Years ago, I read a line in my daughter's chemistry textbook: "processes that require lots of energy tend not to occur." I laughed because it seemed so obviously true and yet ... it is kind of profound.
Speaking of energy, it is much easier to absorb facts that confirm your worldview than facts that challenge it. To accept some facts would force you to adjust your entire worldview. We see it in the novel in which a woman discovers a fact that suggests that her husband is cheating. The emotional turmoil of accepting that fact can be so great that she might first choose to ignore or deny it. Or the emotional turmoil of accepting that your political worldview is out of synch with reality.
When accepting certain facts would force you to adjust your entire worldview - something that takes enormous energy - you will typically opt to just reject the facts instead. Much less fuss.
The beauty of Fox’s business model is that they realize that there is far more profit to be made in defending a worldview than simply feeding folks facts that are as likely to challenge as affirm one's worldview. Reality is jarring.
In John Lewis Gaddis’ On Grand Strategy, he argues that Tolstoy in War and Peace and Clausewitz in On War both work hard to show that reality is far messier than any theory about it … and yet we need theories in order to simplify the endless complexity of reality. A successful general knows to use theories as a means to simplify past lessons but also recognizes the necessity of adapting to reality as it unfolds. A Napoleon invading Russia is defeated as much by his own confidence in his initial plan as he is by the Russians. Plans get you into situations: your ability to respond to those situations is what will get you through them. Put differently, your worldview or convictions might start you in a particular direction but if you’re not going to fall off a cliff, you still need to adjust to the terrain in which you find yourself. There is no map of the future; the past offers some general lessons about how you might better navigate land or water but doesn’t do as well at predicting which you’ll next encounter or even whether you’ll next find yourself in a swamp, a region that refuses to neatly conform to what you’ve previously learned about land or water. Or to put it in the words of Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Jim Collins wrote, "Leadership does not just begin with vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and to act on the implications." Another alternative is to call facts “fake news.” When you do that, of course, the bad news continues to pile up and you need to sweep more and more of it into the corner, denying or distorting it and with each denial become less able to navigate reality. There is a reason that things get steadily worse under leaders who deny reality rather than insist we confront it. It takes a lot of energy to adapt to facts; it’s always easier in the short-run to deny them.
No comments:
Post a Comment