In the beginning, all that existed was God – the peerless Personification of perfection, pulchritude and perception. At the appointed kairos time, God acted out the model for moving to a desired state of being from an undesired one. With the Logos, He pried out specific order out of multiple alternative histories combating for preeminence in a soup of potentialities. We call these multiple alternative histories chaos. Then, God looked at the order He had created and said it was good.
At all levels of existence – individual, familial, societal – people desire to be in a state of being that is an improvement on their current states, whatever that might be. For many people, however, this state remains in the realm of uncrystallized potential. Why? People have learned to tolerate the status quo and shy away from whatever better state there might be.
The wisest one in the room is the person who can move from an undesired current state to a more desired one. They follow God’s model by stepping into a situation, taming chaos, and extracting order from it. The wisest ones are those who can crystallize gestalts of meaning from the fogs of potential. This is not necessarily easy, as life’s complicated and there are billions of ways that issues and events can be arranged in your mind to make sense of them. Many of these arrangements will not make your life’s experiences any better, and some might even make matters worse – just ask the nihilists and rationalists! That said, there are also specific attitudes of perception that will put you in the right frame to dissolve chaos, while bringing you closer to that state God has prepared for you. Three of them are discussed in this article.
1. Be Humble Enough to Understand that Your Map is Not the Territory
Your worldview is built on certain assumptions that may be very different from reality. For instance, sentences in English and many similar languages are in the form of actor-action. The unspoken assumption of such languages is that an act can never occur in the absence of an actor. Hence, we have sentences like “The rain is falling”, where the rain is an actor carrying out the action of falling. Contrast that with the Hopi language, where an action can occur without an actor acting anything out. When the Hopi speaker describes the phenomenon of rainfall, he simply says “Raining”. He is not concerned with what caused the rain to fall. Unlike his English-speaking counterpart, the underlying assumption of the Hopi speaker makes him focus on the meaning of an event, rather than on its cause!
Which language do you think has the upper hand in describing reality? The honest answer is that we do not know. English and Hopi are both valid languages that describe aspects of reality. None is better than the other. English prevents you from seeing the significance of a phenomenon, and Hopi may kill your curiosity about causal factors at the roots of that phenomenon. Yet, reality has both causes and meanings that extend beyond our perceptions. The wisest one in the room is humble enough to acknowledge that he may hold assumptions blinding him to certain aspects of reality.
When making a physical map, cartographers assume that critters, trees, rocks, electric poles and grasses are a constant occurrence wherever you go. As a result, these details are never depicted, despite being present in the territory that is being mapped. In the same way, as you navigate through life, your maps about the operations of the world are riddled with assumptions that pervert your perceptions from seeing reality.
Note that assumptions are not always all bad or useless. The world we live in is complex and events do not fall into neat categories. Hence, assumptions can be useful in helping the mind act more efficiently. The brain does this by lumping things that are similar into the same categories. This enables us to focus our attention and resources on the information that matters: threats and opportunities. Without assumptions, we’d all be in a state of action paralysis, as we’d have to expend mental effort determining whether every information is a threat or an opportunity – regardless of whether they are familiar or not.
In what Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher, called the View from Nowhere, there is an objective reality that describes the inherent nature of things. I prefer to call this the “View from God’s Perspective”. On its own, no human mind will ever see this objective View from Nowhere. This is because we all approach reality through our maps which have been shaped by our experiences in our pasts. The consequence is that when your girlfriend says, “Let’s be objective”, what she’s really seeking out is consensus by agreement, not objectivity! The same thing plays out in every kind of human interaction.
Understanding that the Map is not the Territory is a superpower that accomplishes two things: First, it makes you more humble. Solomon, the original philosopher-king, wrote, “Surely He [God] scorns the scornful, but gives grace to the humble”. Humility is coming to the realization that you really do not know everything, and all you know has been shaped by your own map. Those who choose to be the know-it-alls and sophisticates will inevitably encounter the humbling curveballs that life throws at them. The humble, on the other hand, “will inherit the earth”. As it were, the survival of the fittest is in reality the survival of the most humble. Secondly, when you recognize that the Map is not the Territory, you become more open-minded and understanding of others. You start to see that others do not know everything too. You begin to understand that their motivations and perceptions are only shaped by the maps with which they see the world.
Today, there are not many people who are willing to accept that the maps with which they see the world can be outdated or wrong. Such people are married to their maps and have formed an emotional bond with it. They will defend the rightness of their maps with every fiber of their being. On the other hand, those who will thrive in uncertain or novel terrains share one characteristic: They are all individuals who are humble enough and willing to accept that their maps may be wrong. As a result, they are better able to learn and adapt to new terrains and survive.
2. Know the Boundaries of your Circle of Competence. If you don’t have any, find one
As a human being, you neither have the luxury of time nor resources to be the master of all domains. However, because people have different histories and past experiences, there are fields of endeavor where they can choose and learn to thrive in their element. The reason is fairly straightforward. People who are in their circle of competence have often already devoted sufficient time and effort in their pasts to be proficient in their domains. Problems arise for the individual that tries to compete in a domain where he has zero competence. Such persons end up being crushed into oblivion. It’s nothing personal, it’s just the way the world works. Therefore, a major task in your life is to identify that domain where your history and past experiences can give you a comparative advantage. It’s your responsibility to “[b]e fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion…” in your domain of competence.
If you have not identified your domain of competence, here are a few useful recommendations:
First, you can hone into a specific fragment of a broad field and/or dig deep into the foundations upon which that fragment is built. Most people do not have the patience, resources, discipline, or time to commit to such depths. However, by applying yourself to this method, you can have a relatively easy path to creating your circle of competence. In the broad automobile industry, companies such as Lamborghini or Rolls Royce are not just in the business of manufacturing cars. Rather, they remain profitable by staying focused on a specific slice of the automobile market – those interested in luxury cars. Such is the impact of finding and sticking to your domain of competence.
Alternatively, you can explore the overlaps that exist between unrelated domains of endeavor. One of the reasons why life can be complicated is that events are more interconnected than humans acknowledge. These overlaps have been criminally under-investigated and there is a big demand for people who are willing to devote the time, resources and mental effort to identify associations between fields that appear to be unrelated. As an example, Norbert Wiener investigated the overlaps between mathematics, physiology, engineering and psychology to develop a whole new field of cybernetics and control theory.
Furthermore, you can create your circle of competence by reproducing ideas that are geographically or chronologically separated from you. For instance, there are certain commonplace ideas, goods and services in 3rd-world countries that are highly desirable in developed countries, and vice versa. The same thing plays out when you consider the differences between rural and urban areas. Another area that is commonly overlooked is the past. A common assumption among people living in an epoch is that their generation has an overall better quality of life than previous generations. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, it can be argued that there are areas of contemporary life that are worse than that of previous generations. Nonetheless, this kind of ‘chronological superiority’ makes people in a generation disregard beneficial ideas and innovations from the past. As in other cases, you can create your circle of competence by visiting the past and extracting ideas that can be of service to your generation. Stoicism is an idea from Ancient Greece that has received a new lease of life in the past 5 years. There are tons of similar ideas that are waiting to be unearthed.
The wisest one in the room is the individual who has identified his circle of competence. Whenever he’s faced with problems that fall within his domain, he rises up to the challenge and solves them. And when the problem is outside his reach, he is not afraid to defer them to others better suited to solve them. That probably explains the following tongue-in-cheek remark from the wisest king who ever lived: “Even a fool is counted wise when he holds his peace; When he shuts his lips, he is considered perceptive”.
3. Learn the Power of First-Principles Thinking
The complications that often arise in life are usually because our unknown unknowns exceed our known unknowns. In other words, the things we do not know we are ignorant of are more than the things we know we are ignorant of. To untangle these complications, we have to identify the assumptions upon which these issues are built. Some of the assumptions mapped onto an issue are a function of the individual’s personal history and experiences. Nevertheless, there are other assumptions that can remain central and true to an issue, regardless of the individual’s past experiences, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or religion. These central assumptions are referred to as axioms. The more common name is “first principles”.
In a conversation with His disciples about the greatest in the kingdom of God, Jesus said, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven…” In other words, access to certain aspects of reality will be obscured from you until you are possessed with the spirit of a child. Consider, as an example, the curiosity of a child. Due to their inquisitive nature, children question answers till they arrive at a point where they are satisfied. When you give a child a meaningful answer, you’d better be prepared to go on a journey that’s at least 4 – 5 layers deep to satisfy them. This is because each of your answers will be met with the response, ‘Why?’. As children grow up, however, they learn to conflate childishness with childlikeness in the name of appearing mature. They stop asking ‘Why?’ A natural consequence of this is the propagation of dangerous narratives, ideas and ideologies as people no longer have a willingness to question anything. First-principles thinking is a return to this childlikeness.
Broadly speaking, the ability to engage in first principles thinking is useful in at least two ways.
First, it can be useful in helping you untangle complicated problems. A classic example of how first principles are used to resolve complicated issues can be found in the way the Allied forces handled the 1945 Nuremberg trials.
Prior to the end of World War 2, the extent of human rights violations perpetrated by Nazi Germans on Jews were not known. With victory secured for the Allied Forces (Britain, Soviet Russia, France, China and the US) after the surrender of the Nazi leaders in 1945, the horrors of life at the Nazi concentration camps became widely published. However, a complication came up. There were no international guidelines for trying war crimes on the scale of those perpetuated by Nazi Germany. Although everyone knew the Nazi leaders had sanctioned orders that left carnage and destruction in its wake, there were no laws that classified such actions as crimes. As a result, the Nazi leaders could defend their actions by claiming “…where no law is, there is no trangression”. Furthermore, trying the German war criminals according to Soviet laws could potentially raise issues with the US or Britain. Trials based on US or British laws could also raise the same concerns among other members of the Allied Forces.
To resolve this, members of the Nuremberg tribunal had to think in terms of first principles. They identified and agreed upon the fundamental assumptions a person must hold before he could sanction the execution of war crimes on a population group. Once this was settled, prosecuting the Nazi German leaders became more straightforward.
The second way that first-principles thinking can be useful is when you are interested in testing whether the maps with which you navigate through life are obsolete or incomplete. As we’ve already established, many people’s outlook on life is informed by the stories and narratives that have been passed on to them from other people in their lives. Because stories are very compelling, few people take the time to question the assumptions that power such narratives. Like a child clutching on to his toy, people learn to see the narratives as their own – refusing to part ways with them. In this state, anyone who doesn’t share the same narrative is seen as the enemy. It’s no wonder that we live in interesting times where people are divided along ideological lines. This is a dangerous place to be in. When one learns how to engage in first principles thinking, it becomes easy to identify and avoid narratives that are built on wrong foundations. Here’s the bitter truth: Unless people take the time to ask themselves the uncomfortable questions about the assumptions powering their ideologies or worldviews, we can expect a future of friction and division.
The wisest ones in the room are those are refuse to be distracted by irrelevancies obscuring the first-principles upon which an issue rests. They are the ones who are comfortable with asking ‘Why?’ until it hurts, and then some. These ones embrace their childlike curiosity and inquisitiveness for the purpose of getting to the roots of an issue. Because of their willingness to do this, they are rewarded with the lucidity that eludes the yes-men and echo chambers. They access raw wisdom and enter the kingdom of heaven – starting from here on earth!
