ontological intervention

3 min read

https://danielpinchbeck.substack.com/p/ontological-intervention

According to the Dictionary, ontology is the area of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence. Ontology studies “how we determine if things exist or not, as well as the classification of existence. It attempts to take things that are abstract and establish that they are, in fact, real.” Materialism remains the dominant ontology among the Left and progressive community: “In philosophy, materialism is a monistic (everything is composed of the same substance) ontology that holds that all that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, everything is material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.” This characterizes, generally, the progressive worldview, which remains post-Marxist in essence. 

In Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, systems analyst Donella Meadows considers “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises” as the highest leverage point  for bringing about systemic change (actually, she places “the power to transcend paradigms” as one level above this, but, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, I think she is wrong about this). She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson (one of my heroes): 

Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to … their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons…. It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas … would cause the most striking changes of external things.

Expanding on this idea, Meadows writes: 

The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.

I wholeheartedly agree with Meadows and Emerson here. While it is very difficult to change the underlying paradigm of society as a whole, any society is made up of individuals. Those individuals can undergo a paradigm shift at any moment. When enough individuals have made a shift, society as a whole will follow.

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