The Modern Anthropocentrism.
Pursuit of mission, vision, and purpose-driven organizations?
What caused the pre-17th century institutions to cling to a worldview that saw the Earth as the center of the universe with planets revolving around it- the geocentric view of Aristotle and Ptolemy. A combination of three mechanistic human distractions- i.e., we default to them when we are trying to think about something. They were, and are, being self-referential, identified with others and others’ ideas, and have a tendency toward mental fabrication based on the ableness to imagine things pre its existence, or not yet existent, worlds. These are undeveloped human capacities, and so rule us unless we find our way into a Development School to evolve our inner being. And they are still at work in us today, four hundred years later, as we try to find the causes and cures for climate change, racial bias, and inequity in justice and economics. The cures are assumed to be above in the subtitle of this paper. But the causes are the same at every paradigm shift. The three undeveloped human capacities do not lead us to find the deep causes. The idea of missions, visions, and purpose focus is a mismatch between cause and cure.
Self-referential (1) is when we interpret all activity from its impact on us, from our personal point of view, as if we are the central factor in activating and receiving results. (e.g., effects on our credibility, income, and career). (2)Identification is seeing ourselves as defined by a community that we are beholden to and dependent on in some important ways. We fail if it fails, and we are successful when it is. (e. g. identifying with being human, Caucasian, a Family, a Church, or a Scientific Community— success by association). (3)Mental fabrication is a justification process of filling in and interpreting events from outcomes we want and doing so backward into details imagined as being in events, which are needed for outcomes to make sense, or by weaving stories that explain our beliefs and assumptions, without noticing, or correcting, the missing or mistaken augmentations. We even reimagine scientific experiments and outcomes without noticing our invisible manipulation of the story. Peer review even falls prey to this process when it intends to protect against it. This is the source of Galileo’s countering scientists, and their equivalents have done so for generations. All three of these are the characteristics that drive Anthropocentrism to produce a narrow view of how Living Systems Work.
What does anthropocentric mean?
Anthropocentrism literally means human-centered, but in its most relevant philosophical form, it is the ethical belief that humans alone possess intrinsic value and wisdom to know. In contradistinction, all other beings hold value only in their ability to serve humans, even in feeling good about themselves. Confirming our superiority. The non-human is the savior of life. It is mixed with identification because it is how we show off how special we are. We sacrifice for existence. But it’s working on the wrong cause. We are still viewing from a self-referential point of ‘how we look’ to others who are of their class. Well-intended.
On the surface, this well-intended doing good looks like we are doing something good for Earth and society. But the important first phases are missing to make it the Living Systems Worldview. To remove the anthropocentrism, we must go through a few phases.
Phase One: Understanding how Living Systems work without the projection of human arrogance. Begin by:
1. Noticing our Worldview- Mostly a Do Good, Humanist one and learning to switch to understand the “working” from a Living Systems view using human ideas to fix fragmented symptoms with missions, causes, and purposes.
2. Move away from the Problem/Solution position with fragments, categories, and generic models. This requires seeing it as a living system doing work in value-adding work, like a life shed feeding, sheltering, and transacting with life, or a school growing food for a community.
3. Shift Point of View- from human reference with an ideology, e.g., us looking at it (objectifying); projecting our ideas onto it. e.g., Follow the best practice method by connecting to an environmentalist school of thought and not the living place in front of you.
4. Re-educate the self to avoid a Flatland view- which sees all methods that are better than the bad ones as all the same; rather than that, it is examined with precision to see the difference so we do what really works.
Phase two: Engage in a Story of place discovery to get to the Whole of a place— of unique, not generic, specific Geology, Hydrology, Biology, Geographic Patterns, Economics, and Culture of the specific place. Understand each place is never duplicated anywhere. Find its singularity. Avoid layering categories on life.
Phase three: Understand that the Human’s Role is producing consciousness in our dialogues and creative work so a higher field of energy can offer more understanding in the place of what is needed. Galileo concluded the reason humans in his time failed to see rightly: He postulated that,
“In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea as they hit upon themselves or hear set forth by others, no matter how simple and stupid these may be, gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand, whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage — if indeed it does not make them ill. Besides themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries.” (Author, Galileo Galilei. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems; Stephen Jay Gould editor, Stillman Drake translator)
You will likely see some agreement with my three human distractions in Galileo's rant. I think it is based on incompletely developed capacity in these three arenas. We have been enticed away from understanding how we are able to see the working of a system that Galileo saw clearly. David Bohm points out that we never learn to see wholes and how they work, which is our problem. The process we use further weakens imaging wholes at work as a system. Whatever the reason, we are still in the same approach four centuries later. Fragmenting, the creation of categories, etc.
We currently use the same fragments, not wholes, generic, not specific, categorized, not essence expression, and other broken aspects of the 17th-century approach to try to get us out of our mess. We are using the same paradigm got us there to generate new efforts that are not better because of the method, paradigm, to find them.
What is wrong with Doing Good?
Humanist-centered and wanting to be a good person, each person or organization projects a humanist, individualistic projection of problem derived and an idealized idea by human organization.
Because missions, causes, visions, and purposes are by their nature relentlessly fragmenting (i.e., causes, and issues from each human and institution), they need categories to work on the chaos created by categories; To sort into categories, we ultimately create generic answers to determine what is in what category and offer generic best answers. We have lost the most necessary aspect, the whole that makes it alive. There are mechanisms to learn to see the whole. But the best is the story of the place. And the Essence of a being, particularly humans and species of animals and biota and plants that work together to orchestra living systems, create the value being added each day.