Why do things happen the way they do? This is often the question we ask ourselves as we see events unfold around us. Some times, we think that events that affect us arise because of what we do. Other times, we are puzzled and wonder, "That should not have happened like that!"
My main useful training is in mathematical statistics, which should not mean much other than that I tend to look at the world from a probabilistic viewpoint. I am a practicing Bayesian, which means that I tend to work out the numbers given a set of circumstances, and that my statistical reasoning is conditional. I am prepared to view an event as happening in association with other events that run together to effect the event in an associative or causal way.
My training has led me to think that people most often do not know why things happen. In other words, they cannot put together the causal chain that results in an event. This means that there is a division in attitude among period that divides them over time into faith in causal chains and in non-causal instances. The non-causal instances are ones that they cannot say happened because of something they can put a finger on. The tendency is to lump non-causal events or instances with the notion of acausal events, or in an attempt to ascribe a cause refer to the cause as being controlled by something that is mediating or orchestrating events, the realm of God, gods, or some sinister conspiracy on the part of people in a group with evil or clandestine intentions. The fact is that human survival and individual survival may depend on a sufficient attribution of a cause. An example, may be needed.
Suppose that people are taken ill all of a sudden. There is no obvious cause, but it is true that the people are sick. Suppose that the illness occurs over a wide area. The problem with this scenario is that we have no obvious cause for the illness and thus fall back on our most likely models for such an event or series of events. Because many people will have different models the distribution of ideas as to what caused the illness will vary greatly among those observing the illness, or indeed suffering from it.
If out of this gloom, someone announces that they have had a dream and in the dream they saw that the illness was due to the unhappiness of an unseen power, and that to end the spread of the illness, someone had to be sacrificed to that power. Assume, that the visionary then claimed that it had to be done quickly or else the disease would spread rapidly. Such a situation would leave a group of people in a tremendous quandary because it attributes a cause and it proposes an extreme solution. The question is whether people would buy into the cause and the solution. Suppose that the real cause of the illness is a virus that has arrived on earth by surviving within a frozen comet that melted as soon as it hit the earth's atmosphere. Assume that the virus spread rapidly because water molecules showered into the high altitude atmosphere and were carried by clouds until falling as tiny rain drops. Suppose that during the time the virus was being carried in the clouds, it was able to multiply and multiply through out the cloud. Then when it fell within the rain shower it was able to infect a wide area.
Should such a series of events occur as described above, we would have great difficulty in determining cause and effect. To most people, the cause would seem to be unreal or god-like, and as a result, the actions people would take would not not really deal with the true situation, but some imagined situation. Who knows what people would do?
As I read Jaworski's book about leadership, I was wondering whether his mode of leadership would be able to cope with a world in which many of the decisions that leaders must make arise under circumstances in which there is no cause and effect explanation. Our world seems to be a place in which for many events that unfold there still are no easy answers, no certainties, and considerable risk. In such circumstances, the form of leadership that Jaworski proposes would probably be robust enough for it to select a pathway through the uncertainty that would lead to a positive outcome.
If you have ever watched the series 24 hours, you will notice how the hero, Jack Bauer is able to ellicit a positive outcome despite working under the wrong assumptions about who or what the real enemy is. Life is a bit like that, and the principles that Bauer uses to effect his positive outcome are not all that different from Jaworski, except that Bauer is very much emphasized in the series as a super hero. The character of Bauer is well designed because it suggests a hero of humble mentation working against unspeakable odds that push him to do unspeakable things to effect the positive outcome. I would wonder whether this is the sort of world that our future leaders have to deal with. Do our leaders have to be Jack Bauers, or opperate with synchonicity in the way we expect the Anti-Terrorist-Unit to operate, a collective group of heros in action.
Jaworski's book has a strong flavour of the mystical and mythological. He explains the path he has been dealt in life, which he is not able to define in terms of cause and effect, but more in the physics of quantum reality. As a creator of remarkable leadership institutes that draws on the very partial knowledge that we have of unseen quantum relationships, he is certainly a remarkable person worthy of a visit by Gurdieff or Ouspenski, a la 'Remarkable People that I have Met.' He also has influenced, through his being receptive to higher unseen energies, many wonderful synergies, if not synchonicities. He is well worthy of being grouped with Bohm, Penrose, and Jung as a wonderful thinker of our time. His book is a must read for those interested in leadership in an impossible world. My review really fails to do him justice.