does a certain thing that hurts you, and then someone else does the same thing, you cant afford the continuation of that thing. So you conclude, very quickly, that everybody is going to do that thing and you had better avoid that thing. In fact, you discover that generalizations serve you well, so you become well practiced at them.

To make sure your security is in good shape, you go around the place asking yourself, ˜˜Are things the way I think they need to be? If they are not, you judge them as unacceptable, potentially harmful to your security. If they are the way they need to be, then things are fine. This constant questioning serves you well and it becomes the foundation of a tendency to make value judgments very handy.

So far we have established a clear pattern in your behavior. In certain moments you judge, or you experience angst, or you fear. In longer snippets of time these things translate into other behaviors: In order to optimize your sense of security, you blame (victim), or you fret over the future (worrier), or you order people around a lot of the time (controller), or you hide (fake), or you constantly need to be noticed ( attention-seeker ), or you are bound by anxiety over something in the past ( prisoner ). Each of the problematic types discussed in this book can be traced to the tendency to judge, to experience angst, and to blame. All the people discussed are robotically programmed to engage in these behaviors in response to perceived threats and opportunities concerning security.




Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
ISBN: 814408354
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 134

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