Discover the power of paradigm shifts in driving individual and societal transformation, from overcoming cognitive dissonance to fueling scientific revolutions.
When’s the last time you changed your mind about something?
Many people are stuck in their beliefs and worldview, especially once we reach a certain age. Our map of reality is shaped most by early life experiences, including lessons we’ve learned from parents, teachers, and friends.
A worldview can be hard to break out of on a purely psychological level.
Once we are set in a view, we seek new information that continues to confirm these beliefs by only looking at sources that already agree with us. When new information contradicts these beliefs, we can easily ignore it or distort it to keep our map of reality intact.
Accepting that we are wrong about something can be hurtful to our ego and pride, and in many ways our brains are designed to protect ourselves from this discomfort by simply ignoring contradictory information unless it has a real world effect on our lives. As Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
The average person isn’t primarily driven by a search for truth, they just need a map of reality that is good enough to navigate their lives effectively and not get themselves into too much trouble, which includes social pressures to conform to certain beliefs or stay silent about others.
People can go through radical changes in beliefs though. Young adults and teenagers may go through “phases” as they come-of-age, where they question what they’ve been taught, rebel against orthodoxy, and search for their own meaning or purpose in life. These transformative years can lead to paradigm shifts that last a lifetime, such as adherence to new political, religious, or philosophical ideologies. Many may still return to their old beliefs later in life, but with a fresh new perspective.
Learning about a new worldview, ideology, or philosophy doesn’t mean you need to adopt it – and it doesn’t necessarily lead to a paradigm shift. Often times learning about radically different belief systems can give us a firmer understanding of our current beliefs. There’s wisdom in learning about worldviews you find wrong, mistaken, or incorrect; at the very least, it will give you a better understanding of where other people are coming from.
Paradigm shifts aren’t just new or updated knowledge, they represent a complete change in your perspective that makes you see and interpret old knowledge in a different way.
This shift in perspective can be jolting and uncomfortable at first. We depend on worldviews to make sense of reality, so deep changes in perspective can often make reality feel more confusing or unstable at first.
We often need to re-evaluate old knowledge and experiences through a new lens, and re-integrate them into a new and better map of reality. This is a mental shift that can sometimes take months or years before it is fully developed.
My Paradigm Shifts
My mind has changed a lot over the past decade, which hopefully is a sign that I’m learning and growing. When I first started this website over 15 years ago, my worldview was very different than what it is today.
A few ways my mindset has changed:
- Less Individualistic – During my college years, I explored a lot of libertarian philosophy that emphasized the individual over the collective. This is a common starting point in many “self help” circles too, which have an ethos of “take responsibility” and “pull yourself up by your boot straps.” While I still believe strongly in individual responsibility and initiative, I’ve grown to recognize the “no man is an island” mantra and focus more on the importance of social support, community-mindedness, and asking for help. This understanding has led to changes in my political and economic views too.
- Less Materialistic and Money-Focused – It’s a bit embarrassing looking back on it, but I used to want to be rich and famous. I think a lot of it is just part of America’s narcissistic culture, where everyone strives to become some type of celebrity. As I get older, I’ve discovered new core values that have helped me focus on the more important things in life. I’ve also learned that a lot of my drive for money was really a drive for independence, and those aren’t the same thing. A person can make a lot of money and be trapped in their career to sustain their luxurious lifestyle, but a person of more modest fortune, who can be happy with less, often has more independence because they can then focus on other things in life. That was a counter-intuitive idea for me that took awhile to process.
- Focus on Social and Cultural Forces – When I was younger, and likely a product of my libertarian days, I used to focus more on the importance of economics rather than culture. Generally, I saw things like music, art, and film as just a peripheral aspect of society, but now I’m beginning to understand their central importance. Every culture reflects and propagates a certain set of values, and a culture that promotes harmful and destructive values will lead to a harmful and destructive society. When I look at today’s world, I see a lot of cultural forces going in the wrong direction. I’m not pro-censorship in anyway, but I find many aspects of our culture need to be analyzed, criticized, and abandoned if they are hurting the happiness and health of a people.
This is how my mindset has shifted over the years – and my mind will likely keep changing as long as I stay open to new information, new knowledge, and new experiences. At this point, most of my learning has happened outside of school and that’s a path I will continue on for the rest of my life.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
One of the most popular discussions on the topic of paradigm shifts is Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Kuhn describes that scientific progress isn’t just an accumulation of facts, which he calls “normal science,” but also periods of “revolutionary science,” where anomalies are discovered that force scientists to look at a field in a completely new way.
Common examples of paradigm shifts in science include:
- The Copernican Revolution in the 16th century, where there was a change from geocentrism (“earth is the center of the universe”) to heliocentrism (“sun is the center of the solar system”)
- Newtonian Physics in the 17th century, where classical mechanics discovered by Isaac Newton replaced previous models of Aristotelian physics.
- Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection in the 19th century, which changed how humans viewed themselves in relation to animals and nature.
Often there is initial resistance to accept new paradigms, which can go through heated periods of controversy and criticism among contemporary scientists and laymen.
However, once these new paradigms were adopted, they allowed for research and discoveries into new phenomenon which ultimately expanded the boundaries of science and learning.
New paradigms completely change how a scientific field is looked at. Thomas Kuhn used the example of the duck-rabbit optical illusion to demonstrate how new paradigms can change how we see old information:
A duck or rabbit? It depends on your perspective.
New paradigms can take awhile to be fully adopted. Old facts need to be looked at through a new lens. New books, research, studies, lectures, and textbooks need to be re-written from this new perspective, leading to a type of cognitive restructuring of society. The philosopher Immanuel Kant referred to the advancements of Greek mathematics and Newtonian physics as “revolutions in thinking,” and they take time to process.
Generally, new scientific paradigms are better than old ones because they have more explanatory power over understanding natural phenomenon and predicting future outcomes.
The best measure of scientific truth is its predictive power: if a new paradigm fails to better explain or predict a natural occurrence over a previous paradigm, then there’s no real point in replacing the old model (from a scientific perspective).
Paradigm Shifts: An Antidote to Cognitive Dissonance
Paradigm shifts are spurred on when new facts don’t fit into old worldviews. This leads to feelings of cognitive dissonance which is when someone is forced to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
Often the only way to reconcile this disconnect between facts vs. experience is to find a completely new paradigm that accounts for all old and new knowledge. This may require recognizing wrong or mistaken beliefs from your past, or cultivating a worldview with more complexity and nuance.
Cognitive dissonance is a painful experience that most people choose to ignore or avoid. Many people double-down on wrong beliefs when they are passionately invested in them, which leads to excessive confirmation bias and conspiracy theories when beliefs continue to be held unchecked.
At the same time, cognitive dissonance can be a catalyst for change – it’s a signal that we need to adjust our understanding of reality. This can become a real avenue for transformative thinking as long as you are honest with yourself, seek out diverse sources of information, and open-minded enough to see things in a new light.
Conclusion
Paradigm shifts are a part of learning and growing on both an individual and societal level. They are necessary for both radical self-improvement and radical scientific progress.
While it’s important not to “change your mind just for the sake of changing your mind,” honest searches for knowledge and truth inevitably come up against walls that require a paradigm shift to get over and move onto the next stage.
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