President Obama is meeting with resistance to some of his biggest and most daring plans for change. He repeats over and over that he is open to suggestions from all sides. When the Republicans balked at his current budget, he asked them to provide one of their own. They didn’t, and the reason comes down to closed minds versus open minds. Much of the opposition to change — and not just from the right wing — comes from a rigid mindset and clinging to the past.
It’s typical of a closed mind to defend itself. Whether it’s the right wing going back to Reaganomics, huge banks throwing a fit over regulation, or Wall Street resisting any interference with inflated bonuses, there’s a stubborn resistance to change. The issues involved, even the principles being espoused, are beside the point. What a closed mind always wants to protect is its right to be closed.
I’m impressed by the phrase “the tyranny of dead ideas,” which is also the title of a new book by business journalist Matt Miller. His topic is economics, and the dead ideas he examines are on the order of “Your company should take care of you” and “Your kids will earn more than you do.” Some dead ideas protect us from painful truths, in this case, the truth that companies won’t take care of you and maybe your kids won’t earn as much as you do. But painful or not, dead ideas blind us to reality and close our minds to change.
Here, then, are some ways to get in touch with reality in the fastest and most efficient way, which is to renounce those habits that close your mind.
1. Stop believing that you’re right. Examine the compulsion that forces you to be right all the time.
2. Don’t make every argument us versus them.
3. Be less attached to winning and more attached to the truth.
4. Don’t color every issue with morality. Right and wrong are generally useless when it comes to finding creative solutions.
5. Write down the five fundamental beliefs that guide your life. Now write down the best arguments against those beliefs.
6. When you are the most emotional about any issue, assume that you are blinding yourself. An open mind is calm, centered, flexible, and tolerant of opposing views.
7. When you are thinking of saying an idea that you know came from someone else, let go of it.
8. Most people either automatically agree or automatically disagree. Examine this trait in yourself and give it up.
9. Be aware of how you feel before you speak. Feelings are closer to the truth than words.
10. Walk in someone else’s shoes before you judge them.
These are lifelong lessons, and yet they’re worth learning today, this very minute. To be in the company of open-minded people is to breathe freer air. Being in the company of the passionately convinced is to suffocate. It’s tempting to grab the common coin of opinion and spend it like real money. Right now common opinion says, among other things, greed got us into this mess, the credit system is frozen, Wall Street destroyed the economy, bonuses are evil, the national debt is going to cripple our children and grandchildren. Yet these are all false coins, the tokens of second-hand thinking, received opinion, and the refusal to think for oneself.
I’m not saying these opinions are wrong. There’s a different point: If you stick a fixed idea in your head, you’ve effectively closed your mind. Speaking personally, I had accepted the fixed notion that the credit system was frozen. You hear this every day, and nobody seems to contradict it. Yet I subsequently read an analysis that concluded that American banks loaned more in the last quarter of 2008 than the year before. If true, it paints a more complex picture, one closer to reality. AIG has become the poster child for the evil of retention bonuses, but then I read a letter in the New York Times from an AIG employee who points out that his bonus had nothing to do with credit default swaps but with work he did to help the company get out of those toxic swaps (and repay the company’s bailout loan). Again, the reality and the fixed notion don’t fit.
A Sunday morning pundit remarked that the economic crisis is going through the six stages of grief. We started with denial, and now we’re on to anger, with the next stage, bargaining, on the horizon. I believe we’re in a much simpler place. We’re deciding whether to face reality or not. After a long period of economic delusion and reactionary ideology, our only hope is to face reality. But we can’t do that and cling to a closed mind at the same time.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
This is an excellent and very sensible point of view IMHO. We have to stop being the “reaction” and be the “action”.
Reality is right.
All good ideas — truths — but your introduction shows that you are still stuck in “us versus them” to
some extent. Rhetorically speaking, you may have lost half your audience midway through your
second paragraph. I’d be more comfortable with your approach if you’d included some examples
of closed minds on the left of the political spectrum as well as on the right. Certainly the
Administration must recognize that traditional Democratic doctrines are as dead as Republican
ones; else why did we elect this President?
PS hey Chronicle — fix the margin problem! I had to hit enter at the end of each line …
Oops – should have said, hey Webmaster
As a first step in new thinking this is excellent – not only for those having to make global decisions that effect all of us – but for ourselves. It is old thinking that got us to where we are – and at one level there is still a lot of old thinking that is trying to solve the problem. We can use brick bats to try to change others or we can take responsibility for our own old thinking and make the changes necessary in our own lives first. Encouraging people to go further into debt when a gluttony of debt has been the fundamental problem is ludicrous – but as a consumer going along with this is just as ludicrous. Bucky Fuller said years ago that the only way to make it as a planet is for each individual to sart thinking for themselves, and maybe it’s about time we did.
Same problem as Alan except the enter key brought me to the error page and dumped my text on the back up.
It is not us vs. them. It is age vs age. The Pisceans, conservative by definition are determined to preserve heritage and prevent the change of ages to the Aquarian Age. We therefore, already know how it turns out and ought to be able to relax and watch the show.
Speak only original ideas? Sounds like counsel to be silent. Does the counselor accept such counsel?
I cannot read the text of the last two comments. Text runs beyond right margin.
Most excellent! 10 good points to remember.
God help me be willing to see all this differently. Beyond the limits of what… “I think is right”. My truth is only relative. The real Truth is larger than I can in isolation comprehend. Certainly truth has not been attainable by using the tyranny of an archaic model of duality as its sole measure and judgement.
I am open to new ideas as long as they do not conflict with my VALUES. If we do not have
VALUES
do not matter a hill of beans. sorry dealing with a small key board.
Wouldn’t it be great if people like Hansen and Gore could adopt this approach to the study of global warming?
The Repubs have a budget and some great suggestions. He is
not listening. Great actor!
Socialism does not work. Whether I am having an open mind or not, history proves that socialism does not work.
I’d like to suggest that “change” is not what we really need.
We’ve been changing way back before I can remember, in fact forever.
We need complete transformation.
I invision a world completely void of politicking.
No politics? yeah man.
Replace the political corporations with real market business people.
Replace the government with real business people. (imagine that)
Get results or close your doors.
Yeak. Stuff like that.
“… or Wall Street resisting any interference with inflated bonuses, there’s a stubborn resistance to
change.”
I doubt this resistance just rises out of dead ideas… unsurprisingly, they don’t want to give up on their
their glorious scam.
Their thought process doesn’t include making the country better as a whole. They have but one
interest: accumulating and preserving money and power for themselves. If the broad public has
to suffer for it, that’s never been a concern.
Remember, these are the same people that blind small children, so they can get more money
begging, or send them into copper mines, where they grow up as cripples from crouching all day,
poisoned by fumes and dust.
In response to your twitter.com quote about letting go…finally I am beginning to see the value of letting go. Yes…there is a dramatic change in how I see and perceive people and life.