The World’s Most Important Leadership Test
In a previous reflection, we considered the world’s fastest leadership test. It’s a good one, but it’s not as good as the one we’ll consider here. According to some of our most crucial findings in science, and according to some of the most important teachings of the wisdom traditions, the test we’ll consider here qualifies as the most important one we have.
Not many people can pass it, and we could safely bet that no one in the dominant culture currently occupying a leadership position of significant impact qualifies for that position on the basis of this test. And yet the fate of the world depends on finding or educating people who can pass this test.
In a way, then, what we’ll consider counts as one of the most important things any philosopher or scientist might need to tell us right now, something that goes to the heart of our whole crisis as a species. We find a lot of theories about what’s right and what’s wrong with the world, but the insight we’ll explore together stands out for two reasons: First, it marks a rare overlap of science, philosophy, and religion or spirituality—not the typical “quantum coconut regression therapy” sort of thing, but a genuine overlap—and second, we have so far failed to genuinely apply this insight to the major problems of the world in any significant way.
It’s an insight still waiting for us to truly understand it, and thus to better understand ourselves and our world, an insight that invites us into a transformation most of us aren’t expecting. It’s something . . . wondrous.
Maybe we can start by first acknowledging how crazy our world can seem. Maybe you feel like everyone else is crazy, and you’re just trying to be sane. Or maybe you feel a little crazy yourself, like your mind has gotten threadbare from all the stresses in your life and in the world. Maybe you feel physically off as well, or you have overt physical ailments. All of that relates in one way or another to our subject matter.
When we look around at the problems in our own lives and in the world, we naturally want to do something about it. But what if every attempt to help ourselves or to help the world somehow digs us in a little deeper? What if our best intentions end up perpetuating a pattern of insanity, in ways we don’t fully sense or understand?
Let me give a trigger warning about how we will try and answer these questions, and thus how we will arrive at our most important leadership test—the one most of us cannot yet pass. We will consider a sensitive and aesthetically pleasing scientific account, so that we can appreciate the scientific basis for this leadership test.
If you happen to find science confusing, boring, or somehow limited, you needn’t fear. Just stick with it, and all will become clear (or mostly clear). It’s okay if something about the discussion seems fuzzy at first. That’s a good thing, and perfectly natural with philosophically loaded material, even if it’s scientifically based.
To understand our situation scientifically—and thus to understand both the need for this leadership test as well as its rational foundation—we’ll turn to the multidisciplinary scientist Gregory Bateson, who gave a precise statement of our present insanity in a talk he offered back in 1970.
The philosophical diagnosis of our problem goes back way earlier than 1970. But this talk by Bateson is perhaps one of the best statements of the problem we can find in philosophy or in science.
In this talk, Bateson points out two interrelated errors in our scientific thinking. The first is an error in Darwinian evolution theory. That error has to do with the unit of survival under natural selection.
The original theory was built around the individual, or the family line, or some other set of related individuals as the unit of survival. But that view doesn’t hold up.
Instead, the unit of survival has to include a responsive organism and a responsive environment—and it cannot keep a strong barrier between these. They co-arise, fully and completely.
We can make sense of this quite easily, because if any organism or group of organisms pursues its own survival, its progress will end up destroying the environment. Any organism that destroys its environment destroys itself. Thus we need to change the way we make sense of survival. The habitual notion of “survival of the fittest” contains an error.
The second error Bateson considers is the error we make about the unit of mind. Importantly: These errors go together, and Bateson helps us to see evolution as a mental process.
What is the basic unit of mind?
To help us understand the basic unit of mind, Bateson gives us a depiction of it:
Consider a tree and a man and an axe.
We observe that the axe flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a preexisting cut in the side of the tree.
If now we want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the retina of the man, differences in his central nervous system . . . differences in the behavior of his muscles, differences in how the axe flies . . . differences which the axe then makes on the face of the tree.
Our explanation . . . will go round and round that circuit.
In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits . . . This is the elementary cybernetic thought.
This image contains the heart of our personal and global problem—as well as the heart of the solution—because the cybernetic circuit Bateson presents is too small to cut down a tree wisely.
Clearly, this loop suffices to describe the killing of a tree, but it does not suffice to describe a healthy mind, a healthy forest, a healthy human, a healthy culture, and a healthy world. For that, we need a much larger circuit, or a complex of circuits. When we look at the circuits we actually use for cutting down trees, they appear clever, but not very wise.
We can also note that even the smallest circuit, the narrow and ignorant one described by Bateson, ultimately transcends the capacity of what we typically identify as consciousness, and it does this as part of transcending the boundaries of what we typically identify as ego—though, it does give some indication of the deeper roots of why egos get so possessive over their axes and their trees.
That possessiveness is simply an encumbered expression of a profound truth: The basic unit of mind doesn’t involve something a human being “thinks” inside their skull; we cannot locate the basic unit of mind in a brain or in an ego.
Instead, the basic unit of mind includes what we ordinarily separate, as we do when we speak of the organism and its environment, or the DNA in a cell, or the mind and the body—or the way we separate, in practice, ideas about sustainability, justice, economics, art, ecology, culture, and so on.
Where do you locate your ideas about justice and politics, money and stock markets, mountains and rivers, dolphins, honey bees, sacredness?
And if we want talk about conservation, what is it we think we will conserve?
If we want to save a species or promote peace and justice, what does that mean in terms of the way we think about the problem?
Something powerful comes through when we also realize that Bateson has here offered an identity between the unit of mind and the unit of survival. It’s the same unit. This brings home the idea that evolution is a mental process, and that our survival is not what we think it is.
Bateson says,
“This identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical.
. . . . If this identity between mental and evolutionary units is broadly right, then we face a number of shifts in our thinking.
. . . . the very meaning of “survival” becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in circuit.”
Habitually, we think of things rather narrowly. The division between mind and body and between organism and environment leads to seeing ourselves as set against our world. We function as if mind is “inside” of us, and we therefore see the world as mindless. We don’t see our axes as part of our mind—nor do we see birds, trees, whales, and wolves as part of our mind.
If we want to understand our anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-hatred, self-doubt, imposter syndrome, stress, strain, and trauma—and the general ecological and political catastrophes too—we need to see that birds, trees, whales, and wolves have become a much smaller part of our mind than plastic, petroleum, asphalt, cars, and rockets—along with Facebook, TikTok, glyphosate, Teflon, J.P. Morgan, mercury, and lead. Do we think such a system of ideas will long survive—and thrive?
Thriving means manifesting a more skillful mind. And that’s not easy. Mind transcends what we identify in our conscious purposes, but as a matter of bad habit, we follow our own conscious purposes even when we try to restore ecologies or establish justice, let alone when we try to make money or achieve conventional success and fame.
And when we follow conscious purposes in our habitual manner, we replicate the style of thinking that creates all our problems, and thus—against our best intentions—“the environment” inevitably becomes something to exploit on the basis of those purposes, and we functionally break apart the unit of survival, putting the survival of all of us in peril. We thereby force Earth to absorb the consequences of our ignorance, and Earth has announced that she can absorb no more.
This may make some intellectual sense already, but Bateson recognized the deeper, more revolutionary nature of these insights—which were not personal to him but rather came from the scientific revolutions of the 20th century. As mentioned, these insights go back much further in the wisdom traditions, but that makes them no less challenging to truly incorporate into our culture, and scientists too still face this challenge.
Bateson calls us to face the demands of our own scientific and philosophical discoveries in the following lines:
If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in . . . .
Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is . . . to learn to think in the new way.
Here we have the most important thing laid out: To think in the new way. What are the new ways of thinking—the new ways of knowing and being, living and loving—we so urgently need right now?
We need precision here. Bateson doesn’t want anything to do with platitudes. This has nothing to do with what we call “innovation,” or “thinking outside the box,” or becoming a cultural “disruptor”.
In fact, Bateson wants to tell us that all our notions of thinking outside the box do nothing more than perpetuate the box that’s making us all crazy. Same box, different wallpaper.
And the box keeps closing in on us all. When we try and think outside the box, we end up making the box more capable of destroying the conditions of life.
Thus Bateson explicitly recognized two crucial and related issues: That he himself did not know how to think in the new way, and that it’s far, far easier to talk about thinking in the new way than it is to actually enter this new way of knowing and being, living and loving. Bateson said,
Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree.
“Myself” is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.”
The step to realizing—to making habitual—the other way of thinking—so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.
And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.
Wow. If any of this makes sense, we should probably come to a full stop here in our mind—and in our lives.
Can any of us meet this simple criterion of wise, loving, and beautiful action?
In general, we all pursue conscious purposes in the way Bateson describes. Whatever we may say at an intellectual level, in simple terms, when we go to save the rainforest or to protest injustice or to improve our culture, our organization, our family, or our own soul, we do this from the conscious and also the largely unconscious perspective that “I am doing this.”
In other words, if there were an AA-style group for most of humanity, it would be called Doers Anonymous, because we are addicted to the notion of a doer, and we are addicted to doing things to solve our problems (message me for a copy of the Doers Anonymous 12 Steps). Doing is the source of our problems and can never be the solution except in a partial or fragmented way. After all, we see plenty of partial success with that approach. It’s just that all the partiality of it adds up to what we have today, a world hanging by a thread.
Bateson indicates that genuinely wise action, genuine sanity, involves allowing ourselves to be more than a doer. This would mean liberating ourselves into larger ecologies of mind—a kind of rewilding, reindigenizing, spiritual awakening, and mutual liberation. It’s what we want when we start to talk about systems thinking, sanity, healing, and justice—and what all our talking fails to get us.
Bateson cautions us in no uncertain terms here. He warns us that the ecological catastrophe (like other forms of ignorance and injustice) arises from or as a style of thinking, one which people in governmental, NGO, sustainable business, activist groups, and more suffer from—as much as do oil executives, technologists, and financiers.
If we want to help the world most effectively, if we want real healing, justice, resilience, and rejuvenation—in mutuality—we need to think in a new way, a way that presences a totally different style of consciousness, a different quality of experience.
However great we think we have done so far in all of our history, if we sense that we have still further to go, then we must acknowledge the old philosophical insight that what got us here will not get us to where our fullest potential waits for us. How do we make this transition into new ways of thinking, into our greater potentials? How do we practice a mind of ecology that helps us live in more creative and vitalizing ecologies of mind?
Though Bateson was a lifelong atheist, he acknowledged again and again that the religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions of the world—including Indigenous traditions—offer us insights and practices for entering into better ways of thinking and knowing, living and loving—new ways of being and engaging with the world. The great philosophers and sages were considered wise for reasons we can now describe scientifically, and their insights constitute the single greatest untapped cultural resource for solving our personal and planetary problems.
The solutions they offer are only now coming to light and receiving scientific validation. But the place way to learn and practice them already exists: Find a tradition that speaks to the heart and mind, and find good teachers and good friends who can support that learning, practice, and realization of the wisdom, love, and beauty your tradition contains.