Self-sabotage is in the news these days and it raises the perennially asked but rarely well-answered question: “Why?”
What follows will be deeply covered in my upcoming course The Art of Open Connection. Specifically, I’ll teach you how to see the track people are on and what they’re dead-ending, so you can help or steer clear, depending.
Everyone, whether they realize it or not, has a picture of what reality is, why we’re here, where we came from, where we’re going and based on all of that, what is good and bad. This is called a paradigm, which literally means “show side by side” which is a fascinating etymology. The two sides, I’ll explain, are what we think reality is versus what it actually is.
A paradigm is a base model one has for reality that affects everything we do, and unfortunately it’s largely unconscious to most people. This is why (and the only reason why) people trigger so easily if you challenge their values. It’s not because they’re courageously willing to fight for what they believe in. There’s a distorted idea right there. Don’t fall for it. You don’t fight for what you know is true–only what you’re afraid isn’t.
Try that on and see how it fits. Does that notion explain more of reality than the popular idea that fighting for what you believe is good?
We are hard-wired to create complete worldviews. Humans need models to make meaning out of everything, and we will make up crazy things to do so. Socrates said, 2500 years before psychology could tell us why, “Man is not a rational creature, he is a rationalizing one.” Almost always unconsciously, we test our rationalized models against the truth of reality. In this way, we are all philosophers whether we like it or not.
The problem is that our childhood conditioning, which happens precognitively, causes us to adopt values that aren’t true, but effectively reduce pain. As adults, we experience that we rigorously think something is obviously true, but unconsciously we grip to its falsity as a way of avoiding debilitating emotional distress.
For example:
The idea that serving others is more important than serving yourself represses shame and unworth. You don’t have to face how unworthy you feel to receive.
The idea that life is about having fun (especially travel) is particularly good at suppressing anxiety and depression. You don’t have to be still and be with your unstimulated experience.
The idea that life is about amassing money and power is great for covering a deep-seated sense of powerlessness. You don’t have to feel how angry and helpless you actually feel.
We think we consciously choose our values, but that’s part of the defense system’s ruse: it needs us to think we’re in control, so its control isn’t threatened.
“The devil’s cleverest ruse is to convince you that he does not exist.”
–Charles Baudelaire, French Poet (also see the film, Usual Suspects)
Again, this is why people become so upset when their values are challenged: it’s the defense system that doesn’t want to be found out, because it knows its values were innocently, hastily, and incoherently cobbled together to survive.
Unfortunately for our self-protection, it’s inevitably going to be found out. When you test your paradigm against the truth of life itself, life always wins.
We all live our lives based in fear to some degree or another–until we don’t–and the governing dynamic of that change is what I call productive dead-ending. In dramatic expressions of this, it can look like self-sabotage, but that’s actually a misnomer.
When a person, for example, who values power above all else, makes a dominating move in their life that creates significant problems, we might call that self-sabotage on the surface. But it’s more accurate to say they’re successfully reaching the end of their unworkable strategy.
Richard Nixon was a shady character (e.g. secretly bombing Cambodia) long before he approved Watergate. Bill Clinton’s predatory issues with women were not unknown before Lewinsky. In college, he hung around the library at night looking for single women to walk home. Clever, but creepy. We can’t help but take our paradigmatic assumptions to their logical conclusions because we’re hard-wired to test them like a good scientist to find out what’s true.
This is particularly true of leaders. Leaders’ paradigms dead-end more quickly and dramatically because the people below them take on their paradigms and multiply the effect. In this way, you could say every organization tests a set of values, and succeeds or fails according to their accuracy.
Note that phrase: “accuracy of values.” Did that raise an eyebrow for you? While you’re entitled to have whatever values you want, that doesn’t make them true to reality or absolve you of consequences for being off track. And yes, my paradigm says there is an objective “way things are” that we’re responsible for abiding with. That’s a form of objectivism.
The vast majority of people these days have subjective paradigms; that is, they think they are free to interpret reality however they want without consequences. Have you noticed how that’s dead-ending in our society? Have you noticed the steady increase in deceit, denial, conspiracy theory, non-critical thinking, and negotiating facts as if they’re opinions? That’s a function of subjectivism.
The tragic irony is that subjectivism blinds people to seeing the data from their experiment because the feedback from life is…objective, right? Those data are off the radar of the subjectivist who thinks they can do whatever they want, irrespective of what life is actually about.
An extreme subjectivist then, will eventually depart from reality in such a dramatic way as to seem crazy and produce clear, unavoidable objective and negative results to confront their distorted subjective reality. We see that as self-sabotage, but it’s just learning. Sometimes we have to put our hand on the hot stove to experience it for ourselves.
But what if you could see the paradigmatic assumptions without having to go through the pain of learning the hard way what doesn’t work. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? There is a way and I can show you how.
When I first learned financial management, I had a reality-changing epiphany when I saw everything could be represented by money. Inflows, outflows, stocks, and pools. A new car is a dramatically depreciating asset. That old can of cream of mushroom soup in your cupboard? That’s cash hiding in inventory. Stock less food and increase your cash flow! To be a great money manager, you have to be able to think like this.
You can learn to see everything as paradigms as well, and it’s even more powerful. When you can, you will be the smartest, most aware person you know, because it’s even upstream of the increasingly rare skill known as critical thinking.
Paradigms. Explain. Everything.
Everything is more complicated than it needs to be if you don’t see paradigms.
When you learn to see the values you test against reality, you can learn more quickly and without having to dead-end distorted ideas. When you can see the paradigms in other people, you become an X-Ray machine, and can predict their behavior and outcomes, and help them if they’ll let you.
This is a primary area of focus of my upcoming course The Art of Open Connection which will teach you how to listen paradigmatically and see how people are put together. Of course, you can only see that to the degree you see yourself.
Do you have the maturity to look at how your values might be flawed, or are you still fighting for what you believe? 😉 The course begins April 17, 2025. I hope to see you there.