The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [10]
“Paradigm” may be an off-putting word, but it’s an important concept when considering different ways of organizing our economy and our society. A paradigm is like a framework, or like the operating system of a computer. It’s made up of the dominant set of assumptions, values, and ideas that make up how a society views reality. It’s our worldview. After a while we tend to forget that we’re viewing the world through the paradigm, like it’s a pair of contact lenses. “Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm,” said prominent systems analyst Donella Meadows.21
You’re more likely to notice aspects of the paradigm when you view a culture from the outside. For example, living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for five months in the mid-1990s provided me with many opportunities to see another culture’s norms and also see my own from a new perspective. While there I lived in a house full of Bangladeshis and worked in an organization composed of Bangladeshis; there were no other westerners around. At first my housemates and co-workers were warm and friendly, but after about a week, they cooled toward me. I kept asking people if I had done something to offend them but got no response until one woman who had lived in the United States explained that I had insulted them by not going to their homes for dinner. “But they haven’t invited me,” I protested. She told me that I had to just go and show up at their homes at dinnertime and invite myself in.
Growing up in the United States, I never went to someone’s house for dinner unless I was invited by them. In the back of my head was the understanding that it is rude to go to someone’s house at dinnertime and expect to be fed without an invitation. “That’s impolite,” I told the woman. “No it isn’t,” she said. “Where you come from that is impolite. Not here.” It was a simple thing, but it made me think. I started a mental inventory of all the beliefs, values, and concepts that I considered the truth without having ever questioned them: I started unpacking my paradigm.
Paradigms are so pervasive and invisible that they can be easily mistaken for truth. When this happens, we limit our creativity in finding solutions to the problems we face, since our thinking is cramped and predefined by society’s dominant framework. For example, if your culture believes the earth is flat, you’re unlikely to explore what lies beyond the horizon. If your paradigm views nature as a reservoir of supplies intended for meeting humanity’s needs, you treat nature very differently than if your paradigm holds nature as a sacred, complex system of which humans are just one part. If your framework says that economic growth is the key to ending poverty and bringing about happiness, then you protect growth at all costs even when it makes many people poorer and less happy.
Unfortunately many organizations and political leaders working to improve environmental and social conditions operate unquestioningly from within the paradigm. However, to paraphrase Einstein, problems cannot be solved from within the same paradigm in which they were created. A prime example is the cap and trade approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In this scenario, private companies are permitted to sell their “right” to pollute to other companies, which can then pollute more, in the belief that the free hand of the market will find the most efficient opportunities for greenhouse gas reductions. But viewing pollution as a “right” and relying on the market to solve environmental problems reinforces the very paradigm that got us into this mess. In a different paradigm, human health and ecological survival would be paramount, and industrial activities that undermine these goals would be prohibited outright. The right to clean air and a healthy climate would trump the right to pollute.
Before we can change a paradigm, we need to identify it as a paradigm rather than assume it is truth. In the film The Matrix, the dominant paradigm