“What is different today are the warnings from the technologists themselves. ‘The monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart,’ Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay wrote this week.”[i]
When creating the institutions that form the infrastructure of our communities, it is best to select the most stable foundation available. The bedrock upon which we would do well to site our structures of education, government, science, foreign policy, and health care, for example, is called Reality or the Truth.
We make two fundamental choices that determine our experience in life. We answer “yes” or “no” to Einstein’s question: Is the universe friendly? We answer another “yes” or “no” question about whether the material world is the ultimate Reality. Rather than being consciously aware that we are reacting to those questions, most of us just incorporate the belief or choice made by the community into which we are born without having to think about what we are doing.
We have already addressed elsewhere the consequences of answering “no” to Einstein’s question including the fear-driven behavior that pervades the Global Village. Choosing the material world as the ultimate Reality only adds to our fear and confusion. In doing so we have inadvertently rejected the worldview of Oneness, anthropomorphized the Creator, and doomed our community to life in a “clockwork” universe. We have fallen prey to reductionism.
Reductionism is the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon (e.g., the material world) in terms of phenomena (perceived by the senses) that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation as in the worldview of Paradigm-B.
Where a reductionist (worldview of dualism) would propose that the best way to understand something is to look at what it is made up of (analysis), a holist (worldview of Oneness) would argue that the sum-product is more than simply the sum of its parts.
Reductionism was first introduced by Descartes in his “Discourses” in 1637, where he argued that the world was like a machine, its pieces like clockwork mechanisms, and that the machine could be understood by taking its pieces apart, studying them, and then putting them back together to see the larger picture. The fundamental problem with both the “pieces” and the “larger picture” is that they are not stable foundations, they are impermanent. Reality is “grounded” not in the physical world nor the human intellect but in the realm of intuition, the realm of the human heart. The best word to describe the world is “perfection” if we are to truly understand Where we are, Who we are and Why we are here.
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Supplemental Reading:
Science, Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community (2015)
#29 Clockwork Mechanism
[i] Streitfeld, David. “Changing the World, but Not Quite the Way They Had Imagined.”
The New York Times. October 13, 2017, p. A-11.
