264) The Doctrine of Original Awesomeness, Part 1 -- (Also, Day 32 -- Reason #32 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism)

Today I want to root out one of the biggest delusions in all human history. And replace it with a liberating, vibrant, beautiful, uplifting truth about “human nature”.  

The delusion I point towards lays at the very heart of our Predatory Capitalist system, for it is rooted in fear — fear of the other, fear of diversity and difference, fear that without systems of control, humans’ Hobbesian nature, our selfish, cruel, brutish, immoral nature, will trample society in an orgy of violence and terror.  We will degrade ourselves, if we “revert to our animal nature”.

Rooting out this delusion is absolutely necessary for re-building society, not through the power-hierarchies of control that have turned into systems of oppression and exploitation for so many centuries, but rather, to re-build society along lines of community, and kindness, and creativity, trusting that, given the right nurturance, humanity will, on its own, spontaneously, without overt control by restrictive and penalizing authorities, simply thrive.

I call this the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness.

This is a direct (and intentional) contrast to the Doctrine of Original Sin that our culture has been built upon: the belief that stems from the Bible, based on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the belief that humans are “naturally” sinful, that our base, fundamental nature is to be selfish, lazy, debauched, even violent.  

This is simply not true, and 2000+ years of organizing society to punish “badness”, to enforce “RULES” so that people don’t fall back into their natural awfulness, has done us no good, and instead, has imprisoned us in a world of power hierarchies, militaries, penal systems, and countless systems of CONTROL.  Rather than freeing humanity to express its goodness, to thrive creatively, to fully live and embrace and enjoy the beauty of the world, the Doctrine of Original Sin has kept us oppressed and afraid and subject to the whims of authority figures.  

Although Western culture, in theory, emphasizes the Freedom of the individual, in practice this freedom is limited by the power hierarchies that control us, every single step of our lives.  

People with traditional mindsets, such as parents who raise their kids according to “tradition” and “authority”, don’t agree with me, of course.  They believe kids need RULES to learn right from wrong.  Kids need PUNISHMENT, to learn right from wrong.  Kids need to “respect authority”, so they learn right from wrong.  

And all of this, is bullshit.  In a future post, we may explore the scientific, research foundation of this argument, but that’s a whole literature of literatures to wade through.  Maybe we’ll make it a series…

For now, I want to focus on the simple humanistic beauty of the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness, and invite you to imagine with me.  Imagine what society COULD be like, what childhood COULD be like, what school and work and community COULD be like, if we threw out the pessimistic view of human nature based on original sin, and instead, adopted a different set of assumptions.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that humans are, “innately”, “fundamentally”, “intrinsically”, growth-oriented, excellence-oriented, and community-oriented.  This set of assumptions lays at the very heart of humanistic philosophies and psychologies, and has inspired people from Abraham Maslow, to Maria Montessori, to generations of cultural revolutionaries who believe in the possibility of a better world, without punishment (or minimal perhaps, for the worst-case scenarios), without policing (or minimal perhaps, for the worst-case scenarios), without nations bristling with weapons pointed at each other, and without the exploitative violence that has seemingly forever existed between those at the top of power hierarchies, and those at the bottom. 

This Doctrine of Original Awesomeness gives a very different view of human nature than what almost all of us were raised to believe.  It posits that humans have an innate, hard-wired, holy trinity of fundamental orientations:

1) Growth-orientation:

We WANT to learn things.  We want to be challenged, to stretch our abilities, to get better at stuff, simply because it feels better to be engaged with life, than to live half-heartedly, retreating from challenge to the safety of the known.  

We WANT to grow; it is our innate organismic yearning, to strive to become more, understand more, explore and discover and fully, zestfully experience the beautiful diversity of this world we live in.  We don’t want to sit in our safe little caves, peering fearfully out at “the world out there”.  We want to seize the day, to confidently stride across the land and find out what’s around the corner.  

This is the (oft-overlooked) beating heart of motivational theory.  In contrast to the behaviourist, control-oriented emphasis on rewarding “good” behaviour and punishing “bad” behaviour that so many parents, and teachers, and employers rely upon to “motivate” their kids or employees, if you adopt a Growth-orientation perspective on humans, you can be confident that, without any manipulation or external pressuring to do more, people will NATURALLY WANT to do more.  

You can see this optimism in the idea of providing citizens with a Universal Basic Income.  And you see the resistance by the traditionalists, who believe that if you give people what they need to live decent lives, they will just become lazy and expect handouts and take advantage of the system.  This is an outgrowth of the Doctrine of Original Sin.

In contrast, advocates of Universal Basic Income believe that no, if people don’t have to struggle to simply have sufficient food and shelter and security, then they will be free to GROW.  To create.  To be innovative.  To explore what really matters in life, and figure out ways to GIVE back to the world, to their communities, their family and friends, their society.  People don’t want to just sit around watching Netflix all day and eating bonbons.  Not for the most part and certainly not forever.  How boring that would be!  Instead, people WANT to live better lives.  And when they aren’t shut down by shame and humiliation, when their “inner light” hasn’t been extinguished by a childhood of being controlled, when their inner yearning to grow has instead been nurtured and supported and allowed to express itself freely and safely, people naturally want to thrive.  

This is now well-understood (although poorly practiced much of the time), in business — employees do their best work, especially in a challenging environment that requires people to be creative, when they are motivated by their own sense of meaning, when they are encouraged by their peers, and when they are allowed to fully express themselves in their work collaborations (i.e., socially validated intrinsic motivation).  But the more that leaders, CEOs, managers and such rely on rewards and punishments to try to squeeze out some extra motivation from employees, those employees lose interest in what they are doing, have to push themselves to work harder, and far too often produce sub-standard work, and eventually burn out.  

Parenting shows us this too, if we are open-minded and trusting enough not to control our kids from Day 1.  Because kids are naturally, spontaneously creative, playful, and curious.  They play and create and have incredible imaginations, from their earliest years.  They ask “Why? Why? Why?” ALL THE TIME.  And as long as adults don’t get frustrated and crush that curiosity out of them with indifference, frustration, or criticism, that beautiful curiosity grows and grows and grows.

Unfortunately, school comes along with its all-too-boring-as-hell curriculum that is based on an education model from a couple of centuries ago that was designed to produce obedient workers, NOT innovative, vibrant humans.  Kids spend countless hours, for years, in an environment designed to control them, with teachers who are sometimes amazing but all-too-often power-tripping overlords with disdain for their students.  And the grading system, purported to reward excellence, mostly just punishes kids who fail to conform to the norms.

Kids striving for excellence don’t need grades to keep them going.  But kids struggling to learn sure as hell don’t benefit from getting Ds.  All that does, for most kids, is turn them off school, make them hate teachers, and turn into adults who despise “the elite”, turn their backs on science and education, and “do their own research” by watching YouTube videos who tell them what they already agree with.  Bereft of critical thinking skills, they fall into the Dunning-Krueger trap of thinking they know more than the experts, because they simply have no understanding of the vast gaps in their own knowledge.  And they long-ago internalized the disdain for learning that starting as the teachers’ (or parents’) disdain for them.

Schools, tragically, kill a lot of kids’ innate curiosity.  It’s an absolute crisis in education, and it’s been going on for generations.  It’s no wonder that the TED talk by Ken Robinson — “Do schools kill creativity?” — is still the most-watched TED talk of all time, at 78 million views and counting….

Education shouldn’t be focused on motivating kids, through grades, to do what they are hard-wired to do, which is to be curious, apply themselves, and learn.  Education should be focused on helping feed and grow and nurture and focus this creativity, so kids’ natural instincts to grow and become better, can blossom.

In the next post, we will look at the second and third of our “fundamental orientations”.