8 – Wisdom vs. Power: Postmodern Paradigm Part 1

Welcome back to our blog series Wisdom and Love vs. Postmodern Power. We’ve been talking about why we have so much conflict in our society and unhappiness in our lives.

The primary reason is that we have three conflicting understandings of life at work in society.

It’s like trying to play a game of basketball-football-golf. I call it basket-foot-golf.

The conflicting rules make it impossible to combine them into a single game. It will inevitably lead to conflict and deep frustration.

Are you supposed to move the ball forward by dribbling or running or using a club?

What is the proper club selection on 3rd down from the free throw line?

Do you win by scoring the most points or the fewest strokes?

Basket-foot-golf is a metaphor, of course, for the three understandings of life in conflict in our society—the Wisdom Paradigm, Modern Paradigm and Postmodern Paradigm.
Review of the Wisdom Paradigm
As we discussed in earlier blogs, the Wisdom Paradigm is the way all the world’s great religions and philosophies have thought about life for thousands of years.

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that all people have the same human nature and purpose in life—Happiness.

A big, 80-year, ongoing Harvard study confirms something we already know. Happiness in life comes from high-quality relationships. Good relationships won’t just make you happier; you’ll also be healthier and live longer.

Knowing that our purpose in life is Happiness, reason tells us what we need to do to get there.

The Wisdom Paradigm says that all relationships are covenant relationships. In covenant relationships, the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. Covenant relationships are high-trust, high-performance, high-stability relationships.

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that there is an objective morality with moral facts.

For example, it is a fact that practicing moral virtues like courage, wisdom, honesty, justice and love help us develop good relationships that bring Happiness.

It is also a fact that practicing moral vices like addiction, cowardice and dishonesty destroy relationships and will inevitably lead to unhappiness.
Rise and Fall of the Modern Paradigm
In Europe in the 1500’s and 1600’s, however, things began to change. Religious wars were tearing Europe apart. Different Christian religions had conflicting versions of what Salvation—Happiness—was and different ways to get there.

The religious wars were brutal. Thinkers of the time responded by creating a whole new way of understanding life—the Modern Paradigm.

These new, modern thinkers needed to find a way to get people to live together without killing each other over religion. So, they split life into public life and private life.

Then they put our destination in life, Happiness, into the private side so that we stopped fighting about it publicly.

That helped with the religious fighting, but it created other problems.

When it came to morality, modern thinkers had to come up with a new way to justify objective morality with moral facts. They tried to do that using reason alone. As we’ll see again, that attempt created some big problems.

Modern thinkers also redefined human relationships from covenant relationships into contract relationships.

In contract relationships, what’s good for the individual and team are opposite.

That’s a big change.

For example, in the relationship between an employee and a company, the employee wants more money for less work, while the company wants more work while paying less money.

Contract relationships end up being low-trust, low-performance and unstable relationships.

Finally, remember that the Modern Paradigm is a whole new way of looking at life, so it impacted every aspect of society including art, literature, education, religion, work, music, government and politics—everything.
The Rise of Postmodern Thinking
During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s,