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).

When I use the word «reality», I refer to 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 the reality in that society. A subject who tried to argue in public about that reality would probably find themselves executed for treason. You cannot confront an existing psychosocial reality without due care.

Psychosocial reality provides the foundation for our society's stability: its 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 wholly 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 to all. Past ideas are then typically viewed as immature, primitive, even barbarous—partly to ensure they do not return and infect modern-day thinking. Which is of course, if not perfect, then as it should be.

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 other selves belong to the outer world unless they agree to be part of our world (and we agree to be part of theirs).

People who agree, consciously or unconsciously, to share parts of their psychosocial reality, naturally form a group and create a shared reality. If they share a territory, they form a community. Such groups and communities need governance, and they create it with the power to impose a reality 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 take action in role: but they also have their own personalities, limits and agendas.

Even if large created social systems, «legal individuals», increase our power, we must remember that it is always a person 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 from a person to other forms of «social being».
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