Previously—”I Read the News Today (Oh, Boy),” 4 June 4 2011—I lamented the need for greater understanding and appreciation of the essential premises of Alfred Krozybski’s Science and Sanity, which evolved into the metamodel of NLP. Those premises are basically a cry to pay closer attention to reality, known in both Korzybski’s work and NLP as “territory,” which is distinct from “maps,” which are human beliefs. The problem is that beliefs too often argue with—disagree with—reality, and, as Byron Katie (Loving What Is) has said, “When you argue with reality, you lose. But only every time.”
If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. You can try and try, and in the end the cat will look up at you and say, “Meow.” Wanting reality to be different than it is is hopeless. You can spend the rest of your life trying to teach a cat to bark. (For an overview, see Noticing When Your Thoughts Argue with Reality.)
What prompted my thoughts about this issue was the claim by House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans in the U.S. that raising taxes on the wealthiest people would be a “jobs killer” because they are the “very people that we’re asking to create jobs in our country.” That was followed not long thereafter by the announcement that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has ruled that marijuana has “no accepted medical use” and should remain illegal. (For more information, read the whole story, which appeared in the July 11, 2011, online edition of Time.) Both of these claims present serious issues for the “map-territory” debate.
Neither of those claims is well-supported by what is often called “evidence-based reasoning.” Evidence-based reasoning uses the territory of measurable reality rather than beliefs as a starting point. Of course, what seems to be “evidence” at one time and place may not remain so. At one time, it seemed perfectly logical to think that the earth was flat and that the sun crossed the sky above it. Everyone “knew” that was the fact. The invention of the telescope changed that. In recent times, seemingly evidenced-based reasoning has been doing flip-flops. Think about eggs, for example. First, eggs were good for you. Then eggs were bad for you. Now, eggs are good for you once again.
It isn’t always easy to determine what evidence counts and what should be ignored. Are you old enough to remember when doctors (real medical doctors, not actors who play them on TV) advertised for tobacco companies? Kent cigarettes used a doctor to promote its “micronite” (asbestos) filter, which was later shown to cause a particularly insidious form of cancer.
Just because it isn’t always easy to separate “territory” from “map,” however, doesn’t mean that we can safely ignore the evidence that is available. In a conflict between the reality of territory and the beliefs of mental maps, reality wins. Not everyone who smokes cigarettes develops the diseases most often associated with smoking: cancer, emphysema, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD). Not everyone has a smoking-related problem, but the evidence is accumulating that there’s a strong correlation between the behavior and health problems. In some cases, what we believe has no real influence on our health and well being. How much water should you drink? If you’ve been influenced by various people’s mental maps, you may think you need eight glasses a day. That figure actually has no basis in fact.
According to a recent article on the ABC News website, members of the International Bottled Water Association have been actively promoting the myth that your good health requires drinking eight glasses of “pure” bottled water a day. Fortunately, drinking that much water probably won’t hurt you, but it won’t help you, either. Back in the early medieval period, believing that the world was flat didn’t cause much harm, either, but that didn’t make it right.
The best test for evidence is whether it comes from outside the belief system. A saying usually attributed to Marshall McLuhan is, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.” Staying in a belief system leads to circular reasoning:
- Jesus loves me. [How do you know?]
- The Bible tells me so. [How do you know it is correct?]
- The Bible is the Word of God. [How do you know?]
- The Bible tells me so….
There’s no way out of this particular loop and others that use circular reasoning. This particular belief is not necessarily harmful, but there is no external evidence for it, either.
This isn’t the case with beliefs about tax rates and job creation, nor is it the case when it comes to the efficacy of medical marijuana. These beliefs and a wide-variety of others are sufficiently important to our collective well-being that they deserve careful consideration of external evidence. In terms of tax rates, the reverse seems to be closer to the truth. That doesn’t seem especially logical, either, so additional external evidence would help. While there does seems to be a correlation with tax rates and our economic well-being, the correlation is not absolute. It is hard to say, for example, how waste and fraud influence what we receive in exchange for our tax dollars. It would also help if, as a nation, we could decide on the role of government and what we’re willing to pay for appropriate services.
With medical marijuana, external evidence shows that marijuana is both more effective and safer than a number of different pharmaceuticals for a number of different purposes. The safety record of marijuana is far superior to that of a number of pharmaceuticals advertised with regularity. The TV commercials for one arthritis drug, for example, mentions death as a possible side-effect not once but three times in a 60-second spot. I wonder if that would be the case if medical marijuana were advertised on TV (“Ask your doctor if smoking dope is right for you….”). My guess is that the warnings would be refraining from driving and operating machinery while stoned….
Beliefs about tax rates and drugs are, of course, not the only beliefs that should be examined in light of the best evidence available currently. Like those who lived before Galileo and Copernicus, we can’t be blamed if we see the world as flat. We can, however, be blamed if we fail to take into account evidence that is readily available. Byron Katie, to whom I owe credit for the title of this blog entry, has a wonderful exercise for conducting reality checks when it comes to relationships called The Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet. The four critical questions about the problem are the following:
- Is it true?
- Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
- How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
- Who would you be without the thought?
The first two of these are questions about mental maps and the territory being represented. We would do well to ask those questions of most of our beliefs, especially when we can see that large numbers of people have completely different beliefs. Think how the world would change if, instead of arguing (including going to war), we looked first at the evidence: Is it true? Can we absolutely know that it’s true?
