In a class on Corporate Turnaround, my professor recently discussed pluralistic ignorance. This is when an individual believes that the group they’re apart of holds a very different view than they do, so the individual decides to go along with the perceived norm rather than their actual, privately-held belief.
The perceived norm is often very different from the consensus that would emerge if everyone was being honest, and study after study shows that entire groups will go along with ideas no one believes in simply because the individuals are afraid of challenging the status quo. This is, more or less, the phenomena underpinning the classic story, The Emperor’s New Clothes.
I experienced firsthand some of the most extreme versions of this phenomena during my time in a high-control group in Southern California. I can vouch for how far this dissonance can be stretched and precisely how deleterious it can be for a community. Whether or not the multi-verse exists in the Marvel sense, I don’t know; but the concept that we live in an infinite number of parallel realities is something that most of us experience everyday on a subjective level. A cornerstone of health, both for an individual and a community, is precisely how close we can get to living in the same— “capital R”— Reality.
In MBA world, conversations around this topic always lead to the same encouragement: psychological safety. Make it safe for people to speak their mind, propose divergent ideas, or deliver bad news. “It is the leader’s job,” professors say, “to create conditions that help people to tell their truth or deliver bad news.” Fair, but I often wonder:
In the absence of safe conditions, what will you do then?
I have found that there is no substitute for personal bravery— and anyone who is brave has had a reason to be. But I digress…
In the years post-cult, I’ve noticed a pattern among the spaces where people were willing to speak their mind. Generally speaking, the truth, when spoken, is not nearly as catastrophic as it is cathartic. It doesn’t come to people as a shock — it comes to them as a relief. When someone finally says the thing, it is like taking the lid off a pressure cooker, giving permission for people to act looser, less fearfully, and be less stressed.
My favorite (and perhaps the most obvious) way to watch “the steam escape” is through a laugh. A good joke is almost aways the best way to introduce an alternative plane of thinking.
I don’t mean that one should always try and Trojan Horse a revelation inside a light-hearted quip. I know very well that some truths are hard to swallow and that reality is not always pleasant. Rather, what I am discouraging is the attitude of people that try to justify coarseness by saying “they’re just being honest.” I was, at one time, among them.
Indeed, I cringe when I look back at myself. I was like a toddler playing on a drum kit. I use to love taking an opposing viewpoint, not because it was useful but because it was possible. I have a personality which craves intensity more than the average person, but there was also an ideological philosophy at work.
See, I was taught (and believed) that truth had power — something I still stand by. Yet, still being immature, I sought evidence for power in the all the ways which the world had taught me to look for: authority, leverage, control. I thought that the purpose of truth-telling was to undermine other people’s conception of the landscape, providing an opportunity to conform them to mine. In reality, telling the truth is about sharing part of a map that others might not have—and that you yourself see but through a glass dimly.
Subversion can be fun for a moment, but real joy needs something sturdy to swing on. The beauty of everybody being on the same page is not necessarily the factual correctness of said page (although that is important). Rather, the beauty is that truth provides people with coordinates to be together— and togetherness is the goal. Using truth to create hierarchies is a strategy for division; and that is a perversion of truth’s greatest gift.
This is, I suppose, what makes writing so satisfying for me. It is remote solidarity. A way of sending myself through space and time so that I can be with someone who is far, far away from me. Good literature is often disturbing, but rarely is it disruptive. There are times where something from the written word upends humanity’s perception of the universe, but it is much more likely that a great book or rousing speech confirms something that, deep in our hearts, we knew but never had the language for.
In his book on The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis remarked that friendship “is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…“. I’ve described this before as world-building, a term I use to describe the collective project of piecing together a shared reality with your neighbors. Experiences such as travel have a way of dispelling ignorance and exposing you to new understandings, but only friendship can give that expanded universe solidity. It’s through relationship and fellowship with others that we triangulate onto the things are both actual and crucial. It’s a vulnerable process and there are serious hazards to living so openly; but the rewards are numerous too— and the alternative is a lonely, lonely path.
Keep the laughter on your side,
Bradley
About the Author:
Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that you are guaranteed to love.
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