Embracing Newton’s Cradle is the Secret to Success
James Surwillo medium.com
It has become easy to characterize Millennial moral development as corrupted or pathological. By that I mean something has infected them from your personal definition right and wrong or good and bad…
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Medium
It has become easy to characterize Millennial moral development as corrupted or pathological. By that I mean something has infected them from your personal definition right and wrong or good and bad. It has been my hypothesis now for about five years that an accurate depiction of some basic value structures of the generation will serve us just as well as the education, skills, and competencies within a culture that they will increasingly dominate. Knowing why still requires knowing how. In a matter of a decade we will see the vast majority of Baby Boomers surpass the historical working age and a larger and more educated generation replace them in numbers at organizations.

I’m sure everyone has seen polls, memes, and anecdotes that are troubling regarding Millennials. Even as we begin to talk about Generation Z in the workplace, we are not clear of the distinction between them and older Gen Z and younger Gen X. We should understand that demographically, they are the drivers and leaders of our future economy. It would make sense for anyone who does not fall into that category to apply some sort of developmental model to more fully understand their point of view.

Moral psychologists have found clues in the four primary emotions (guilt, shame, empathy, and sympathy), that are very closely linked with our actions involving what we feel is true, not necessarily what we can prove to be true. We are constantly searching the spectrum of our emotions for truth and lies. Why? Because if we know something is true we can have a pretty good idea that specific version of truth, for better or worse, will be a reasonable predictor of what materializes next time under similar circumstances. We can deviate behavior or restructure ideology based on prior results . . . or at least theoretically. We learn in a very contextualized environment say the constructivist theorists going back to Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development in 1936.

What I am calling for is a type of pragmatic philosophy that, in certain circumstances, may deny your rational and empirical nature of eternal truth. The American physicist Thomas Kuhn argued in 1962 that science itself, the one idea we moderns hold as infinitely true, is always subjected to a “paradigm shift” with the function of time. From a pragmatic view of ethics you would identify truth as a sort of temporary energy that bends to the whim of utility with the passage of time. And by truth I do not mean facts, I mean the particular metaphysical manner in which one develops a consciousness, spirit, or reality.

In some cases truth could be more accurately described as what you deny instinctively because it does not suit your predetermined framework of the world. That is quite common. The negative version (pain or suffering, it might be called), usually emerges as our default settings. It is no wonder that major world religions such as Buddhism or Christianity elucidate these ideas as its main tenets or truths. Many times pain is what is most real. Good luck proving that with a scientific theorem.

In the political world, each side constantly points out facts that the other side negates, usually with a broader and more complex theory regarding reality, if done correctly. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. So it seems we can agree on an argument or even a set of given arguments, yet be just as bitterly divided by what is left unsaid. In either case we develop a heuristic, or a mental shortcut, that is usually much less complex than the unspoken whole which we can rarely fully interpret. Usually heuristics are very effective because we have limited time and cognitive resources and timely action is essential in a fast paced world.

The absence of utility, or potentially the time invested without obvious gains to the individual is exactly why this critical philosophy is dead as a pragmatic venture. I would argue using this method of assimilation and differentiation of your personal value structures within the inevitable transformations of business and culture over the next decade may be your most important task, if not for business strategy at least for your mental health in what is sometimes referred to as a post-truth world.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is perspective not truth” said the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Roman Stoic philosophy itself is based on the idea that personal truth, purpose, or virtue exceeds personal or social utopia. Maximizing happiness is not exactly the right strategy we have learned in recent years from the discipline of Positive Psychology. Willing and chasing happiness is ineffective.

You can’t be “high state” all of the time. By that I mean overly optimistic in every situation such as, spiritual gurus, or naïve managers. The high state extremist is so thankful that they live in an advanced society of relative safety that they fail to see the forces against them until their expectations do not match the realities time and time again. Predators preying on the naïve is a reality much older than humans and has probably sustained life up to this point. Only humans have morality.

This high state person is in danger, the depth psychology of Carl Jung might say, because they are not properly incorporating their “shadow” personality. The accompanying psychological paradigm of state is depth, which is most simply defined as our ability to integrate the truths of either side of the spectrum of our psychological state. Political psychology might root this down to the “Nature of Man” vs the “Nature of Society” as “good and evil” or “light and dark”.

This is why psychoanalysts usually preach assertiveness and not optimism when things are not going well for someone. However, it is also true that setting a goal and having faith of the possibility of attainment of that goal using positive emotion is a necessary function of psychological health. There is always a both/and- and the world always changes, which is why we always must update our heuristics.

Naivety is dangerous because you become an unguarded prey animal alone in the wilderness. However, the informed position without nuance might seem less ideal to our moral structure because we don’t like to look at ourselves as powerful predators. The motto “speak truth to power” was a mid-century mantra of pacifism against the predators of culture.

Jungian analysis might subscribe to speaking to the truth of power within yourself. Psychoanalytic tradition is not generally about maximizing happiness or dismissing fear. Perhaps this is why modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy credits it’s foundations in ancient Stoic philosophy. It is about building the parallel circuit within the individual to secure strength and meaning.

Jung also described the four functions of consciousness . . . sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling, which decode the world quite differently between individuals. How do these things make up the beliefs, realities, and experiences of a human being? Science has very little idea as of yet besides the fact that it could be theoretically mapped out in advanced algorithms at some point in the future. That current quantifiable output still does not give us an obvious path forward.

Sam Harris, among others, has been trying to advance a theory that science will be able to capture the four functions of consciousness to give us definitive facts regarding moral authority. It seems quite clear that path is still very foggy. But we need to develop a framework to make sense of the world. We want to find truth that makes the world a little clearer. We can then adopt strategies with better likelihoods of effectiveness. Still the world is vast.

The human mind is the most complicated machine in the galaxy, yet still incredibly insufficient to chart existence itself. There seems to be something truthful, or at least metaphysical about the conscious mind’s relationship to the number four. So do we categorize people like an ancient medic using Hippocrates Four Temperaments? Can we map reality by the transpersonal psychology of Ken Wilber’s four dimensions using an All Quadrants All Categories (AQAL) approach, or the four directions that make up the spirit of world in the Native American Lakota culture? Perhaps the four elements that quintessentially made up the material world in ancient science (earth, fire, air, water) or the four dimensions of modern physics (height, width, depth, and time) are more appropriate?

All accepted personality types including the Myers-Briggs framework, sees human personality structures in factors of four. Just last month Time Magazine reported that based on scientifically accepted factors of the Big Five Personality model, it was found in a sample size of 1.5 million respondents a natural cluster of four distinct personality types. We have four seasons encompassing the two extremes of Summer and Winter with the mirror image of transitional periods called spring and fall. The human life cycle is most easily broken down into four stages. It seems eighty years, without extreme medical advancement, is and has been about the extent of a relatively healthy person throughout human existence. That’s why turning 40 is climbing and rounding the parabola of the proverbial “hill”. At the age of 20, roughly, is when we stop growing and enter the world as fully formed humans. Perhaps this is why Jean Piaget talked about the four stages of childhood development ending around the age of 20.

The period of 20 years brings us back to generational differences. The ancient Etruscans, a mysterious pre-Roman civilization with lasting traces still high in the Tuscan hills, believed in the idea of the saeculum. This is the seemingly metaphysical quality of 80 years of human life. The Etruscans believed that we will all forget any first-hand knowledge after this time period, mostly because we will likely be dead. It is an inevitable truth that sustains as long as average life spans do not suddenly explode. In recent years life expectancy in advanced society is actually dwindling in some cases. It is true that average life spans have doubled in the past century; however even in times of scarcity, entirety in life sustains and completes the saeculum. Michelangelo and Donatello lived until their 80’s. For Ninja Turtle fans, Raphael died at 37 and Da Vinci at 67, born among the Tuscan ruins of the Etruscans.

It makes sense then that we learn the four stages of competence for growth and the four stages of cancer for death. Energy itself may be divided into four perspectives using the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical. The yin and yang is not absolute in its geometry. The two solid opposites cannot exist without traces of its negative version tucked completely inside the other, thus creating four elements. Lao Tsu assumed four cardinal virtues in ethics. We simplify financial and social perspectives from either the right or the left, classified by political scientists into four distinct points of view.

By now you get the point. There is an interdisciplinary and mystical idea of Four represented in two pairs of opposites throughout human history and within human consciousness. In the early 1990’s William Straus and Neil Howe proposed the idea of four generational archetypes that repeat in a sort of fractal, which is a mathematical term adopted by philosophers and theorists to describe a recursive pattern occurring naturally within a confined system. The idea says that as history develops in linear trajectory, there are small patterns that re-occur in humanity due nearly exactly due to our “humanness”. Nietzsche referred to it as “eternal recurrence”. The idea is that because even as we grow and adapt to the realities of the present and future, we are still a subject and object of Newton’s Cradle, which is the series of balls in pendulum fashion that restricts movement to the same plane. You have seen the mechanism representing eternal momentum within a self-supporting system.

That is the right way to think about generations. You have to think developmentally, historically, yet cyclically about their situation. There is an eternal momentum that we can never really understand that differentiates the feeling of existence. The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault recommended thinking genealogically and not archaeologically about history. The tree is deep and wide and connected in ways that we will never be able to fully know. What are the truest depictions of the ways that the youth, and specifically the Millennial generation view the world?

If you are not a Millennial you will need a practical framework that approximates their worldview to be able to act pragmatically. I am not suggesting adopting the median perspective of the Millennial, but at least consider that a corresponding viewpoint exists and will potentially become your company strategy, or at least the viewpoint of your employer, employee, or customer within the next decade. Deny the reality of 83 million Americans or 2 billion around the world at your peril. Whoever has the most perspectives wins might say the Metamodern philosopher Hanzi Freinacht, who calls for new values in this decidedly new era in which we find ourselves over the last several years.

We are hyper focused on skills, competencies, and relevance and rightly so. We have to stay economically useful and the world is changing much more quickly than we can update our perspectives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the political landscape. We have known this since sociologist Karl Mannheim exclaimed that the felt necessities of youth were divorced from the realities of their parents nearly 90 years ago. Schrodinger’s Cat made people’s heads explode seven years later when he said his cat was both dead and alive at the same time.

The Mathematical Theory of Communication shortly followed in Claude Shannon’s Information theory, setting in motion modern computing, and the Butterfly Effect of Edward Lorenz by the early 1960’s mathematically proved chaos was here to stay. The 1970’s arrived with Alvin Toffler publishing Future Shock where he stated that he wasn’t sure that humanity could sustain the coming complexity of life itself. Psychologist Robert Kegan declared that the mental demands of the new world made us In Over our Heads by the 1990’s. Biologist E.O. Wilson famously said by the turn of the century that “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom”.

Maybe we need to step back and analyze everything we know. Maybe we have to adopt another strategy so we realize this and begin the very difficult journey of transforming into a different person. The sentiments, realities, and assumptions we make regarding Millennials specifically, probably have some merit based on our experience and knowledge. However, it is utterly impossible to categorize an average Millennial completely as a cohort much less as an individual. The information reservoir makes it likely that their realities are exponentially different than even the starkness of differences between previous generations. Mannheim described it a century ago, and 3000 years ago the Etruscans acknowledged the idea of human transformation as a function of a single lifetime. That’s why we see memes about Millennials that captures a sentiment in which a segment of population will ultimately respond. There are infinite modes of truth but confinement around the structures that we can accept. We can find truth in small things that we can embrace and understand but can we roll them up into more complex ideas and use them? We have to try.

I say do not categorize a Millennial in the same breath that I ask you to categorize someone as a Millennial. It seems paradoxical! And it is. I could get attacked on-line for either of those two opinions. What I am saying is that Millennials are just different people in a different time. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger differentiated the idea of “Sein” and “Dasein”. Most simply, as I understand the idea, “Sein” is the eternal self (perhaps simply made of biology and personality) and “Dasein” is the set of influences that could change the self over time, space, and circumstance.

We have to assume a Daseinian avatar of ourselves exists in the world, in the past, present, and future- as a business strategy, not to mention a metamodern moral imperative. Why? Because their vision will soon grow larger than ours. Their viewpoint from the parabola as represented by a hill is further, probably, as we round 40 and it descends increasingly into the last quarters of our lives. This does not make them wiser because they see further ahead only more updated. They were raised on the emerging constructs that you are just now ready to accept, if you ever do at all. That might seem political. It is not. The same rules apply for everyone. Again, whoever has the most perspectives wins in the future.

We use a very selective interpretation of the world. This is an idea of phenomenologists, who state that where our attention goes seems to matter. In a world of nearly infinite facts how do you narrow the world into a set of useable truths? Well, we have to believe that we learn based on what worked before. That judgement is based on our senses much more than we would like to admit. David Hume, perhaps the most important philosopher to have written in English might say that sensing comes before thinking. So our senses can be forced to make us act rational.

We use rationality to justify our emotions many times. This is probably the most useful idea to know about large scale group interaction from politics to organizations. Most of us are attuned to what is objectively happening. It is much more difficult to swim in the world of Hume. That’s why the idea of emotional intelligence actually existing is only a couple of decades old. It’s undisputed founder, Daniel Goleman, claims this intelligence is nested in four domains- self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

So you have to ask yourself in the social and emotional environment- Am I the pathological one? Am I the “One causing disease”? Am I the one who is toxic? Do I have the right point of view? No, do I have the right judgement to make an accurate forecast of my responsibility to uphold my inner truths? This has been goal of philosophy for time immemorial. The forecourt of the Temple of Apollo was inscribed with the words “Know Thyself”, Socrates asked us to examine life, Plato advised to escape the cave with its echoes of groupthink, and Francis Bacon told us to abandon the idols in the world that would suppress true knowledge in Novum Organum. Perhaps not coincidentally there are four idols that seek to obscure our clarity.

The idols that deflect truth can be categorized succinctly yet look different to people with different realities. The accepted boundaries of value structures are always in question. That’s why we establish cultural norms that may or may not go out of date. Leadership theorist Nick Jankel says that we switch from our default “Control and Protect” mode based on our evolutionary impulse to stay alive. Essentially it is the dark forces of chaos and uncertainty and our requirement as humans to use this shadow to protect ourselves.

This is in contrast with “Create and Connect” mode which provides us with ideas such as love, trust, passion, and meaning as well as the positive emotions that make us useful in the world of work and beyond in the 21st century. The four elements of these two systems seem to uncover precisely the values that will be both meaningful and useful in the long term. We must understand the evolutionary utility of controlling and protecting as well as the exponential and existential gains of creating and connecting.

What is required then is that we see the positive emotions and values that best represent the most positive cohort of Millennials in addition to the apparent troubling structures witnessed in the media. It is easy to default to the “Control and Protect” mode to double down on our fears of the future. It is important to be skeptical and critical of rapid change that disregards previous modes of truth, however, reactionary models invite the idols of truth to our front door.

A fairly simple glance at history tells us that this is exactly what humans always do eventually when we run out of imagination. A hunter-gatherer has values that coincide with the realities of the world prior to about 12,000 years ago. 1000 years ago we would have had medieval values without question. We would have had modern values since before the Declaration of Independence was signed and Postmodern values in some respect perhaps since Nietzsche claimed “God is dead”, Kerouac saw Big Sur, or intellectuals began questioning the Enlightenment project in academia.

With the proliferation of technology, and especially communication technology over the last several years we have decidedly entered a new cultural era distinct from the previous. Every 20 years or so we find a new generation that rebels in one of four distinct ways, Strauss and Howe might say. The difference between Millennials and all other previous generations is that their generational transition happens to coincide with a complete cultural era transition. That is no small occurrence. Historically over the course of human history it has taken us hundreds or thousands of years to fully integrate technological and cultural disruption from one stage to the next. We have been tasked to do it in just the past couple of decades. Just like any cultural era transition we will have to adopt new values to pragmatically adjust to the situation. This, however, is unchartered territory.

So what we have in Millennials is a value structure that is rational as well as pragmatic for their circumstances. It may be easy to spot their deficiencies as a function of youth, universally. It is much easier to deny their insights about the emerging structures that do not yet seem true. It may be fair to say that their view of the arc of history may be much shorter, but our view of the arc of the future is much shorter than theirs. This has unimaginable consequences in all aspects of business, culture, and politics. So not only do you need to have the skills, the smarts, the passion, the education, the experience, and the temperament, you need to learn the meta perspective of meaning within human culture and how you as an individual will interact and utilize the values systems of the future. In fact, it might be the most important lesson to learn that you are currently neglecting.