Note: If you accidentally landed up here, I suggest you start by reading part 1 of the series.
When Dionysius, the Greek God of wine and merriment, granted King Midas[1] one wish, the King asked that everything he touched be turned to gold. Dionysius warned him of the danger of such a wish, but the King insisted, and his wish was granted.
At first, the King was quite pleased with himself, going through every room of his Palace, turning all his trinkets into solid gold. But soon the realisation of his fate began to dawn upon him. He was unable to eat, nor could he drink. Every time he placed food onto his tongue or took a sip of wine, it instantly turned to gold. An embrace from his daughter, unaware of his new powers, leaves her a statue.
The King had been living a false narrative. He was convinced that the fastest and easiest path to truly flourishing life —what I call the LLP framework of loving, learning, and playing — would be solved through material wealth.
Many of us never come to the realisation that we are living under the trap of false narratives! Could you be one of such people? Are you trapped, looking for happiness in materialistic possessions? If yes, how can you get out of the trap? Let’s talk about the barriers to LLP and what you can do to free yourself from the traps of false narratives.
The Trap Of False Narratives
I read about this tale, especially poignant when the world was living through the great pause during COVID years. Many of us, myself included, have found ourselves in reflection as to what is and what is not most important, questioning the narratives, many of which may be false, that have influenced the direction their lives have taken them.
Unlike King Midas, I have never believed that the success I have achieved in life would solve every problem that I might encounter. For example, I know that my material wealth cannot protect me or my family from the coronavirus. Yet for many years as I traveled the world, advancing my career to running Blackstone in India, and splitting my time between New York and Mumbai, I let false narratives pull me away from love, learn and play (LLP), from my ability to truly flourish, a framework that I had been immersed in as a small child and had let lie dormant along the way.
What is Means-Ends Inversion?
Contemporary culture has become so preoccupied with means that it has lost sight of ends, or to be more precise, means and ends have become inverted. In other words, our means have come to constitute our ends. This phenomenon of means-ends inversion (MEI)[2] is happening in all walks of life, at the level of individuals, organizations, societies, and countries, without us being aware of it. This is one of the reasons why our present human condition is so far from what our capabilities could and should allow us to achieve.
That said, money itself is not evil. It is a means to all sorts of goods that are most compatible with love, learn and play (LLP). Money and research invested in the healthcare sector and medical research can and will be of great benefit.
It is when the focus is on how much money will be made from selling the healthcare services and not on the lives it will save that things become inverted and we move away from truly flourishing life.
- False Narratives On Money, Wealth And Capitalism
We’re told that if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist. This further feeds into the false narratives about money and wealth.
Markets, money, crony capitalism, competition, a sort of crude pseudo-Darwinism, and the Washington Consensus seem to have become our new religion.
These false narratives tell us that the shareholder is more important than the employee and that conspicuous consumption is more important than conscious consumerism.
There have been leaders[3] in the United States who have suggested during the pandemic that the economy is more important than human life. This is in direct contradiction to the love, learn and play (LLP) mindset.
False narratives get in the way of living the true love, learn and play (LLP) mindset, but they are not limited to money.
- Belief Systems and Religion: Is It Making Your Life Meaningful?
A common means and ends inversion is the use of religion as an end in itself, rather than a means to create meaning, fulfil our purpose, and flourish.
Religion and belief systems can help us in our quest for meaning-making, purpose, and the realisation of true LLP, but when the narrative is co-opted by those who use it for their own gains, it can be the source of unspeakable evil.
False narratives persist because of our socialised minds and are propped up by those who use religion for their own agendas; however, they can be changed.
The Catholic Church no longer says the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Instead, it accepts science and now sees the story of Genesis more as a metaphor, with deeper meanings rather than a strict, literal timeline.
- False Narratives On Diversity and the “Other”
Some narratives urge us to exclude or minimise diversity and even do away with certain groups of people. Other narratives tell us that each population is so uniquely and wholly different that there should be no interaction between them.
We have false narratives that aim to divide us and make us fear the other. Those in control—or who wish to be in control—put out propaganda meant to tear us apart. Leaders have historically exploited the masses through false narratives. Hitler used the idea of the other in Nazi Germany.
There is a narrative currently being pushed by some in the United States that immigrants are the other. China has recently implemented a social credit system [4], which tracks individuals and assigns each of them a social score based on how well they live up to the state’s expectations. Instead of using new technology to increase individual autonomy, these leaders are using it to control their citizens and decrease their chances of a flourishing life.
- Fragmentation of Knowledge
We have access to more information today than at any other time in history. Yet as much as data sets have the ability to “talk” to each other and learn, knowledge has been fragmented into silos. Social Media exacerbates this as information in one’s feed often only reveals one silo that may or may not be based on evidence-based facts.
Knowledge can also be misused and distorted, as in the scandal involving the company Theranos. In that case, a false narrative of a miracle-type of blood test was created as a means to get funding for the company.
One of the largest divides in knowledge is between the humanities and the sciences. All of this stands in the way of LLP and ultimately of true flourishing.
- False Narratives In The Sports Industry
Finally, false narratives and MEI have been created in the $100 billion+ sports industry. One of many examples would be the false narrative around American football [5], which continues to thrive despite increasing evidence that it often leads to brain injuries.
University sports, in which players are not even paid, are money-making machines for many colleges, often overshadowing their core foundational goals of education and what a university should be.
We Can Change Our Narratives
In the current age, we face a few external problems that are not human-generated. Global warming is not an accident, it is anthropogenic. While many attribute the original source of COVID-19 to be bats [6] in a wet market in Wuhan, China, we already know that the lack of reporting caused it to spread farther. We also know that the dismissal [7] of how real this virus was by more than one world leader caused it to spread more quickly.
We are the cause of all our problems. We are also the solution.
This means that while our cultures may socialise us to believe the false narratives and means and ends inversion (MEI), which limit our ability to recognise and pursue the triple helix of loving, learning, and playing, we can change that.
We can begin by naming it and recognising what’s in the way, and remembering that our true inner compass is the same one we had while we were children on the playground. The challenge is to begin to redirect our conscious thinking so we live more consciously. Perhaps, as I have written before[8], the silver lining in the coronavirus is that we now have the time and the opportunity to reflect on how.
References:
[1] https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/King_Midas/king_midas.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton
[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/dan-patrick-coronavirus-grandparents
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4
[5] http://www.center4research.org/football-brain-injuries-need-know/
This post is the second in a 3-part series by Akhil Gupta. Read the first part here: what it means to flourish in the 21st century.
About the author:
Akhilesh Gupta is the founder of theUEF Foundation and a Fellow of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative. He previously served as senior managing director at Blackstone and held leadership roles at Reliance Industries and Hindustan Unilever.
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