Commitment to the Truth

COMMITMENT TO THE TRUTH

We may begin with a disarmingly simple yet profound strategy for dealing with structural conflict: telling the truth.

Commitment to the truth often seems to people an inadequate strategy. “What do I need to do to change my behavior?” “How do I change my underlying belief?” People often want a formula, a technique, something tangible that they can apply to solve the problem of structural conflict. But, in fact, being committed to the truth is far more powerful than any technique.

Commitment to the truth does not mean seeking the Truth, the absolute final word or ultimate cause. Rather, it means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness, just as the great athlete with extraordinary peripheral vision keeps trying to see more of the playing field. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events. Specifically, people with high levels of personal mastery see more of the structural conflicts underlying their own behavior.

Thus, the first critical task in dealing with structural conflicts is to recognize them, and the resulting behavior, when they are operating. It can be very difficult to recognize these coping strategies while we are playing them out, especially because of tensions and pressures that often accompany them. It helps to develop internal warning signals, such as when we find ourselves blaming something or somebody for our problems: “The reason I’m giving up is nobody appreciates me,” or “The reason I’m so worried is that they’ll fire me if I don’t get the job done.”

In my life, for example, for many years my experience was that people let me down at critical junctures in major projects. When this happened, I would bulldoze through, overcoming the obstacle of their disloyalty or incompetence. It took many years before I recognized this as a recurring pattern, my own special form of the willpower strategy, rooted in a deep feeling of being powerless to change the way others let me down. Invariably, I ended up feeling “I’ve got to do it all myself.”

Once I recognized this pattern, I began to act differently when this happened. I became angry less often. Rather, there was a twinge of recognition—“Oh, there goes my pattern.” I looked more deeply at how my own actions were part of the outcome, either by creating tasks that were impossible to accomplish, or by undermining or not supporting the other person. Further, I worked to develop skills to discuss such situations with the people involved without producing defensiveness. The book’s Chapter 9, “Mental Models,” illustrates these skills.

I would never have developed those skills or known how to put them into practice without a shift of mind. So long as I saw the problem in terms of events, I was convinced that my problems were externally caused—“they let me down.” Once I saw the problem as structurally caused, I began to look at what I could do, rather than at what “they had done.”

Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. Once we can see them and name them, they no longer have the same hold on us. This is as much true for individuals as it is for organizations. In fact, an entire field is evolving, structural family therapy, based on the assumption that individual psychological difficulties can be understood and changed only by understanding the structures of interdependencies within families and close personal relationships. Once these structures are recognized, in the words of David Kantor, a pioneer in the field, “It becomes possible to begin to alter structures to free people from previously mysterious forces that dictated their behavior.”15

Discovering structures at play is the stock-in-trade of people with high levels of personal mastery. Sometimes these structures can be readily changed. Sometimes, as with structural conflict, they change only gradually. Then the need is to work more creatively within them while acknowledging their origin, rather than fighting the structures. Either way, once an operating structure is recognized, the structure itself becomes part of “current reality.” The greater my commitment to the truth, the more creative tension comes into play because current reality is seen more for what it really is. In the context of creative tension, commitment to the truth becomes a generative force, just as vision becomes a generative force.

One of the classic illustrations of this process is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Through the visitations of the three ghosts on Christmas Eve, Scrooge sees more and more of the reality from which he has turned away. He sees the reality of his past, how the choices he made steadily whittled away his compassion and increased his self-centeredness. He sees the reality of his present, especially those aspects of reality that he has avoided, such as Tiny Tim’s illness. And he sees the reality of his likely future, the future that will occur if he continues in his present ways. But then he wakes up. He realizes that he is not the captive of these realities. He realizes that he has a choice. He chooses to change.

Significantly, Scrooge can’t make the choice to change before he becomes more aware of his current reality. In effect, Dickens says that life always avails the option of seeing the truth, no matter how blind and prejudiced we may be. And if we have the courage to respond to that option, we have the power to change ourselves profoundly. Or, to put it in more classic religious terms, only through the truth do we come to grace.

The power of the truth, seeing reality more and more as it is, cleansing the lens of perception, awakening from self-imposed distortions of reality—are different expressions of a common principle in almost all the world’s great philosophic and religious systems. Buddhists strive to achieve the state of “pure observation,” of seeing reality directly. Hindus speak of “witnessing,” observing themselves and their lives with an attitude of spiritual detachment. The power of the truth was no less central to early Christian thinking, although it has lost its place in Christian practice over the last two thousand years. In fact, the Hebrew symbols used to form the word Yeheshua, “Jesus,” include the symbols for Jehovah, with the additional letter shin inserted in the middle. The symbols for Jehovah carry the meaning, “That which was, is, and will be.” The inserted shin modifies the meaning to “that which was, is, and will be, delivers.” This is the probable origin of the statement “The truth shall set you free.”