From the beginning PRC has been an experiment. Not just an educational experiment, but an experiment in Explanation. The fact is, even the best of explanations is still only an explanation, inadequately and incompletely instrumental, but never perfect and final. How could it be?
The hope for PRC was that my proposals along these lines might have some suggestive value for the social institutions that I worked with, as well as offering ways of thinking about social management somewhat different from those commonly obtaining, then and now. The justification for this emphasis on the relationship between Explanation and Social Management is that a social institution doesn't simply use explanation as a means for communication, survival, and growth, a social institutions is an explanation.
And since life is impossible without explanation, our social institutions are best seen as adaptational mechanisms, or modes of adaptation. If they don't work, we don't work, and lately our institutions across the board and around the world don't seem to be working all that well, or as well as they could.
Of course, there are many reasons for this, but certainly one of them, perhaps the most important, can be found in the gap between our dependency on Explanation and our knowledge of how it works in practice.
The idea at PRC is to bridge that gap.
Explanation is to a social institution what blood is to the body, if it doesn't flow things don't work, and after a while - fall apart. At the beginning this problem might be easy to fix, but hard to see. If the problem remains unseen, or ignored, it becomes easy to see, but impossible to fix. Not a few institutions today are suffering from exactly this problem. Just look around.
But there's more, and it's hightly relevant. An understanding of Explanation is the best defense we have against what I like to refer to as Know-It-Allism.
Know-It-Allism is a disease found in individuals and groups that are, now more than ever before, infecting our social institutions - all of them.
It says, in effect, I/We have all of the questions and all of the answers.
Know-It-Alslism is synonymous with The Dark Triad. The attributes of The Dark Triad are: a lust for power, narcissism, and psychopathy.
Know-It-Allism can be found in all self-focused, low-character* parents, employers, employees, clients, university professors, political activists, politicians, celebrities, consultantcies, etc. I could go on, but I'd never finish.
*Character here is defined simply as how we treat other people.
The point is that Know-It-Allism, or The Dark Triad, is a maladaptation that can only end in disaster, the case with any closed system, which is what a know-it-all operates out of, a closed system, or block universe. The reason for this is that know-it-alls, who desperately need to believe that they are always right, have a corresponding inability to admit when they are wrong.
That being the case, the intelligent, practical, and humane alternative to the intellectual, social, and moral insanity of a closed system, is an open one.
We'll go into more detail about the difference between open and closed systems and the consequences in the next few entries. Until then, the key point here is that the basic building block of any closed system is the know-it-all. The explanation for this is that the know-it-all is incapable of grasping, or is simply unwilling to face, an obvious fact. Now that fact is this:
An explanation is usable (functional and adaptive) only if it is open-ended and unresolved in two directions, the verbal and nonverbal, theory and data, explanation and behavior. Without this openness there can be no learning, change, and growth. In short, there can be no genuine human progress.
Since institutions are explanations, and since institutions as explanations are adaptational mechanisms necessary for our survival, to arrest the development of those institutions is to pose a threat to human adaptation.
So, to be truly free of Know-It-Allism, that left unchecked ends in a Slavery System - run by the know-it-alls - we must first learn to expose our own explanations to a process of continuous feedback and correction.
Why would this be necessary and beneficial - and would it?
Yes. It would be necessary and beneficial. Not because I said so, but because this process of feedback and correction is the very source, not only of all creativity and innovation, but more importantly, of human adaptability itself.
The carrying out of this process is what is meant by Cultural Transcendence, and Cultural Transcendence is the beating heart of PRC.
In any event, for those times when we can't avoid the know-it-alls of this world, or Know-It-Allism in ourselves (no one's perfect), we can at least find some consolation in an understanding of how this obsession with perfect adequacy works in relation to our explanations and institutions, and how such an understanding might free us from what is essentially a superstition.
Spoiler Alert! The source of this Rage for Order is found in the primary attribute of the human brain - randomness of response. The hope here is that an awareness of this primary attribute - and how to better respond to it - just might help to make us more modest and less murderous. And how would we acquire this improved response to the brain's primary attribute?
By transforming the murderous and immodest human Rage for Order into the less murderous and more humane Drive Toward Reality. And how could we do that? By experimenting with our explanations, of course!
It can be done. In fact, it is being done right now as we speak.
For more see here.
In short, an honest and thoughtful experiment with Explanation in general, and our own explanations in particular, has something to displease practically everybody, and to please them too.
To displease them in the sense that such an experiment is bound to give us a knowledge about ourselves that many people simply do not want to have.
But, if one can muster the courage, honesty, and intelligence, to face such unpleasant facts, it can also please them too, in as much as Joy is deeper than sorrow. This is what I have attempted to do in my life and work.
But don't take my word for it.
My strong wish is to pass on to my readers the same sense of contradiction, incoherence, uncertainty, frustration and excitement, that I feel in myself whenever subjecting my own ideas to that process of feedback and correction for the purpose of continuous learning, change, and growth.
Breakdown - Breakthrough
Life truly is dynamic, not static, and we are imperfect, not perfect. The acceptance of this irresolvable dynamism between us, our beliefs, and the world we live in, is the source, not only of adaptability, creativity, and innovation, but also of our only real excuse for hope. It very well may be.
It will certainly do much to free us from the tyranny of absolutes - in any form - while helping us to experience, perhaps for the first time, the sense of value - and joy - of becoming who we are.
Paul Rothwell
Patagonia, Argentina
October 26th 2023
Note: The word hope appears in the above three times, and for good reason. Nevertheless, as I've said before and will say again because it's worth repeating: Hope is waiting for things to happen - courage is doing it!
