By Arthur Leggett
Three separate chance incidents this week at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy, at the Detroit Opera House and at the office of the Arts League of Michigan (ALM) got me thinking about the power of paradigms and the dangers of paradigm paralysis. On my visits to catch up with two old friends at my old high school and at the Opera House, I was alarmed by the 1984ish security measures installed at both places since my last visits.
I politely mentioned to my friends that the eyes-in-the-skies, armed storm troopers and bulletproof welcoming centers send the absolute wrong message: paranoia and distrust. Both men seemed a little befuddled by my comments and responded in the most obtuse way. In both cases, I quieted down and listened to a litany of excuses for the extreme security measures.
I attempted to end the conversations by suggesting that, "You might be right, but perhaps there's another way to address security?" Both gentlemen huffily retorted by sharing all the terrible things that happened in the past year and that could possibly happen in the near future without tough security policies, as though they were the Athenians preparing for the inevitable Spartan invasion.
As I reflected on these incidents, I realized that we were all concerned with the same issue: security, but we had very different paradigms.
What is a paradigm (pronounced pair-a-dime)?
A paradigm is 'a shared set of assumptions' that influences the way we perceive this rich world and predict human behavior. Paradigms can cause two different people to look at the same data but use a different set of filters to process the information, consequently, their outlooks differ.
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