What Matters?

Everything matters and nothing. It depends. Since our proposition here at PRC is, The meaning of life is your response to it, any response we have, to any particular situation, at any given time, is what matters, to us at least. But that could be anything. So, for this particular entry we’re concerned with what really matters. And what really matters are the things none of us can avoid.

Meaning, if we want to live we have no choice. These things have to matter, or life will become intolerable, and sooner than later, unlivable. There’s no denying that humans are certainly capable of living in this way, and usually do. So much so, in fact, that we shouldn’t laugh at the dinosaurs for getting themselves extinct.

After all, they lasted a lot longer than we have so far. So, if what really matters is what we can’t avoid, what are we talking about?

Well, we’re not talking about the basics, like breathing, sleeping, food, clothing, shelter and reproduction. But we are talking about the things without which those basics are impossible. So, what are those things? Let’s call them The Irreducibles. I'll explain.

Life is impossible without Social Interaction.

But Social-Interaction is inconceivable without Explanation.

Both require Social Institutions.

All three are subsumed by Culture.

And all four by Human Behavior.

These five things: Social Interaction, Explanation, Social Institutions, Culture and Human Behavior, are what we refer to as The Irreducibles.* The rest of this entry will discuss two related themes: The Irreducibles and Social Management.

*Of course, these five are not exhaustive (for example, one could and should add History).

But for the purposes of this entry the above list of Irreducibles will serve.

You’d think that because we can’t avoid these things, because these things are so important to our survival, we´d know something about the relationship between them all and how a knowledge of that relationship can help us improve the quality of life in general and our lives and social-institutions in particular.

But, it’s not easy to point without hesitation to a book or a person talking about these things. The only person I know of is Peckham, just as the only book on Explanation I could point to is his luminous Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior. Discovering his writing was like finding a buried treasure. Which is why PRC is, in part, a celebration of his work.

One thing’s for sure, the inter-relationship of these five categories is not being discussed in any educational institution today, anywhere. Or if it is, it's the best kept secret in the world.

Let’s take Explanation for example. To restate the passage from Explanation and Power quoted in our first entry:

Explanation is ubiquitous in human behavior. So much so, that to understand it, even incompletely, is to possess an insight that no other insight can match. Explanation is found constantly, at all levels of culture, in every kind of social organization, in every human situation. Social management, of ourselves or others, is impossible without explanation. We justify our actions and our plans by explaining their importance – their value – both to ourselves and others.

Social Interaction without Explanation is Inconceivable.

It’s the very condition of human existence. Good luck living without it. And yet, there’s no Explanation 101 offered in any university today. No introductory course that lays out and discusses the conditions of Explanation and its place in Human Behavior. Why is that? One possible answer is that, since the elite is using its own explanation of the world to control the people in it, they don’t want anyone knowing about Explanation itself.

The other reason, much less conspiratorial, but also much more probable and far more troubling, is that having only ever thought about their own explanations and having received no real education or training in understanding the conditions of Explanation, its place in human behavior, and the impact of both on the social institutions they control, the elite itself doesn’t know anything about Explanation! Our leaders today, from executives and managers, to professors and politicians, in business, education and government, not to mention their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, are essentially professional explainers.*

*By the way, the above list also includes Consultants, of course! That's why we don't expect anyone to believe in our ideas or explanations. All we can do is encourage anyone who might be interested to test and use those ideas and explanations. That's all. If they work for you, great! If not, just ignore us.

In other words, the world today is being run by professional explainers who can’t explain Explanation itself. This explains why they're now often referred to as "Professional Dumb People." For this reason, and not just this reason, never before in the history of the world has an elite been more powerful and yet more ignorant and incompetent, more spoiled and yet more resentful, more indifferent to suffering and yet more self-righteous, more arrogant and yet more mediocre and unimpressive. And all of this at a time when life in the civilization whose social institutions they control is more complex and unpredictable than ever before in human history.

No surprise they’re often referred to as The Hostile Elite (and Professional Dumb People). To them Explanation is not something worth understanding. It’s merely an instrument of power. Not surprisingly, that power is not being used very wisely.

One obvious consequence is Cultural Impoverishment.

In any event, there’s certainly a daunting body of information about society, culture and behavior, and it all involves Explanation. But there’s no one person or book directing our attention to a common thread that ties them together and brings them all into a more manageable focus. That is the basic aim here. The idea is to get us thinking about things that really matter.

In other words, to get us to think about the relationship between The Irreducibles and Social Management, and to test and use the discoveries we might make along the way.

Of course, there’s lots of books, videos, etc. available on social management. Too many, in fact. But a survey of the best-selling books on social management reveals no awareness of The Irreducibles, or their relation to Social Management.

It´s the conviction here that a knowledge of The Irreducibles is vital to the full functioning of our social institutions - all of them. It’s the missing piece (and any company’s competitive edge).

And the fact that we are not thinking, discussing, writing and reading about them is showing in the failure of those institutions.

One consequence is a seemingly unbridgable gap between the responsibilities of social management and the healthy functioning of our social institutions. The result is a devastating social incoherence. The perception of social incoherence by a critical mass of individuals means that the society in question is in a condition of cultural crisis. And that is the condition we are in.

It’s also obvious that this crisis is both caused by behavior and impacts behavior, and that whatever particular causes one attributes to the crisis, the situation badly needs to be explained and the behavior understood and responded to with all the thought and care we can muster. None of this can happen by operating out of a position of defensiveness and guilt. Neither of which are of the slightest value when it comes to creative problem-solving, innovation and responsible leadership.

And one thing, among many, the hostile elite has made perfectly clear is that they’re not good problem-solvers or responsible leaders (which is why no one individual or group should care about the elite’s condemnation of them, at all).

And when we said above that this situation needs to be "explained" we mean explained from an approach, or point of view, unlike those we’ve become accustomed to. Otherwise, what would be the value of Cultural Transcendence?

An approach, moreover, that uses the language of common-sense to help us understand the relationship between Explanation and Behavior as both are experienced in Social Interaction and acted out in the Social Institutions of one's Culture.

You’re certainly not going to learn any of this in a university today, or from a Noam Chomsky, Salvoj Zizek, or Jordan Peterson, and certainly not from a cabal of charlatans like Richard Delgado, Ibram X Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo.*

* The fatal thing about celebrity intellectuals is that their mediocre minds are extolled as great by a credulous public devoid of judgment and a cynical elite devoid of conscience. It’s no great achievement to have your success depend upon those in the public suffering from Codependency and Dunning-Kruger Effect, or an elite possessed by and living out of The Dark Triad.

Also, proof we live in an irony-free age is found in the fact that CRT buffoons like Delgado, et al. don't see the irony of presenting their theory as the truth, when the truth is, it isn't even a theory.

The point of view, or orientation, offered here is simple and direct and based on a response to The Irreducibles and their relationship to Social Management, to an understanding of Human Behavior. The approach to human behavior here is not to be confused in any way with academic behaviorism. As Morse Peckham once said, “Academic behaviorism is not nearly behavioral enough.” Besides, there´s no reason why a group of academics should have exclusive control over so useful a word.

Nor does the position here come from a philosophical point of view. Philosophy, instead of directing fruitfully our attention to how we move from sentence to sentence, has been involved in telling us how we ought to move from sentence to sentence, ie; it’s prescriptive, not descriptive, as it often clams. In other words, it´s normative, to use its own terminology (against it).

And though the position here is certainly prescriptive (if any point of view is descriptive it´s prescriptive), it says so up front and offers an explanation as to why.

Philosophy should have told us by now something about Explanation´s place in Human Behavior. And Psychology should have told us about Human Behavior´s relationship to Explanation. But they have done neither. One wonders if both, as they are practiced today, can properly be called "intellectual disciplines." For this reason, the position taken here does not come from either one, though it doesn´t hesitate to borrow whatever tools both have to offer that might be useful - to us.

Concluding Remarks

One of the principles at PRC is The Principle of Justification.

To satisfy that principle we´ll close with a brief explanation for the answer offered here to the question, What Matters?

It’s always the obvious that eludes us.

That we can’t live without Social Interaction and Explanation, and that their context is Social Institutions and Culture, and that they all involve Behavior, and that each are fundamental to Social Management, is so obvious (once it’s pointed out to us) that we don’t think about it, even when we obviously need to.

One thing a study of Cultural History makes clear is that every once in a while those obvious things that elude us need to be brought to our attention and explained. Because, continuing to ignore or avoid them renders our social institutions dysfuntional and maladaptive. The evidence is all around us. So, any help we can get in understanding The Irreducibles and their relationship to Social Management is bound to be useful. And that is the justification for the answer to the question What Matters? Join PRC for the next entry when we’ll discuss What Matters Now?