Yesterday I posted a long commemoration of my entrepreneurial journey in 2011. Buried at the bottom of the post were 12 lessons learned from the last year. A few friends recommended I repost them as a separate post in order to properly highlight them. Here they are in case you didn’t catch them.

Every experience holds both positive and negative. The last year had many successes but also many tough times. At some point over the last year, around May or June, I reached a point of stability and confidence in my own ability and identity that even the negatives times started to be seen as opportunities for growth, rather than maladies to be avoided. Setbacks were simply feedback on my performance, fodder to improve next time, not an indicator of self-efficacy or self-worth. But even when I learned my lessons, the new performances were always less then perfect. This fallibility needs to be accepted.The cycle never stops. There is always more to learn.

Before I close, I wanted to share a few more lessons learned from the experiences of the past year.

Lesson 1: What are you going to be when you grow up?

We experimented with so many different ideas and approaches over the last year. I feel like I learned the discovery process inside out. It’s a very important and valuable process, but I think the possibility space is a lot more constrained than people’s intuition lead them to believe. When starting something new the possibilities for what the project could become seem infinite, but ultimately there are a limited number of models that can scale into something with high impact. However, if you’re willing to entertain building something niche, there is access to the much wider possibility space along the long tail. Given our mission of finding a scalable way to increase the success rate of startups, there were really only 4 viable, scalable ideas that we uncovered: A Software Company, an Investment Fund, an Educational Media Company and a Research Institute. Bjoern and I decided to the Software Company.

When I see nascent ideas now I almost always ask myself, “from the viable models I’m aware of, which one could this project be when it grows up?

Lesson 2: Patience—Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

It’s important to have a big vision, but it’s equally important to get started right away. Creating something from nothing is really, really hard. When you have as little resources and as limited time has startups do, it  requires extreme focus. All of the big things you want to do can be done eventually as you get more momentum and resources. But that will only happen if you focus successfully first.  If you do it right eventually, your baby will eventually grow into the world as an organism with a life of its own, with the power and energy to pursue crazy ideas like Space Elevators and Autonomous Driving Cars. But that takes time.

“A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else”

“Patience is not about how long one waits; patience is about how well one behaves while they wait”

Lesson 3: Entrepreneurship as a means of Self Expression

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It is a life encompassing sport full of trials and tribulations. But if you dare to embark on the perilous journey you will find an opportunity like little else for authentic self expression, self discovery, and world altering impact. Commit to preparation, commit to learning, and when the time is right, don’t forget to leap.

Lesson 4: The Power of Ideals and Vision

Blackbox as an idea and ideal was something that was very powerful and resonated with a lot of people. Its descendant projects possess the common thread of passion for empowering entrepreneurs, belief in the power of data to improve decision making, and a desire to maximize human potential.

Lesson 5: Startups Are Not Efficient

Startups do not run like a well oiled machine. They stop. They start. They break. You have to find new parts. Those parts end up being out of stock and you have to make them yourself.

This requires a lot of patience, perseverance and expectation management. If you expect to hit cruising altitude right away you will just become frustrated and demoralized.  It’s rare a founding team has everything they need to start firing on all cylinders right away. The process is much more like jumping off a cliff and assembling your parachute on the way down. Despite all this inefficiency startups can be very effective, because they have something other organizations don’t: Freedom.

Freedom from conventional thought. Freedom from bureaucracy. Freedom to explore and create their iconoclastic vision of the world. And the vision doesn’t need to be perfectly realized right away, just getting something working is often enough to begin drumming up the support, momentum and resources necessary to accelerate into maturity.

Lesson 6: Don’t Project Your Ambitions on to other People

Founders have to be irrationally optimistic and their enthusiasm often inspires other people to want to join them, and for them to want to include many people in their vision. They need to be careful not to project idyllic views on other people, and expect them to live up to unrealistic expectations. There will just be hurt and disappointment on both sides.

Lesson 7: Select The People You Want To Work With Carefully

Only select people who you believe are great now and have potential to be even better in the future. Don’t hope that a B or C player will grow into an A player. You only want A players who can become A+ players.

Lesson 8: If Your Startup Is Done Right Your Cofounders Will Become Your Best Friends

You don’t have to start out as best friends but it should emerge over the first year of working full time. If you’re doing your startup right you will inevitably create a stronger bond with your cofounders than any of your friends. You have to put everything on the line to succeed. Not only do you burn all your boats at the shore, but you are dependent on high performance from your cofounders to survive. This requires an enormous amount of trust to be able to march ahead confidently. Over the last year Bjoern and I lived in the same house and spent almost every waking hour together and discussed nearly everything on our minds, from personal to professional. I wouldn’t recommend it any other way.

Lesson 9: Don’t Work with People Who Can’t Evaluate Their Own Value

If they can’t evaluate their own value they won’t be able to evaluate your value or anyone else’s. Whenever pies are split or credit is taken, there will inevitably be conflict.

Lesson 10: The Learning Curve For New People is Longer than You Expect

Expanding the team can accelerate growth, but there are very high initial costs. When you add someone you will probably move slower for the first weeks, maybe even first few months. It takes time for them to get acclimated with the project and your working style. Take on your first few people slowly, and know you will lose more than you gain if they don’t stay long term.

Lesson 11: Success Carries a Burden of Responsibility

The more momentum you gather and the more success you have, the more responsibility you carry for others. People put their faith in you, users rely on you, and employees depend on you. This burden of responsibility should not be underestimated. Living with integrity is all the more important.

Lesson 12: Having the Flexibility to Let Go

In the course of starting a company many projects and directions are explored. It is as important to have the ability to let go as it is to be able to persevere.

In Finale… I Would Stand In Line For This

I write this from The Glint looking out over the expansive San Francisco skyline and can’t help but get excited about what 2012 has in store for us all. It’s going to be a big year. Happy New Year my friends, stay hungry and make the most of it. This is just the beginning.

This post is a reaction to reading Ken Wilber’s Developmental Sequence of Meditation that flows through the states of Psychic, Subtle, Casual, and finally Non Dual. I encourage you to read it first and have faith that if you can quiet the “monkey mind”, you can avoid the distractions that will try to prevent you from making it back to my post.  http://integrallife.com/member/ken-wilber/blog/stages-meditation-interview-ken-wilber

I really like parts of this. I want to like all of it, but I can’t.

The metaphysics just don’t resonate with me. I feel glimpses. I agree with the direction. But then when the statements crystallize it feels wrong and empty. It feels like it is searching for something that is not there.

It is more evolved than “Magic“, but I feel Magic Residue.

I can quiet my monkey mind. I can rest in emptiness and death. I can close my eyes and feel absolute silence. But I just don’t see the Divine there.

I have felt ecstatic feelings of oneness and wholeness before, but they fade. The emotional rushes seem to only occur for me when I discover something new. It’s the reward and excitement of a new developmental wave crashing to the shore of my awareness. But if I try to recreate the wave, to surf it again, the feeling is not as intense. I like that I cannot return. It makes sense. A reward for progress that is ephemeral removes the temptation of complacency, aligning the whole system for further growth and expansion. Happiness and bliss are not the destination. Rather they serve as feedback mechanisms that journeyer is journeying down the right path.

I think as I explore, what I don’t like here is an implied sense of Pre-Determinism. A sense that we are expanding into shapes that already exist. Potentials already fully incarnated, just waiting for us.

There’s an attribution of Divinity, of Spirit, of Self, of Wholeness to the past. There’s an implication that these things have always been whole and full. And it seems the mental models here often rest on conceptions of the infinity, totality, and purity of the Big Bang. But it feels like this model begins to crumble if the assumption that there was nothing before the big bang is wrong. And I believe that to have a significant probability after diving deeply this past year into John Smart’s work on developmental cosmology and developmental cosmic intelligence. It is one of the most beautiful synthesis I’ve seen of the Lower Right and integrates well with many other dimensions or lines I have been exploring in the Lower Right Quadrant and in the other three.

I believe the implications of this collapsing belief is that ideals like Spirit, Self and God are no longer seen as if they already exist. Instead they are seen as ideals unfolding into existence. God comes at the end, not the beginning. It is a process of asymptotical becoming.

All we can awaken to are the potentials that have already arisen. To go further we must create. We must build. We must transcend. We must continue to evolve and develop. Awakening just to where we are and where we have been is beautiful at first, but becomes stale if it is not seen in the perspective of what we can become. When I see how much room we have to grow and I feel that growth happening, the edge being pushed, that is what gives me a new ecstatic rush of the Divine, The Spirit and The Self. I am not tapping into a “whole” or an “infinity” that already exists, I am approaching wholeness. We all are. Our consciousness, our body, our community, our ecosystem approaching wholeness together.

They did not start out whole. They started out with the potential for wholeness. With the Big Bang a seed was planted. But the seed was not the tree of life. The seed was the potential for the tree of life. And now that tree blossoms. Expanding at an accelerating rate into the unknown. That dance, that movement forward, is the expression and the becoming of the Divine.

After my last post, “Mapmakers, Toolmakers and Complex Developmental Systems” I was encouraged by a friend to read about Robert Keegan’s Constructive Developmental Theory as an alternative model to Spiral Dynamics for how human’s consciousness, thought and values evolve. Here was the best quick overview I found.

I thought I would post this quick take on how I think people increase their meta-cognitive ability and some of the dangers of I’ve seen with falling in love with meta-cognitive frameworks.

After reading about Constructive Development Theory I’m pretty sure I’m in the process, over the last 6 months, of making the jump from thinking in systems to thinking in “systems of systems”. I’m not sure what triggers this jump for most people, but it seems my jump was both a combination of realizing the limitations of just one system, expanding my own self-awareness through interior practices and specifically learning new systems that would allow me to concretely think in multiple perspectives, not just have an intuitive feel that multiple perspective are better.

What I’m getting at, is that I’m not sure “5th order” thinking will just “emerge” on its own, unless people specifically commit to learning the intricacies of new systems, like Constructive Developmental Theory, Integral Theory, EvoDevoUniverse etc. People don’t just learn new systems intuitively, it requires deliberate action to seek them out.

I think it’s also important to differentiate high order meta-frameworks from more practical frameworks. CDT is very meta-cognitive. Moving up the developmental hierarchy of CDT won’t directly improve any hard skill. Hard skills still require a lot of practice, although increases in meta-cognitive ability should lead to more effective and efficient practice, and thus an overall faster rate of practical skill acquisition.

I want to clarify this because it seems that many people who learn about these meta-frameworks never apply their increased freedom and complexity of thought to anything practical because they get obsessed with “leveling up” and mistake meta-cognitive expansion as a means rather than an end.

My belief in the power of complex developmental systems as one of the most accurate lens to view reality continues to intensify. The shift to this worldview, (in combination with an upshift from egocentrism to kosmocentrism), is truly transformational and guides nearly every (fully) conscious moment of my life (as most people’s worldviews do, they just aren’t aware of it). A natural consequence of this worldview is a gift of clarity, a sense of purpose and dissolution of the egocentric torments that so many individuals in the western world spend most of their life fighting. But this worldview also comes with a striking moral obligation to get off your ass and do something important rather than wandering to a distant mountaintop in an enlightened, ecstatic bliss.

The question then becomes what is important? What is worth thinking about? What is worth building? What is not just “worth it” but the highest leverage, most important thing that can be done to unlock greater systemic potential in order to evolve life itself at an ever faster rate?

At this point in universal history most of evolution roughly falls into two groups: Better Maps and Better Tools. (Another core group not discussed here is Deliberate Practice, of both the interior and the exterior. This is what creates movement along developmental maps).

Better Maps

1) We can gain a better understanding of the principles how complex developmental systems work. This will have cascading effects on all areas of knowledge.

2) We can apply the abstract framework of complex developmental systems to more tangible areas of knowledge such as Politics, Psychology, Innovation, Spirituality etc. This will increase the precision of each of these areas of knowledge and guide the direction they should evolve in. Integral Theory has tried to do this with adaptations like Integral Psychology, Integral Politics and Integral Spirituality.

3) We can create ever more integrated theories of knowledge, that sparkle with increasing fluidity, beauty and symmetry. One of the defining properties of complex developmental systems is emergence.  Emergence continues to spiral upwardly, inexhaustibly, indefatigably, with accelerating momentum due to a powerful self-propagating, auto-poetic force that synthesizes parts into greater wholes and then proceeds to use those new wholes as a platform for an expanding set of ever more complex parts.

In the realm of map making I’ve been recently enamored with the expansive breath and depth of Ken Wilber’s Integral theory. While Integral Theory’s professed goal is to do something similar to what I describe above, and increasingly encompass and weave together all of reality, Integral theory is an evolving “whole” that is itself not complete; and needs to “integrate” many new “parts” to reach its next developmental stage of “wholeness”.

Recently, I’ve felt a growing intuition towards what this next stage of wholeness would look like. Since greater wholes, emerge from newly available, innovative parts, I’ve been trying to catalogue the new parts that seem to describe a part of reality more accurately than anything else, and thus need to be integrated into the next level of wholeness. I call these “frameworks” and have been listing the parts I discover here.

I’m still in the information intake phase of this process so I’m very far away from the destination. But I’m happy to have at least recently found some clarity on what the destination is. I also will personally be working towards this destination very slowly because I believe given the stage of societal and universal evolution that we are currently in, better tools are more important for forward progress than better maps.

Why do I believe tools are more important than maps right now?

Too much important research (i.e. map making) is not being funded and the mapmakers lack many of the resources they need to progress rapidly. Therefore the people with resources in the world today, must not value the creation of these maps. Since resources centralize around the people with the best tools, rather than begging rich people to fund maps they don’t understand, we just need to create better tools and get the resources ourselves. Remember the scene from 2001 A Space Odyssey where the apes figured out how to use tools, and then used that advantage to kill large beasts and take back their drinking well? We need to develop better tools, ideally inspired by our cutting edge maps, so that the toolmakers can create a new gravity-well for the world’s resource to centralize around. Then a new generation of mapmakers turned toolmakers can fund the next generation of maps with their new found wealth, perpetuating the cycle.

This is my intention with the Startup Genome, the company I have been working on for the last year. At the Startup Genome we are building predictive models of how businesses evolve (i.e. making maps of complex developmental systems) in order to help businesses make better decisions. We package the map in a Software as a Service, business analytics tool. What is beautiful about this marriage between mapmaking and toolmaking is it can leverage the enormously powerful economic engine of capitalism and the business world to advance the breadth and depth of the map, as long as advances in the map continues to produce incremental value to the tool’s customers. Many mapmaking endeavors stall out once they reach a certain level of complexity because they can’t figure out the right economic or social engine to centralize the resources necessary to continue to advance the complexity and precision of their map.

As I thought about this, I realized only recently has technology progressed to a point where the creation of tools and maps can be pursued somewhat simultaneously, because now almost any developmental map worth creating can be packaged as a predictive model delivered as a software as a service tool that can deliver automatic assessment and orientation value to some potential customer.  If there are no customers interested, it is likely the map is not worth creating or at least the timing is not right. Models often require a lot of data to work properly so another enabling factor is the abundance of data we are all now swimming in.

This synergy will propel maps to progress even further. Due the grandeur of the theoretical landscape mapmakers are exploring they can often get lost in obscurity and irrelevance. The marriage of maps to tools makes sure maps stay practical and gives them the resources and energy to continue to progress.

This also gets us over the hurdle of trying to get most of the world to see the world the way we do. I’ve recently been studying Spiral Dynamics and think it is one of the best lenses to interpret questions such as, “How do we get people to care about the things we care about? “Why don’t people value the things we are talking about? Do they just not understand it? Are we off base? Are we crazy? Or do they have other issues they have to deal with first before they can even begin to be receptive to this type of thinking? In the language of Spiral Dynamics these are fundamentally vMeme (value meme) questions. The holistic, system, universal worldview implicitly being articulated here, is considered level 8 Turquoise on the Spiral Dynamic spectrum. The world’s current center of gravity is stuck around Orange (level 5), with Blue (level 4) slowly fading and Green(level 6) slowly emerging. People can’t be expected to just immediately jump to level 8. Once people adapt to a certain worldview and get complacent it takes a lot of energy to break free.

In terms of integrating theoretical “parts” into greater “wholes”, I believe Spiral Dynamics sits inside the larger Evo Compu Devo Telos, inheriting many parent properties and pertaining only to Upper Left Quadrant (Integral theory) at the time when consciousness emerges in universal history.

In Spiral Dynamics, Turquoise is the most advanced and complex value system that has evolved to date. Level 9 is called Coral and I’ve only seen very vague hypotheses about what it actually represents. I believe this synthesis of mapmaking and toolmaking is a major part of Coral, the next level on the Spiral.

Coral is an odd number and the odd numbers in the Spiral Dynamics model are “individual” levels, that centralize resources. Between the odd and even levels there is an oscillating “i/we” force and an oscillating “individual/community” force. The collective levels usually promote new insight and understanding, while the individual levels promote action. So there’s an “action/understanding” oscillation, as well.

One time I quipped that “Coral = Turquoise + Money”. I don’t think that’s technically accurate but it points in the right direction. Right now there are a number of turquoise thinkers sitting on the edge of society, but are largely irrelevant. They have world changing ideas but have been unable to impact world affairs with them. It’s very difficult to identify any Turquoise thinkers who are in prominent positions of power. Name one billionaire or political leader who is a Turquoise thinker? Of the world’s most powerful people, I think the most Spiral Dynamically evolved people appear to be entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. There’s a lot of yellow systemic flow in what they do and how they work.

I think it’s generally pretty futile to try to convince more people to think like you and care about the things you do. At least it’s a very slow process that is usually not the best option to achieve the desired objective. It’s better to try to find and gather all the people who already have a similar value system to you. Rather than trying to convince people to start thinking holistically in systems, Turquoise mapmakers need to take the world’s fate into their own hands, build a team with a number of toolmakers and start creating the future they are spending all their time thinking about. At least that’s what I’m doing and what I concluded makes sense after studying enough maps.

For the world to continue to evolve we need entrepreneurs to build companies founded on Turquoise ideals. As those companies succeed and accumulate more power and resources the Coral vMeme will emerge. Put another way, Coral emerges, when Turquoise ideals leave the theoretical plane and become embodied in tools that achieve societal ubiquity. I am doing everything in my power to make that happen with the Startup Genome in order to set an example that evolutionarily inspired mapmakers and toolmakers can follow.

This post is in written in a dense systematic language that won’t resonate with many. But one purpose of my blog is to send a signal out into the world in hopes of attracting like minds. I write this in ‘untranslated’ form to find people who can speak similar tongues. My thoughts increasingly only occur in mind in the language of systems and “normal conversations” require an act of translation of these concepts into terms other people can understand.

Dan Pallotta wrote a post the other day on the Harvard Business Review blog called: I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore. Dan laments that in more than 50% of business conversations he has no idea what the other person is saying. He used to think he was stupid when he couldn’t understand what someone was saying, but now he has changed his mind and shifted the blame to the other person for poor communication.

Dan identifies 4 different “strains of this epidemic” of poor communication.

People using…

1) Abstractions instead of concrete terms. “A new idea for a doorknob becomes ‘an innovation in residential access’.”

2) Acronyms that other people aren’t familiar with.

3) Long winded sentences with no content interspersed with plenty of “likes”, “ums”, “sort of’s”.

4) Meaningless Expressions like “Thinking outside the Box” and “Exceeding Customer Expectations”.

I agree with Dan that the responsibility for clear communication falls mostly on the Sender not the Receiver, which is also consistent with a central tenet of NLP, that says, “the meaning of a communication is the response it gets.” But I believe Dan is giving too big a pass to Receivers, and is missing a huge part of the equation: the Receiver’s inability to ask good questions and identify their own points of confusion.

This is actually a pretty serious deficiency that results in an enormous number of lost learning opportunities. The ability to ask good questions I would bet is one of the single biggest differences between “intelligent” and “ignorant” people. Most people have the fundamental mental capacity to become intelligent, but they fail to realize much of their potential because they never develop their ability to ask good questions.

Why don’t people ask good questions?

1) The biggest reason is probably that people are afraid of looking stupid.

It’s amazing how much this fear, and the fear of failure inhibits people from being successful and fulfilled in their life. Almost any successful person, in business, athletics or science, has found a way to overcome their fear of failure and fear of looking stupid. To learn, improve and eventually make a big impact you have to be willing to take risks and make mistakes.

One of the reasons people find the fear of looking stupid so gut wrenching is because they identify way too strongly with their current competency, lifestyle and past life decisions. When people tie their identity to their past and present, any fault or deficiency that other people point out can emotionally destroy them because they have to interpret their deficiency as, “something is wrong with me that I cannot change.”

Usually people are able to stop just short of having to make that statement to themselves by using some sort of defense mechanism: yelling, vilifying, fighting, running away etc, because it is this type of negative explanatory style, with the use of global, permanent statements that end up making people seriously depressed and suicidal. Almost everyone has experienced one of these ego-defensive mechanisms kicking in, even if they aren’t consciously aware of what they are defending or why. Rather than continuing to put themselves in these ego destroying situations, people end up just developing an experiential avoidance to ever putting themselves out there, in order to avoid their fear of failure or looking stupid. As a result, they “play it safe” their whole life, unaware of the subconscious mental script that confines them to zones of mediocrity.

How then does one get out of the trap, where being successful and making progress requires risking failure, but failing creates a depressive ego destroying tailspin?

I don’t want to go into too much more detail on this pervasive psychological roadblock right now, but I will offer one mental trick to resolve this dilemma. Although it is simple in theory, it is difficult in practice. (I discuss related psychological concepts in much more detail in the 3 posts I wrote on mental health in September).

The key is a subtle change in how you relate to your ego and identity. If you can stop tying yourself to your present competency and instead tie most of your sense of identity to your potential, what you can achieve in the future and who you can become, than you can free yourself from the bonds that are created by trying to protect the deficiencies in your present identity.

2) Overcoming the fear of looking stupid is a necessary but not sufficient for being able to ask good questions. Asking good questions is a skill that takes time and practice to develop with specific trainable components.

The basis of asking good questions is being able to clearly identity what you understand and what you don’t. To do this isn’t easy, and requires a considerable amount of self-awareness and mindfulness. (This is probably yet another area where a meditation practice is able to increase performance). When you read or listen to a sentence and get confused, there are particular concepts that trip you up. Since most people are either afraid of looking stupid or unable to identify what confused them, they will just smile and nod instead of alerting the Sender to their confusion. As a result, a huge portion of everything said thereafter goes over their head, and they don’t get any value from the conversation, because concepts they didn’t understand were either referenced multiple times or used as foundational components for new concepts. And then both people’s time are wasted.

In my opinion, just bumbling “I don’t have any idea what you just said to me”, as Dan Pallotta advocates, is a tremendous resignation of conversational responsibility. The listener has an obligation to identify their points of confusion. However, I’m not saying the blame then falls solely on the listener either. Conversational dynamics aren’t so black and white and we should, in general, avoid swinging from one extreme to another. So let’s a dive a bit deeper…

Dan does do a good job of enumerating some of the most common ways people confuse their listeners: Abstractions, Acronyms, Fillers, and Meaningless Phrases, but is wrong to imply each of these maladies are equally bad. Fillers and Meaningless Phrases should probably be eradicated as a general principle; they create negative conversational value in almost all instances, but the misuse of Abstractions and Acronyms is a bit more nuanced.

The Value of Abstractions

Abstractions and Acronyms are not inherently bad. The blogosphere is in the middle of a long love affair with simplicity, but the world is complex, and undeniably increasing in complexity. Therefore, we actually need dense, specialized terms to be able to communicate more complex ideas, lest the time it takes to communicate expand exponentially. Furthermore, I’m afraid the simplicity movement is giving people justification for avoiding learning complex terms and this is literally robbing people of developing greater intellect. Ever greater abstractions enable us to perceive the world with more granularity and precision. Instead of just seeing a collection of dots, I can perceive higher level patterns like lines, shapes and derivatives. Or in more everyday terminology, instead of seeing a collection of people I can perceive communities, cultures and societies. As a result, I can think and talk about the interaction between societies, which would be impossible if I only had the language to talk about individual people. My point here is to stress that we shouldn’t avoid abstractions, as Dan and many others regularly suggest. Conversational mastery entails learning how to move fluidly up and down layers of abstraction and being able to pick the right concept for the context of the present moment.

However, problems are created when we use abstractions that other people don’t understand, because this creates confusion and miscommunication almost 100% of the time. When this happens the Sender deserves a significant portion of conversational blame.

But why does this happen? Why do people use abstractions that other people don’t understand?

A) The most forgivable error is when people use concepts the other person doesn’t understand because they inappropriately assumed the other person possessed the same knowledge and background.

B) Sometimes people will use concepts other people don’t understand because it makes them feel superior that they know something the other person doesn’t. They lord their expertise over others with a smug smile.

C) But probably the most common reason for the offense is that people don’t understand themselves the concepts they are using. They don’t really understand what they are trying to describe, so they hide in the altitude of abstractions because it gives the appearance they said something meaningful or intelligent.

But as I said, all the blame does not fall with the Sender. If someone uses an acronym you don’t understand, ask them what it stands for. If someone uses an abstraction you don’t understand, like an “innovation in residential access”, ask them what they mean by that, ask them to explain it in a different way, or ask them to give a more concrete example, in which case they would tell you that they were trying to describe “a doorknob”. If you challenge them you’ll either find out that they were either full of shit or just were unable to simplify their expertise. In both cases, you learn something valuable. (It is worth noting the same dynamics apply for reading written content. If you read a sentence that you don’t understand, don’t keep going! Figure out what words or concepts are tripping you up, and use a dictionary, google or a friend to resolve your confusion).

When both sender and receiver have attained conversational mastery they have robust error correcting conversational methodologies to make sure miscommunication doesn’t happen. This process happens to be fairly similar to the error reduction methods Claude Shannon invented that ended up forming the foundation of information theory and enabled digital technology to transmit information without errors. Shannon’s key idea was to add extra information and redundancy to make sure all the information was properly communicated. Perhaps there is a corollary here for conversational theory that could form the foundation for a revolution as big as the digital technology revolution. Human miscommunication, after all is a pretty big deal. It is at the root of most major personal and societal conflicts, from broken marriages to wars. But humans evolve and adapt slowly, so if there were any implications here, it would be for when machines start communicating with each other in natural human language, which is closer than you think. Hello, Siri. Hello, Internet of Things.

I may have just used an abstraction you didn’t understand, so let me give you a concrete example of what I mean by “conversational error correction methods” *smug smile* *kidding*

Primary sender error correction method: After the Sender talks they can ask questions to the Receiver to check the listener’s comprehension. “Did that make sense to you?” “Did you get what I meant by error correction method?” “Can you repeat back to me what you think I just said?”

Primary receiver error correction method: The listener can ask good questions that identify specifically what they didn’t understand, and ask the Sender to reiterate or elaborate on that point. “No, can you reiterate what you meant by error correction method?” “Explain to me again, how you connected the idea about Claude Shannon’s error correction methods to Conversational Theory?”

Bottom Line: Conversation is the primary way ideas are created and transferred in today’s society and we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and strive to develop conversational mastery, instead of letting our eyes glaze over when people say things we don’t understand or uttering simpleton phrases like “I have no idea what you just said to me.”

This is an early draft and exploration of the ideas circulating in my head on the evolution of government.

Problem:  Government is old. We need to upgrade it and evolve it. Humanity’s continued evolution and development will be stunted until there is a place to live with a modern technologically advanced government that is able grow with its 21st century citizens rather than repel them.

6 Ideas:

1) Increasing Pace of Change As The Fundamental Driver of Governmental Evolution

2) Why Change Will Not Come From the United States

3) The Skillset That Creates Political Power is Changing

4) Speculation on the Future of the United States

5) If Government is not going to evolve in the United States where will it occur?

1) Increasing Pace of Change As The Fundamental Driver of Governmental Evolution

Technology has caused the global pace of change to dramatically increase. A technologically incompetent government cannot adapt fast enough to be effective in today’s world. 

2) Why Change Will Not Come From the United States

The United States is too old and has too much baggage to become a forward looking technologically competent government. We should abandon our nationalistic allegiances and worldviews and bet on a new horse. 

The United States is a 235 year old dysfunctional monolithic system. It is unlikely a system with that much legacy structure will be able to adapt as fast as emerging countries with far fewer social and political constraints and tradition to preserve. When change is afoot, it is speed and agility that wins, not wealth or the size of your warchest. If you have a nationalistic worldview you’ll stay in the United States and go down with your assumed motherland. Personally I don’t have any allegiances to the United States as my mother land. We are all generals on Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth.

Earth is my motherland.  The universe is my great-grandmotherland. Bacteria are my grandfathers, trees are my uncles. A nationalistic worldview is maladaptive in today’s globalized world. It’s not necessary for the purpose of this post, but I’m pushing for making our decisions from a kosmocentric worldview, a perspective successively deeper than ego centric, nation centric, and world centric worldviews.

In the business world, transformation rarely comes from the entrenched No 1 player. When a No. 1 player is able to reinvent itself, it requires a visionary CEO with almost complete autonomy. There are only a few examples of market leaders who have been able to disruptively innovate in new markets: IBM (Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.) , Apple (Steve Jobs), Amazon (Jeff Bezos).

Amazingly the people of the United States, elected a Visionary leader into office in 2008, in President Barack Obama, but the structural constraints of dealing with an uncooperative congress and powerful special interests groups have blocked him from being able to get almost anything done. Did Steve Jobs have to get approval from a legislative branch to start working on the iPhone? No. He was free to reorganize Apple’s internal resources to make it happen. The problem is not that Obama is not tough enough or that his ideals are impractical. What is impractical is making transformational change in our governmental system.

It is actually extremely inefficient to make transformational change in our government by design. The United States Government and Constitution were designed to change slowly and be very hard to change so that the DNA of our country could be insulated from the passion of the moment and impulsive reactions from the general populace. Stabilizing the core DNA or “thesis” of a country is a problem every new government will have to solve, but calculated inefficiency, like the way we have it, won’t cut it in today’s fast moving world. The solution to stabilization can’t undermine a country’s ability to adapt.

3) The Skillset That Creates Political Power is Changing

Today’s political puppet masters and powerhouses are not very evolved people. Currently political power is won through money, seniority, propaganda and attack campaigns. The people who win this game are people like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who are political mafioso thugs in well groomed politically correct sheep clothing. They want money and power and are willing to cheat and put hits on anyone who stands in their way. Modern Vito Corleone’s. But the battlefront is shifting from smoke filled old boy’s rooms to cyberspace. The superstars of this space are not dons and thugs, but a new generation of savvy technologists and hackers who admire knowledge and reason over power. They think in systems and want a thriving society, rather than seeking to maximize the size of their off shore bank account. These hackers, liberals and libertarians are shifting the center of gravity to Yellow along the Spiral Dynamics spectrum. Rebel hackers will leverage rogue bot networks to perform denial of service attacks on primitive, reactionary candidates. Television and Radio attack advertising will lose their audience. And winning campaigns will use authenticity not money to spread their messages virally around the web.

4) Speculation on the Future of the United States

Before turning attention to what we should be placing our bets on, what are reasonable expectations for the future of the United States?

I believe the Occupy Movement in the United States is a natural response of a subtle socioeconomic immune system that is trying to notify us that our current paradigm of government is no longer adaptive for the globalized, technology driven information economy we now live in. Transformation is inevitable. It is “when” not “if”. We can choose to heed this early warning call and start engaging in the right kind of reform now in the United States, or we can ignore it at our peril, and there will be revolt and revolution on the way down. If the government remains reactive, defensive and hostile towards the movement, we can expect the financial sector the continue to rape the rest of economy, Washington to continue to be run by money from the countries wealthiest corporations and individuals (of which sadly there’s no legal difference for campaign donation purposes), congress will remain gridlocked, only ineffective legislation will be passed and unemployment will spike above 25%. The United States economy has the potential to never recover, although we shouldn’t confuse this with the end of the world. It’s just the end of the United States as we know it. The world will no doubtedly find a way to eventually rebound with a digitally informed government reimagined for the times. At best the US makes the necessary reforms to live out its last days as a world superpower with grace and style. At worst we have the effect of a series of asteroid collisions, wiping out a significant portion of life. Which will be eventually followed by a kind of Cambrian Explosion, as the old has been cleared out to make room for the new, with significant parts of science and technological infrastructure still intact, ready to pump the global macro socio-economic ecosystem with exponentially more diversity. I’m not sure what the time frame is on this collision course. My alarm bells to pay more attention started going off when a few of my friends told me they were anxiously building up their survival skills in preparation for cataclysm in 2-3 years. I think 5-7 years is more likely.

5) If Government is not going to evolve in the United States, where will it occur?

The most obvious choice is China, because it’s growing so fast, and hyper-growth creates a breeding ground for experimentation and radical new ideas. But while China’s population size is seen as an asset from an economic perspective, I think it will be a liability from a governmental evolution perspective. They are growing so fast the economic leaders will probably just try to keep government out of their way. The scale also makes it difficult to take risks with new forms of governance because so much is at stake for so many people. That is unless more special administrative zones are created and small localized regions are allowed experiment with new forms of government,  with early examples in Hong Kong and Singapore.

This would lead to what I believe is the most promising structure for future governmental evolution: The Rise of City States.

This push towards greater decentralization is sorely what is needed needed. And the timing is actually right. The driver of the pendulum swing from centralization towards decentralization is usually enabled by advances in information and communication technology. Over the last 7 years we have seen the Internet mature before our very eyes. From a systems theory perspective this also makes sense, because systems can only grow in complexity when more autonomy is given to the parts and there is greater connectivity between the parts, creating a smarter whole. An increase in complexity is important because quantum leaps in adaptive ability usually require quantum leaps in complexity.

The question is, where are these city states going to exist, when every inch of land is already claimed by one of the world’s 212 countries? My friend Patri Friedman created Seasteading in response to this dilemma and hopes to experiment with new forms of governance on autonomous barges out on the high seas. I believe this approach has potential, but at some point we are going to have to redistribute land on earth.

But countries will not relinquish their land easily, so what will drive this shift?

To overcome the friction and inertia required to create new countries, there will need to be a very strong economic tailwind. I believe most of the world’s GDP growth will increasingly be driven by the creation of new information technologies. Therefore my bet on what will cause the creation of new countries, is either new innovation clusters or the succession of existing ones.

The dominant innovation cluster in the world right now is Silicon Valley, and it is getting stronger by the minute. An insane amount of money and talent is flocking to Silicon Valley right now, and with a Facebook IPO on the horizon we haven’t even hit the peak yet. Silicon Valley is on track to produce a majority of the country’s new jobs and wealth in the future, in stark contract to almost all other sectors, which are reeling.

Recently I’ve been wondering if Silicon Valley will create so much wealth, and have such a different culture from the rest of the United States, that a few billionaires will band together and decide to secede. Why do they need the rest of the United States leaching on the ever more powerful, lavish party? Then maybe other tech clusters will decide to secede, too. New York City can be run by Michael Bloomberg and Jay-Z. Los Angeles can be run by Mark Suster and Ashton Kutcher. The Bay Area can be run Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Peter Thiel and Ron Conway. I’m kidding, but only kind of. These City-States should be run by entrepreneurs because that’s what we need. Governments need to act more like startups. Try a new technology or legal structure and see if it works. If it gets traction and crosses the product market fit threshold, then scale it. Then they need to be managed with the same accountability as large companies.  If you don’t like the city state you’re in, drive 30 minutes across the golden gate bridge to Marin “Country” run by a Deepak Chopra look alike. Or you could drive up a few more hours north and settle in a city-state run by Larry Harvey. The possibilities are endless. The creativity boundless.  People would now have viable methods to vote with their feet and wallets when they don’t like their government that is ruling them. Right now we don’t really have an option to stand up and walk away. Where are we going to go? But that’s the right thing to do in life when you have an argument with a former significant other that can’t be reconciled. Don’t scream at each other and make each other miserable for the rest of your lives, just walk away and go your separate ways. You have your life and I have mine.

I don’t know what is technically needed to perform a secession or what buttons would need to be pressed for the Silicon Valley elite to start scheming such a thing, but it’s a fascinating thought to entertain.

Maybe if the government seriously interferes with the ability to create a successful companies. I don’t see that threshold being crossed for Internet companies, but I do think the US government is very likely to handicap the development of the world’s next great innovation cluster on the horizon, which will most likely emerge once biotechnology becomes a full fledged information science. When that happens it will unleash a global transformation even bigger than the information technology revolution that has occurred over the last 40 years. But I don’t think there is anyway the primary Biotech innovation cluster emerges in the United States. The regulatory environment is simply too slow and too conservative. So if secession doesn’t happen, this revolution on the horizon is potentially the huge economic tidal wave that could trigger an era where the city-state becomes the dominant geo-political unit.

On a side note, my personal goal is to live in what ever city in the world has the greatest creative energy, innovative companies, and influx of talent. Right now that city(state?) is the Bay Area, so I’m staying put.

6) Ingredients of A More Evolved Government

Most of the thoughts in this post have been about the current deficiencies of status quo, how things will break and where the solution will emerge, but little about what the solution will actually look like. To be honest, I don’t have a very concrete picture in my mind at this point, I’ll need to think about it more, but here are a few guiding lights.

- All government services should have an online interface and be as seamless to use as Facebook and other Web 2.0 apps.

- More innovative projects. There are many things government can do that entrepreneurs in the market can’t. Projects like SF Park, which connect all parking meters to the Internet and broadcast the availability of parking spaces in an iphone app, are step in the right direction.

- Open data so app developers can create things like SF Park without the assistance of the government.

- Much more transparency of government finances in an online interface like Mint.

- Tax payers allocating a significant portion of tax dollars to specific projects.

- Supporting new forms of digitally enabled decision making, like Deliberative Democracy and Distributed Democracy. Two friends of mine, Bobby Fishkin and Micah Daigle are working on solutions and are on the right track.

Final Thoughts:

Exciting times we live in. Few people get to go through such transformational societal changes in their lifetime and have a chance to do their best to positively affect it.

Bottom line: Government needs to evolve and will evolve. It’s just a question of how and when.

According to this journalist, the federal government is very afraid of the Occupy movement, because their agenda is coalescing around 3 powerful points of reform:

1) Eliminate money in politics
2) Reform the banking system
3) Eliminate loopholes that allow congressmen to make exorbitant profits from their official positions.

They believe the police crackdown on peaceful protestors in cities all over the country over the last week was federally orchestrated by the Department of Homeland Security (which is technically illegal for the feds to intervene on a local level).

…And that this violence could be the foreshadowing of a new Civil War.

Heavy stuff.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy

I believe the Occupy Movement is a natural response of the subtle macro-socio-economic immune system that is trying to notify us that our current paradigm of government is no longer adaptive for the globalized, technology driven information economy we now live in. Transformation is inevitable. It is “when” not “if”. We can choose to heed this early warning call and start engaging in the right kind of reform now in the United States, or we can ignore it at our peril, and there will be revolt and revolution on the way down. The United States economy has the potential to never recover, although the world will no doubtedly find a way to eventually rebound with a digitally informed government reimagined for the times. At best the US makes the necessary reforms to live out its last days as a world superpower with grace and style. At worst we have the effect of an asteroid hitting, wiping out a significant portion of life. Which will be eventually followed by a kind of Cambrian Explosion, as the old has been cleared out to make room for the new, with significant parts of science and technological infrastructure still intact, ready to pump the global macro socio-economic ecosystem with exponentially more diversity.

Exciting times we live in. Few people get to go through such transformational society changes in their lifetime and have a chance to do their best to positively affect it.

Bottom line: Government needs to evolve and will evolve. It’s just a question of how and when. I will be sharing more thoughts on this soon. 

Recently I have been exploring the ideas of Ken Wilber. His theories are fascinating, but I’ve found when discussing his ideas with friends many have met them with great skepticism.

I agree he is not perfect. And after exploring others critique of him on the web, and thinking about my own experience of his text, I decided my biggest problems with Ken Wilber are twofold.

1) He implies too much consensus.

2) He does not engage in enough public discourse about his ideas.

However, it’s important to note that he has not build his theories, as far as I can tell on anything that is patently false. I think the reason he does this is expediency. His books are already 800 pages. If he had to discuss the debate on each of his assumptions that would be it’s own book unto itself, where he wouldn’t get the chance to present any new ideas, and that would hardly be worth the read.

I realized this problem is endemic to many of the authors and thinkers I’m most fascinated by: Clare Graves, John Smart, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Don Riso etc. They are all building models to better explain the past and present and predict the future, but some of their assumptions are based on scientific fact and some of their assumptions are unproven. And it’s often hard to tell which are which. Furthermore, some of their assumptions are built on top of their unproven assumptions.

Most people are not comfortable with any uncertainty, much less multiple levels of uncertainty, which is one of the main reasons why many of the theories of the authors I’ve listed above do not have much mainstream acceptance in the general public or academia.

However, we as a society cannot dismiss these people and their models. They are the visionaries who are attempting to climb the tallest mountain they can find and see farther than any man has seen before. Society needs to be giving these people more attention and resources, not less. We just need a better mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff, and shifting much of the burden of truth verification off the individual reader. What we need is more transparency. We need to be able to more easily identify shaky mountains from ones based on solid ground. And we need to be able to separate the scientifically validated ground from the visions in the air. We need to make our models more explicit. We need more rigorous futurism.

I can imagine a tool that could provide a standardized format for:

1) Listing the core assumptions of the model, and separating the scientifically validated facts from the hypotheses.

2) The bold conclusions that follow if all the assumptions and presuppositions are true.

3) Monitoring and debating the scientific validity of all of the assumptions as the scientific community runs new experiments and gains new evidence.

4) Followers to discuss alternative theories based on the same set of assumptions.

5) Authors or other leading proponents of the theory to share their thoughts and analysis in real time as new evidence rolls in.

This could serve as underlying reference structure or metadata for any one of the visionaries listed above. This should be possible, especially as we move off the antiquated medium of distributing ideas on paper to more accommodating digital mediums.

Many ideas in this post were formed in discussion with Alexandros Pagidas.

This blog post is part 2 in my 3 part series on Mental Health. You can find part 1 here: Medicating Ourselves Into Lives Not Worth Living, and part 3 here: Towards A New Paradigm of Mental Health And An Enlightened Society.

The blog post that I wrote 6 days ago, Medicating Ourselves Into Lives Not Worth Living has sparked quite a debate. It stirred up a lot of new thoughts for me, so here is my follow up post.

Recap

I’m glad I wrote this post and got the conversation started, although the dialogue wasn’t as productive as I hoped. Most of the comments were from people taking medication themselves, who were riled up and ready to defend their life choices. The critique I received basically boiled down into to two arguments.

1) Medication does improve many people’s lives
2) I didn’t experience depression, I only experienced teenage angst. Therefore my analysis is invalid.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with my previous post, was that I failed to properly scope which part of the mental health spectrum I was talking about. I do so in this post, and address both points of criticism in more depth and proper context.

I would have liked the discussion to evolve towards a more holistic debate about mental health and personal transcendence. Granted, this didn’t happen because my post was perceived by many as incendiary, but I believe my tone was necessary to get the conversation started. And fortunately, this discussion helped me understand more clearly where the discussion needs to be taken.

There was some talk of “science”, but it was mostly a mudslinging of one-off studies that sought to confirm the commenters current worldview. This is certainly a complicated issue, but my strong feeling and observation is that our society is often in pursuit of the quick fix, the magic pill. And the solution will almost always lie in hard, diligent, regular practice and work. Most people don’t know how to do this, or aren’t willing to put in the effort. While it is bad for people to put “blame” on themselves, there’s danger in people believing they don’t have what they need inside themselves. Most people don’t realize how much our mental states are affected by actions within our control. We make probably hundreds, if not thousands of decisions every day that positively or negatively influence our mental health. How much sleep we get, what we eat, how much water we drink, whether we exercise, who we decide to talk to, the tonality of our voice, what we decide to put our attention on etc. etc. These daily decisions cumulatively add up day after day, and determine the majority of our mental health and our life. It’s rare to see someone doing all the right things and still be depressed.

I also received plenty of personal anecdotes across the spectrum about how medication was helpful or harmful in people’s lives. But what almost all of these comments failed to do was point the discussion towards how we need a more complete theoretical model of mental health. The fact is, the mind is a very complex system, and without a strong theoretical model that can integrate theories and findings about different parts of the psyche, most of our scientific studies will only be isolated insights that are unable to capture reality, and for the most part make inaccurate prescriptions. The inadequacy of our current paradigm is what enables the main problem I was pointing out in my post: that too many people aren’t realizing their full potential because they don’t know how to shape their internal reality to enable outward excellence. And our failure to acknowledge that reliance on medication is one of the biggest inhibitors to this.

Until we change the paradigm of mental health, and give people both the tools and a new belief system to replace their internal narrative of mental health, which has strong undertones of victimization and helplessness, then their lives will continue to exist far away from their potential.

Psychiatric Discontents & A Movement Towards A Better Model Of Mental Health

One of the only comments I received that pushed the discussion in this direction, was from my friend Ian Spector, who said that,

“Mental state/illness falls on a spectrum — and there isn’t just one. It’s all quite multidimensional. I completely understand your frustration with how most people are generally inefficient. That being said, unless you know your DSM, PDR, and a few other things inside and out (which professionals spend years studying), you can’t jump to the conclusion that anyone who is “functional” isn’t mentally ill or “close to 0.”

This comment refreshed my memory on what the current paradigm of mental health is, and is the implicit worldview in most people’s comments. What this helped me realize is that one of the main sources of confusion and controversy in my post, was my failure to properly scope my argument. I needed to provide more clarity and structure around what part of the mental health spectrum my post was directed at.

This is not easy, because mutual understanding is dependent on the resolution of a worldview conflict. My attack of the status quo did not come out of “thin air”. It came from making inferences on a mental model I’ve intuitively constructed through the synthesis of many different fields of knowledge. Understanding where I’m coming from may be difficult because I haven’t explicated this model, (I unfortunately only have the time to explicate a model on entrepreneurship and innovation right now), and if even I were to do this, most people probably aren’t ready to accept many of the underlying assumptions I have made. To make things more difficult, I can’t communicate as effectively as I would like because 1) I’m not well versed enough in the language currently used to describe mental illness 2) Most of the people I’m talking with aren’t either, and 3) The DSM is itself a legacy framework, with perverse incentives from the drug companies, lacks a solid system of classification, particularly in its understanding of personality types, is categorical rather than dimensional, and most importantly is focused almost exclusively on pathology, ignoring human flourishing all together.

A few quotes on the inadequacies of today’s “bible” on mental illness, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (The DSM), and how we need a much better model of mental health:

“The most fundamental scientific criticism of the DSM concerns the validity and reliability of its diagnoses. This refers, roughly, to whether the disorders it defines are actually real conditions in people in the real world, that can be consistently identified by its criteria. These are long-standing criticisms of the DSM, originally highlighted by the Rosenhan experiment in the 1970s, and continuing despite some improved reliability since the introduction of more specific rule-based criteria for each condition.”

“Critics, such as psychiatrist Niall McLaren, argue that the DSM lacks validity because it has no relation to an agreed scientific model of mental disorder and therefore the decisions taken about its categories were not scientific ones; and that it lacks reliability partly because different diagnoses share many criteria, and what appear to be different criteria are often just rewordings of the same idea, meaning that the decision to allocate one diagnosis or another to a patient is to some extent a matter of personal prejudice.“

From Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery:

“As you would expect the terminology of the DSM-IV is pathologically oriented and as you might not expect it sometimes seems rather arbitrary.”

“Perhaps the Enneagram can throw light on the psychiatric personality disorders by sorting out the basic personality types, which, after all are what become disordered when people become neurotic.”

“One of the main problems of the DSM-IV is that its compilers erroneously, albeit understandably, combined traits from one personality type with another, with the result that the brief schematic descriptions they offer are sometimes confusing.”

And one quote that points to a failure to be able to use the DSM effectively due to cognitive fallacies and the incentives from the drug companies:

“Psychiatrist Joel Paris argues that psychiatry is sometimes susceptible to diagnostic fads. Some have been based on theory (overdiagnosis of schizophrenia), some based on etiological (causation) concepts (overdiagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder), and some based on the development of treatments. Paris points out thatpsychiatrists like to diagnose conditions they can treat, and gives examples of what he sees as prescribing patterns paralleling diagnostic trends, for example an increase in bipolar diagnosis once lithium came into use, and similar scenarios with the use of electroconvulsive therapy, neuroleptics, tricyclic antidepressants, and SSRIs. He notes that there was a time when every patient seemed to have “latent schizophrenia” and another time when everything in psychiatry seemed to be “masked depression”, and he fears that the boundaries of the bipolar spectrum concept, including in application to children, are similarly expanding.”

The Spectrum of Mental Health

Having finished this preamble about some of the problems with our current paradigm of mental health, I will say that I agree mental health falls along a spectrum. It’s also important to note that I call the spectrum mental health, whereas the status quo is to call the spectrum “mental disorders” or “mental illness”, indicative of today’s corrosive pathological worldview.

Given there’s a spectrum, what should we label the points along the spectrum? Rather than try to define my own spectrum, I’ll take the Enneagram’s for now, since it’s pretty good:

This gives us some language for classifying mental illness along a spectrum that puts mental health into 9 levels with three triads (healthy, average, unhealthy) and goes from psychosis and neurosis to ego transcendence, enlightenment and beyond. But we also need language to talk about illness from different perspectives, including genetics and neurochemical deficiencies but also more interior perspectives, such as mental models of the world, internal belief systems, the stories we tell ourselves and inner dialogue, as well as the strong influence of our environmental factors such as our relationships with friends and family.

I’ve done some reading and the most accurate model I’ve found to describe mental health in the holistic way I am advocating seems to be the biopsychosocial model. This model says that mental health comes from three interdependent spheres of being: biological, psychological (thoughts, emotions, and behaviors) and social. Notably this implies that psychological and social spheres are under our control and play a major role in determining our mental health. In complex systems top down causalityoften exerts a greater or equal force to bottom-up causality, implying somewhat crudely that more than 66% of mental illness is within our control.

Why do some people so strongly reject a worldview that places mental health within our control? At least part of the reason why people who have suffered from some form of mental illness reject this kind of model of mental health, can probably be explained by Martin Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness”.

“Seligman’s foundational experiments and theory of “learned helplessness” began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression. Quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that were opposite to the predictions of B.F. Skinner’sbehaviorism, then a leading psychological theory.

Seligman developed the theory further, finding learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation – usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation – even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance.Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.” (The counter to learned helplessness is learned optimism.)

Furthermore, our current paradigm, and one that many commenters are preaching, is characterized by an unfortunate dose of biological reductionism. (Not unlike the reductionism that pervades many branches of knowledge in today’s society). This view reinforces the narrative that billion dollar drug companies seek to profit from the most, and also reinforces the victim mentality of many mentally unhealthy people, by giving them permission to attribute their illness solely to biological factors, i.e. something completely out of their control. Interestingly, in the mind of mentally ill people the reasons actually are often attributed to reasons outside of their control. But this is an unlearnable mal-adaptive psychological process calledExplanatory Style.

“People who generally tend to blame themselves for negative events, believe that such events will continue indefinitely, and let such events affect many aspects of their lives display what is called a pessimistic explanatory style. Conversely, people who generally tend to blame others for negative events, believe that such events will end soon, and do not let such events affect too many aspects of their lives display what is called an optimistic explanatory style. Some research has linked a pessimistic explanatory style to depression and physical illness.”

Unfortunately, though not surprising to me, the biopsychosocial model has been given lip-service and severely perverted, stunting its development and dissemination. Check out a few of these quotes:

“The president of the organization that designs and publishes the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association, recently acknowledged that in general American psychiatry has “allowed the biopsychosocial model to become the bio-bio-bio model” and routinely accepted “kickbacks and bribes” from pharmaceutical companies.”

“He states that the biopsychosocial model should be seen in a historical context as bucking against the trend of biological reductionism, which was (and still is) overtaking psychiatry.”

“It has also been alleged that the way the categories of the DSM are structured, as well as the substantial expansion of the number of categories, are representative of an increasing medicalization of human nature, which may be attributed to disease mongering by pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists, whose influence has dramatically grown in recent decades. Of the authors who selected and defined the DSM-IV psychiatric disorders, roughly half had had financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry at one time, raising the prospect of a direct conflict of interest.”

Now that the theoretical underpinnings of my perspective have been more clearly defined, let’s dive deeper into each triad of mental health.

This blog post is part 2 in my 3 part series on Mental Health. You can find part 3 here: Towards A New Paradigm of Mental Health And An Enlightened Society.