Let there be Chaos

So I wanted to build off of Jill’s Post entitled “2012: A Time for Change.” I was struck by a single sentence in that post, “We are currently experiencing a crisis of consciousness.” This struck me because I have and continue to spend much of my professional career in the capacity of dispute resolution. I’ve traveled across states, oceans, and countries to various departments and companies to find that there does indeed exist a crisis, and as close as I can tell, it does involve our singular and collective consciousness.

Much of the issues that require correction center on communication (and the lack of it), and from this I began to form ideas as to the origin of these common miscommunications. Over the years I began to reflect on how communication has change, and how we have evolved our communication habits based on advancements in technology. I started to notice what I believed to be a trend, the trend of separation.

The idea came to me one day as I sat with another coworker reading an email. The email appeared to have a tone of anger. To make a long story short, we ended up confronting the employee and discovered that it was not meant as many of us had read it. Now, certainly this employee that sent the email could have been simply lying to us, but I did not think it in their nature to a) send such an email or b) lie, but the idea of separation crept into my head in the moments after. This idea, that through this separation between the persons through the written word, the A to B conversation was given an additional layer through the separation provided by the electronic mail. This additional layer also provided for this confusion centering on the tone of the email, and then I laughed at the idea of, the “tone” of an email. To prescribe to something that is not auditory to have something that would be, pointed to the paradoxical nature of the thoughts I was having, and so I indulged, and worked backwards.

For the purpose of putting this into religious terms to keep with the current tone of our posts here is how I saw it:

Spoken word begot Alphabet

Alphabet begat Letters

Letters begat Code

Code begat Telegrams

Telegrams begat Telephones

Telephones begat Faxes

Faxes begat Email

Email begat Facebook

Facebook begat Twitter

When I looked at this I started to see that all we were trying to do, from the moment we began to communicate, was put distance between the other. Ultimately, we have arrived to a method for communicating with large amounts of people called our friends or followers through single to multiple sentence blurbs. Something that I would argue is not ultimately communication or social at all. A very Orwellian Double-Speak term “Social Network,” again pointing out the paradoxical nature of this discussion.

So what does this have to do with communication and the “crisis of consciousness?” Well, I saw this separation, and that these layers of separation that we have been adding to since we first stopped grunting and pointing were to the point that we were not even communicating at all. Granted, if I go to a place I don’t know, and I ask how to get to the bathroom, do I get there? Yes. But I think that this problem goes deeper than just my bladder. It strikes to our “social” collective consciousness. We seem to often times believe the worst, expect the negative, and paranoid, and I believe it all spawns out of our communication both with others and ourselves. For how else do we communicate with our own consciousness than through our own given language? Our thoughts in our head predefined and limited by language, and this was where I found the ultimate separation. Maybe this came inherent to some of you by reading the above ramblings, but it was language itself that was the ultimate separation. We’ve all heard that communication is like 90% body language and only 10% the spoken word. Meaning the language itself is just another added layer, another separation point that adds on to the confusion. As I thought about reasons for this and what it all means I was brought back to my ancient Hebrew studies, and the idea of a God that creates not only through separation, but through the spoken word. Again to keep with the “tone” of the blog:

Genesis 1:3-And God Said, let there be light, and there was light.

There was no separation between the spoken word and reality, the reality was the word and the word was reality.

Genesis 1:4 –And God saw the light, and it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.

And the separation began…

I’ve been pivoting around this idea for a year or so now; I’m not sure what to do with it, if anything. I know that I see that the problem of communication appears to be worsening, but that may just be me seeing the negative. So I submit this to you all, do what you will with it, I know that I myself sit highest on the offender list as I write a blog post to a group of people of no more than two I have ever met in person, looking for solutions, but that seems to be acceptable as the irony appears to mount in this post.

Phil