We Need a Sense of Systemic Perspective

The farther away a situation is from us socially, like a different industry or culture or community, the more puzzling and irrational and crazy—and sometimes evil—it looks. We're dismayed at how people drive in other countries, or at how some of the commonplace behaviors over there are so rude, or how ruthless the colleagues in Sales are, and so on.

Maybe this is just because we are not built to see perspective that is not visual. Our eyes and brains have evolved to know when something is far from us or close, and we automatically correct our expectations based on that. You don't expect a person on the other side of a restaurant's hall to hear clearly what you're whispering at your table, and you're not amazed by how tiny she looks, because your intuition tells you that this is how distance works.

Yet, when we talk—in a more abstract way—about contexts and circumstances different from our own, we expect them to make sense to us here and now, no matter how "far away" they are in terms of their structure, behavior and histories.

That's not surprising, considering that for most of our evolutionary history we've lived in small groups and in relatively stable environments. The mind-boggling variety of contexts people live in today, and especially our ability to know about them, are a very recent turn of events.

I wonder if we're in the process of evolving an intuitive sense of systemic perspective. I hope we are, although I don't think we've made much progress yet. In the meantime, we're forced to make up for this deficiency with the slow, tiresome, and rational parts of our brains. ●