The Paradigm Conspiracy

I'm just finishing off the final chapter of an ambitious and thought-provoking book entitled "The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential - and How We Can Change Them" by Denise Breton and Christopher Largent. Erudite, accessible, broad in scope and judiciously peppered with quotes from mystics, physicists, biologists, philosophers, psychologists and consciousness researchers, this book has given me much to ponder in the past few weeks; in short, if you've ever felt that there's something very wrong with the way the world works, but are unable to put your finger on what it is, if you've been plagued by the eternal question "but what can we DO?!?!?" then The Paradigm Conspiracy might set you on your way to finding answers.

The book begins with the premise that the ever-increasing prevalence of substance addiction is a symptom of a sick society. The underlying cause, according the the authors, is the flawed paradigm (paradigm being loosely defined as a mental model or way of viewing the world) upon which our social systems - family, government, church, education, medicine - are founded. Taking the 12-step recovery programme as a model, the authors propose their ideas for revolution - a paradigm shift.

Although it's difficult for anyone to define what the current paradigm is, given that it's such a vague and intangible thing, the authors do a good job of pinpointing some of the false, usually unquestioned assumptions that underpin our society. They refer to it in general terms as the "control paradigm", i.e. the prevailing view that lack of control can only lead to anarchy & chaos, so it's justified for the few to rule over the many. The authors point out that soul qualities like individuality & creativity, being unpredictable and potentially transformative, are too dangerous to the control paradigm, so the controllers have no option but to deny and suppress our souls in order to maintain the power structure. But the price we pay for order & stability in a tightly-controlled world is disconnection from our souls and from each other, and thus evolution on both the personal & global level is stunted. According to the authors the solution amounts to a spiritual path: tuning in to our souls via our inner guidance, embracing connectedness over separateness & cooperation over competition, evaluating unconscious beliefs & assumptions, reawakening our critical faculties and deprogramming our minds from control-paradigm propaganda are all crucial to bringing about a paradigm shift.

For me personally, there were no ground-breaking revelations about our world that I gleaned from the book, just page after page of high-quality inspirational writing along with astute observations about the nature of our society that had me nodding along. To give you a taster, here's a quote I picked out:

"As long as we tolerate the strategy of having a paradigm imposed on us..., though we have the power to initiate a new paradigm, we don't exercise it. Instead of flexing our paradigm-shifting powers, we project back onto society's mirror what's already there.

Mesmerized by the images and seeing them multiplied by the millions, we conclude that there's no other way to be: "We have no choice but to behave thus to survive." "We must accept the hard realities of the control-and-dominate model." Ignorant of our power, we follow the patterns, and the thousand reflected images don't change.

That's our situation, personally, culturally, and globally.

Knowing what's happening breaks the mesmerism. Immediately, we're more soul aware, because we name the de-souling dance for what it is. Deep memories begin to stir, and the next control type who expects us to fall in line had better watch out. We're not accepting any paradigm that fails to resonate with the truth we've observed." [p144, Breton & Largent, 1996]

Following are some key thoughts I jotted down whilst reading the book... The current paradigm causes us pain because it denies the validity of our feelings. In our "system roles", i.e. professional life, we are expected to play by the rules - obey authority, keep your feelings to yourself, don't joke around, be serious and, above all, don't let the mask slip. Feelings get in the way. Anything subjective is dangerous; objectivity is safe and dependable. That's why we depend so heavily on rational science to give us answers: scientists are totally objective, passive observers! Their consciousness doesn't influence their results or observations whatsoever! The observer and the observed are entirely separate from one another... aren't they?

Reading the book also helped me to articulate what I feel is lacking when I listen to the mainstream news, go to work, or walk down the street: our society collectively lacks soul. The control paradigm/power elite/Matrix/antichrist consciousness has tried to stamp out our inner life and deny its reality; we are taught that our inner experiences of feelings, desires, thoughts and values are products of - and therefore secondary to - physical processes, so we generally either a) blot out our feelings and those of others around us, or b) because we don't understand the nature of our inner life, we fail to realise that we can take command of it, and thus we are vulnerable to being swept to and fro by the tides of our feelings and impulses. We can only master our inner life by first acknowledging its reality and validity. In fact, Rudolf Steiner founded his entire spiritual philosophy on the premise that the inner life - the realms of soul & spirit - could be studied and observed with the same scientific rigour that we now study the physical world. Materialistic science would find this idea laughable, but then our current approach to science has its own set of unexamined assumptions - its own invisible paradigm.

Inspired by quotes from The Paradigm Conspiracy, I'm actually considering writing a post about our flawed approach to science. In the meantime, perhaps get yourself a copy of this book if my review has piqued your interest.