Ignorance

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Parent Category: Engels

Category: Training

Created: Thursday, February 23 2017 13:38

Published: Thursday, February 23 2017 13:38

Written by Bart

Kennemer Dunes, today. Learn [ or burn ].

Min/max temperature: 3°C/9°C; humidity: 100%; precipitation: 12 mm, sea level pressure: 988 hPa; wind WNW 52.0 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds Few 243 m., Scattered Clouds 304 m., Mostly Cloudy 548 m

"[People] interested in creating high performance teams are unafraid of incertitude and unresolved issues and are able to remain open-minded. [Prepared] to accept a condition what the poet John Keats termed "negative capability": "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" […] It is important to maintain a state of deliberate open-mindedness -- the ability to keep imagination alive without having the urge for closure. […] Paranoid and depressive anxieties are major emotional drivers within a group-as-a-whole. At the core of these primitive regressive processes is a basic feeling of helplessness, a state of mind that produces the deepest source of anxiety in human beings […] If these regressive forces are not dealt with, the group-as-a-whole falls victim to a paranoid mindset, expressed as mistrust, untruthfulness, suspicion, hostility, immoral behaviour, rivalry, jealousy, envy, spite, and fear. […] Within this paranoid framework, scapegoats will be targeted within a group or team. Scapegoating is a way of deflecting our aggression onto safer targets, instead of directing it towards the target we are really frustrated with. People who become scapegoats act as receptacles for the projections of the unacceptable impulses experienced by the group-as-a-whole. […] As an additional "benefit" this act of projection may bind "good" group members closer together, by creating a common enemy. In many instances, scapegoats are chosen because of some special or unique characteristic that makes them different from the other members of the group […] some low-status individuals frequently become associated (forced by the group) with the unacceptable, unseemly, or foolish aspects of the group."

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries in 'The Hedgehog Effect', page 145, 146, 147, 151. First published in 2011 by John Wiley and Sons, USA

Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.
The wise are not sick, because they are sick of sickness.
Therefore they are not sick.

Lao Tsu in 'Tao Te Ching', translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. Originally published by Knopf, New York, 1972