There are things in life we believe we may not challenge. They are sometimes called sacred cows. There are also some things in life we seem blind to. When these two phenomena are both present in a given situation, we can be paralyzed to intelligent change and not even know why. There are also secret loves. These are special moments we reserve for times we believe are organized by serendipity or even higher powers. As a consequence, we may not consider them to be attainable by design. The social architect must consider both.
Sacred Cows First, sacred cows are everywhere. We believe them to be the nature of reality. For example, lets look at how we organize the communities we long for. They don't seem to exist anywhere....because the sub-divisions we now have were designed for cars and not as gathering places . The real problem is that, as a culture, we haven't noticed . The basic design is flawed and yet developers keep on cranking out sub-divisions. You may have noticed, the grid-like maze of streets mask out what used to be the central green and there is little common area.
The doors to the homes are garage fronts. There are no porches to notice neighbors. Therefore, the common sub-division resident knows none or few of his neighbors. An uncharacteristically large amount of violent crime occurs in residences and no one living nearby feels comfortable enough to step in to help. We don't have community, but worse we haven't really noticed the alternatives or the controlling principle that keeps us in trance. Why? The sacred cow lives as a large pattern. The pattern is pervasive, so we imagine it also must be the best of all possible worlds ...not so.
In the modern organization many key ideas and principles are similarly controlled by the pervasive organization chart handed down through the years by management practice. Few people understand this chart was a rather arbitrary design constructed by two social scientists in order to limit "span of control". The scientists were responding to a need to shape the focus of world war II army officers, who it was feared were not well enough prepared to manage more than three subordinate elements each. No wonder we woke up one day and realized our organizations were hopelessly vertical and control heavy. We eventually began to ruthlessly flatten them.
It's interesting to ask the question: what would have happened if the original shape had been designed as a round form to include more input like a tribal council? As modern organizations formed they just accepted the lines and boxes without thought to what they were creating.
The real shocker is that no one has seriously violated this sacred cow by realizing it was just graphic language and could be redrawn to produce some other equally plausible diagrammatic relationship. It's the unconscious acceptance of ideas that often cripples us. It's a sort of a hardening of the categories.
There are also other powerful but rarely challenged ideas like the forty-hour work week, breakfast-lunch-and dinner, news weather and sports, functional job descriptions, and no bashing the boss in public. It takes a trained eye to see a sacred cow.
OK, let's look at how we spend time. In a professional position we work five days a week. Who remembers when that started? In Bali, Indonesia, for example, they each spend time outdoors doing a little growing, then time doing a little crafting and then time doing some social service. Their word for work is "art". They don' t wait until Saturday to try and balance out their lives.
We could change our orientation to work altogether by seeking out the hidden controlling premise for how time is spent. It's a matter of noticing the bigger pattern and asking the tough questions until the culprit is rooted out.
Some Africans think we are insane to grow grass and then expend time and energy cutting it. When they find out we don't feed the excess to the cattle...they are sure we have lost it altogether. Is a lawn a sacred cow? And are we blind to it's marginal value and cost in pollution ? Probably.
The army in Vietnam was so enamored with their new toy,,the helicopter, that they didn't want to believe it was actually compromising the security of 90% of their operations. Breakfast , lunch, and dinner was created for farmers and laborers who needed physical nourishment every four hours. Today, it's a formula for obesity. Corporate types think that a power point briefing actually creates communication, when mostly it isolates the presenter from the intended audience. Its a formula for communications disaster. See what I'm driving at ?
The modern organization hasn't noticed that it has slowly drifted into a mode of finding an administrative solution for all it's problems. The most profound organizational problems are often attacked by simply responding with a memo or a checklist. The most sacred behaviors together with an endless list of problems (issues) are hashed out and end up posted on the wall as if they were all equally important. The problems have been identified and class is dismissed.
If really new solutions had been created many of the problems identified wouldn't even exist! Modern management training says everything can be handled in a training room. It ain't so ! Kill the management cow or at least put it out to pasture!
Many of you may have thought that the english language was a completed work. It has been proclaimed that that we don't need to add any words or conventions to work with. Some believe the language itself to be pure if not added to. Of course, its also true that you can't really have a totally new idea without a totally new word. Nevermind, lets just stop where we are...freeze our evolution in place...yuuk.
There are thousands of words in other languages that reveal ideas we don't have in English. Shall we just allow English to rule without recovering those other ideas and including them? Ancient Hawaiian has concepts about our sensual relationship to nature that English has never approached. Well, if we want a more sensual relationship to nature we should mine those ideas and give them presence. Blind acceptance is just that.
Secret Loves We all harbor secret loves. But, too often they stay locked in the category of dreams. We would be well off not only to focus on them as goals and as a reminder of what's possible, but consider adding them to the list of cultural design options. We can't evolve without raising the bar.
Once you have imagined a desired state ...well, the pieces of that state begin appearing everywhere. It's a principle of visioning that once you "cognize" something then you can instantly "re-cognize" it in the world. The challenge for us is to imagine the most precious experiences realizable and go after them consciously.
How about states of rapture? Epiphanies? Total surrender? Perfect solitude? Being in the zone? Of course we could imagine that these states are auspicious and only occur with divine intervention. That could be true...but the conditions that foster their manifestation can be designed. Let's just reach as high as we possibly can with our social designs.
For example, what if the design principles for a temple sanctuary were employed to create a magic restaurant space ? In this case we might want to elevate the vibrational state of all the guests to the broadest band of sensory awareness possible. The Tibetans have a formula for this that is guaranteed to bring the spectrum of stimulation to its fullest capacity. People seem to cook just like food in a hot pan.
The idea is that the environment is loaded with a band of stimulus for each of the senses. But for each sense the impact is designed to activate the sense without overloading it. So, the music is turned up just to threshold and then backed off a tad. Then the lights are turned up to level and then dimmed back a quarter turn. So it is with the color, the texture, the temperature, the smells, the movement and the entertainment. Full activation...no overload.
The current engineering approach to physical spaces is focused on functional performance not the activation of the entire range of sensory channels. Its fine that we design so that everything works. That's basic. The social architect wants to evoke the very best essence of the beings who occupy the space. The end state is expanded consciousness. Why ? Simply, because its within our potential. Work the spectrum.
Who knows what heaven is really like? In this case, the idea is simply not to be reticent to design for the very most empowered human response possible. When thinking of social inventions, consider a building, for example, in terms of the experience it will evoke. Work the spectrum.
Despite the rampant increase of modern life with its accompanying techno-frenzy, we have also experienced the increase of privacy. So, there is the possibility of optimizing serenity as well. Sanctuary will be a valued part of any living situation. Its important to note that it is the experience that's of interest.
In the future it will be possible to import the most bizarre kinds of experience through the virtual communications network that will prevail. Then to amplify for the spectrum we may consider pulling the glowing fire and logs back out of the basement where it has been banished for too long. People are suffering from fire deprivation syndrome.
It is important to note the powerful impact the Bauhaus and modernism has had on our public environment. Add to that the innate capabilities of the computer design tools we have evolved in the nineties. Together they can inadvertently create a very sterile and low texture set of surfaces. We could well use an infusion of texture in much of our public art and architecture.
In summary, there are so many unquestioned cultural habits that tie us down without us recognizing them. The social architect must flesh these out for the outmoded lifestyle they imprison and then build a social invention to reinstall that life again.
Council Inquiry Select a blindspot you personally have been limited by.
Explain how you would expose and neutralize a blindspot.
Uncover a secret love that needs to be reestablshed.
