A Life Full of Learning

TL;DR: In this paper, it was pointed out that as truth is strengthened by the use of the ideas in good currency in the scholarly community, it can also create conditions for limiting truth.

Abstract: I began my career with a dedication to reducing injustices. The injustices that intrigued me were those that inhibited the expansion of liberating alternatives. Soon I narrowed my focus even further to those injustices created by human beings when they were acting to reduce the injustices. The more that I studied these phenomena, the more I found myself studying processes that were selfsealing, compulsively repetitive, and non-interruptable and changeable by the very people who created them. Kubie (1958) described such processes as neurotic and undermining creative change. Fromm (1955) made a similar point, emphasizing societal variables. It became increasingly clear that human beings were skillful at maintaining vigilantly these corrosive and non-learning features. These features continue to exist today in organizations. Yet there are no courses at universities or other executive programs that teach human beings, groups, intergroups, and organizations the skills of producing these counterproductive, compulsively repetitive processes. How do we explain their omnipresence and perseverance? I chose to become a scholar because I felt a deep sense of responsibility to test the claims that I would make in the most robust manner possible. I sought to assure myself that I was not unwittingly kidding myself or others in the claims that I was making. At the outset of my career, I assumed that justice and seeking truth represented unbounded good. As I will illustrate below, I learned that both features contain inner contradictions. As justice is strengthened, it can also produce knowledge that violates it. As truth is strengthened by the use of the ideas in good currency in the scholarly community, it can also create conditions for limiting truth.