We Create a Reality

The Essential Assumption

The essential assumption underlying the Taxonomy is that reality is continuously created. Not any reality, but psychosocial reality. We can use created reality (e.g. a plane, an organization, an intention) to impact on the reality we have to accept (e.g. gravity, weather, events) as well as on existing created realities (e.g. a relationship, a contract).

By «reality», I mean something you can bump into and that can seriously hurt you—just like a razor blade—if you don't handle it correctly. The sharp blade belongs in the physical world, but things created in the psychosocial world can be just as harmful: think of cruel words, heavy taxes and war.

… where a king rules by divine right and the subjects in the society regard divine right as being intrinsic to kingship. Then «divine right of kings» is part of the reality of that society. A subject who tried to argue in public against that reality would probably find themselves executed for treason. You cannot confront an existing psychosocial reality without due care.

Psychosocial reality provides society with stability through the creation of laws, security, defence, taxation, social structures, and more. Just try telling the tax office or a policeman that those created rules are a mirage without any substance …

In any period when certain values and institutions do not yet exist within a society, it is almost unthinkable that they could ever exist …Closed except perhaps in the minds of idealists or fantasists. Yet, once new values and institutions become incorporated into society, they appear to be matters of necessity and even common sense. Past ideas are then typically labelled immature, primitive, even barbarous—partly to ensure they are harder to revive and infect modern-day thinking, which is promoted as the most sensible way to see things, even if it is not perfect.

Now try applying this way of thinking about reality to your family, to your work group, to a friend who always gets into trouble …

Creation is a Personal Power

Each of us must draw on and deal with our own intentions, aspirations, talents, ideas, emotions, preferences and other essential and unavoidable internal states (what we often term our «self»). Each of us must also handle the «selves» (i.e. the abilities, feelings, interests, thoughts, values &c.) of relevant others. These others belong in a different world, unless they choose to be part of our world (and we choose to be part of theirs).

People who agree, consciously or unconsciously, to share parts of their psychosocial reality naturally form a group with a shared reality. If they build that reality within a territory, they form a local community. Such groups and communities need governance, and they create rules and assign people the power to impose the reality determined by those rules on members and even outsiders who enter.

Governments, organizations and other social groups, which seem so powerful on the surface, can do nothing except through their members. We confuse ourselves when we talk about such bodies as if they are independently real. Insiders have a duty to share a certain reality and act in their official role, but they also have their own personalities, limits and agendas.

Incorporated organizations, «legal individuals», can become extremely powerful, in extending what can be achieved. But we must remember that it is always a person within them who communicates, controls, promises, learns, obliges, adapts, cheats, lies, competes and so on. The deepest and most fundamental qualities of a taxonomic element are unchanged by shifting their use from a person to diverse social bodies.
Example:Closed Certain details and methods surrounding compromises and compromising vary greatly according to setting, but a compromise is still a compromise whether agreed between two people, two firms or two governments. 

Originally posted: May 2010; Last updated: 14-Jan-2014