All-Encompassing Frames Self-Reinforce 🌀

Once, I read a book about marketing that claimed ‘everything is marketing’. From this lens, a Crepe Myrtle’s vibrant red flowers are marketing to bees to help it procreate. I encountered another theory that said all communication is needs based. From this lens, the flower’s beauty is a way of expressing it's need to be pollinated.

The lenses look convincing only if we forget that the “everything” claim pre-determines all interpretations. The game is rigged. This is how projection works. We project an internal assumption, see the results of our projection, and forget we did the projecting by claiming that we’re seeing “truth”. A self-organizing system begins. As one example: Feeling unworthy of care, we assume people are mean; we treat them adversarially, they end up meaner, making it observably true that people are mean, reinforcing (and hiding) our unrecognized feelings of unworthiness. 

Many lenses similarly claim to be all-encompassing, or at least get used by us that way. “Surrender”, “Masculine/feminine”, “The Hero’s Journey”, “healing shadow”, “adult development”, “everything is connected”, “it’s all relational”, “power dynamics”, “we’re on the verge of collapse”, “geopolitics”, “trauma”, “class”, “status”, “good/bad”, “sin”, etc… Less obvious lenses like “people don’t like me”, “anger is dangerous”, “I can’t do it”, “they don’t value me”, “I’ve got to earn love”, can work in a similar fashion. While holding useful perspectives, they all run the risk of occluding forgotten projections, and becoming self-reinforcing-ly convincing in a way that keeps us from encountering our own deeper vulnerability, freedom, and wisdom to move towards better futures.

With love, Jordan