Convenience paradox

Convenience paradox

Intuitive description

Short description

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Resolved within Holoscope

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Reverses within Holotopia

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Causes

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Unravels

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See also

• Bullets

Peccei gave us also this hint: “A great cultural revival” will be the way to change course; “improving human quality” will be the key.

Which brings us to the pivotal question of values. Could our values too go against the grain of some very basic principle?

I am asking this with tongue in cheek, because the answer is obvious. The narrow frame has left us with the “values” that require no culture and no knowledge; the “values” that are based on naïve experience alone. We uphold only those values that seem attractive. That spells convenience in our personal pursuits, and egocentricity in inter-personal ones. (By convenience I mean favoring whatever feels attractive; and by egocentricity I mean prioritizing “our own interests”.)

Convenience simplifies the complex reality. Why seek knowledge and wisdom, when we can simply feel what is to be desired? And why try to understand the world, when we can be successful by simply learning a profession as one would learn the rules of a game, and performing in it competitively?

Furthermore, convenience and egocentricity seem so scientific! Convenience because it resembles the experiment; and egocentricity because it is rooted in a scientific theory. If the nature creates and harmonizes through “the survival of the fittest” – why should we do it differently?

And so we witness a curious inversion: Information is not used to correct our naïve perception and help us make better choices; our naïve perception now determines even our choice of – information! Are you impatient to see our contemporary condition in a similar light as we now tend to see the world at the brink of change that Galilei was inhabiting? An Intuitive Introduction to Systemic Thinking is a brief vignette that illustrates how this inversion is reflected in our everyday reality.

And what consequences it may have.

The convenience paradox has been developed as an antidote to convenience. By federating insights from a variety of cultural, therapeutic and academic traditions, we showed that all too often, the pursuit of a convenient direction leads us to a less convenient condition, by affecting our very ability to feel. We pointed to a range of happiness “between one and plus infinity”, which lies beyond what we have seen around us or experienced ourself.

See also

• Bullet points
• In five insights you can see the other five insights, and some comments about their relationships.