According to Abaraham Maslow’s theory of motivation, physiological needs are the most basic requirements for survival and well-being. These needs are the foundation for human existence and must be satisfied before individuals can progress to the higher-level needs such as safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The physiological needs include air, water, food, shelter, clothing, warmth, and sleep. If these needs are not met, the body’s organic systems are weakened, leading to physical maladies that could, if serious enough, endanger life.
Although meeting physical needs are the most important problems that people must solve, few of us devote much attention to meeting these necessities because they are either naturally plentiful or humans have built elaborate social structures to comfortably sustain us. For example, air is abundant unless you are a non-swimmer who falls into deep water. Food is conveniently procured at the supermarket, and water is a short walk to the taps in comfortable homes that provide shelter from heat, cold, wind, rain, and other environmental hazards. Unless we lose our homes in a disaster, are marooned on an uninhabited island, or get lost in the desert on a blistering hot day, the vast majority of us take the physical world for granted.
This helps explain why few of us reside in the first quadrant of the Human Intelligence Map. This is the Prerational space where System 1 thinking and physical reality intersect. For the most part, when people engage in this space, they are tourists who temporarily have an urgent physical issue that needs to be solved, such as little food in the house or finding a place to stay in the dead of winter when the furnace has died. Once these problems are solved, people will return to their resident intelligence territory, which for most people, is the Arational space. However, there are a few people who take up residence in the Prerational territory, and as we will discuss below, the majority are children. While some adults are residents of this first quadrant, most of them are more like first-time homebuyers who will eventually move to other neighborhoods or seasonal residents spending time in their second home. Like a rural coastal beach town, the actual number of year-round adult residents is a relatively small number.
The archetype for this group is the Innovator. Innovators’ favorite two questions are: Why? and Why not? This explains why the majority of children reside in this space. Children are forever challenging their parents with questions as they are learning how the physical world works and how to safely navigate its immutable conditions. They are natural System 1 thinkers because they will not begin to develop the basic capacity for reasoning—which is essential for System 2 thinking—until they approach puberty. While they may be low in reasoning, they are often high in creativity, which they demonstrate in play with other children or in vivid expressions of imagination as they try to make sense of the world around them.
Sensemaking is the common attribute that youthful residents share with the adults who populate this space. The Innovator is constantly focused on making sense of the world, especially the physical world. They are never fully socialized and will not shy away from questioning common understandings or accepted ways when they don’t make sense.
Innovators love to explore possibilities and are often drawn to find a way to do what seems impossible. They are fascinated by the world around them, wondering how and why things work as they do. With this knowledge, they explore new ways of understanding and doing things. They are the catalysts for technological revolutions that lead to the proliferation of inventions and the creators of ideologies that explain the workings of the vast physical world that surrounds us. They are the people who change how we see the world.
Theories
Innovators are driven by curiosity and imagination. They are curious about why things are the way they are, and more importantly, they are imaginative in thinking about how they can create things that never existed before. Innovators are continually thinking about how they can make things work better. They are not afraid to challenge the accepted ways of doing or understanding things and are often highly irritating to those who are invested in the ways we’ve always done or understood things.
Innovators live in the world of ideas, which explains why the domain of Prerational intelligence is theory. Theories are systems of ideas that explain the general principles for how things operate and can be used to account for a situation or justify a course of action. Ideas are the ingredients used to construct models in the form of quantitative schematics or compelling narratives. These models often provide the principles for helping people navigate what can often feel like a complex and chaotic world.
These principles can be expressed in the form of metrics, such as the aerodynamic formulas the Wright brothers used to guide the invention of the airplane, or common understandings, such as the medieval notion that the sun rotated around the earth. Both of these models were designed to explain how the physical world worked, although one theory did a clearly better job. Theories, while often helpful, are also fragile and remain so until they are either proven by science—which means they’re not theories anymore—or codified into dogma and are thus no longer open to question because concepts have been transformed into beliefs.
The Visionary
The luminous character for the Innovator archetype is the Visionary. Visionaries are often intuitive people who see new ways of navigating or understanding the physical world, but more importantly, they are able to move their ideas to action and make a difference in the world. Albert Einstein is the first person to recognize that time is relative and interconnected with space. His theory of relativity would transform our understanding of the universe, making it possible to safely travel to the moon and back. Steve Jobs had an idea that a phone, a camera, a recording device, and a computer could be combined into one product that you could hold in the palm of your hand. The iPhone is a physical product that has transformed how we gather information, communicate with others, and form communities in ways that were never possible before. Elon Musk’s fascination with physical possibilities has led to the invention of fully electric cars, reusable rocket launchers, and the realistic hope that we may someday establish a human community on Mars.
Other Visionaries have created social and economic models that have allowed us to advance our understanding of human capabilities and build highly sophisticated societies. The early Romans designed the top-down hierarchical organizational model to support a highly effective army that allowed their empire to last for almost 1,000 years. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung transformed our understanding of the inner workings of the human mind with their innovative psychological theories. Adam Smith built the economic theory of capitalism that postulates the most effective economies are decentralized markets where information is open and individuals are free to participate as they choose. And recently an anonymous Visionary has created the decentralized currency of Bitcoin that uses a peer-to-peer network for the exchange and storage of a fixed number of digital coins. The underlying technology for this new currency is blockchain, a transparent organizational structure where no single individual or entity can seize control.
Visionaries have also created the world’s religions. Whether the early pantheistic religions of pre-civilized societies or the monotheistic creeds spawned in the pre-Industrial world, each of these religions has created a narrative that explains how the physical world came to be and how it works. The theories that inspire these narratives have brought a sense of shared understanding and certainty that has helped people make sense of a highly complex and often chaotic physical world, as well as providing a set of mores to guide social life.
In addition to exploring new ways of thinking and novel possibilities, the common attribute of Visionaries is their commitment to action. They strongly feel that their ideas are worthless if they are not able to move them to realty, whether it’s the Wright brothers toiling for years to make human flight possible or the founders of the United States creating the world’s longest standing democratic republic. It is this commitment to action that separates the luminous character from the shadow character, the Daydreamer.
The Daydreamer
Daydreamers experience a very different world from their luminous counterparts. Whereas Visionaries are focused on leveraging their ideas to transform the external world by creating new technologies or ideologies, Daydreamers live in their own inner world and are often content to remain in that space. Like the fictional character Walter Mitty, they are content to focus their attention on their fantasies without regard for making their illusions actual goals. Unlike Visionaries, who experience innovative ideas as a pathway to changing the external world through action, Daydreamers embrace new ideas as a conduit for changing their identity and how they experience themselves.
For example, if an individual has a strong desire to be a pilot but never takes the flight training necessary to get a pilot’s license, he or she might internally identify with pilots by becoming an airplane buff, listening to air traffic control conversations, and imaging that they are flying the plane every time it takes off. While this inner reality may feel palpable for them, it is ultimately a fiction. They may become legends in their own minds, but they are having no impact on the world around them. Although these illusions tend to be harmless, there are times when they can devolve into problematic delusions, especially if Daydreamers insist that others accept their fantasy identities as reality. Airplanes are physical objects that work only when they are flown respecting the immutable laws of physical flight. Mastering the skills of aeronautics requires intensive training, not wishful thinking.
A Temporary Residence
As mentioned above, there are few permanent residents in the Prerational space. The largest number are children, and they grow up with most becoming Believers and migrating into the Arational space. The adults who are Daydreamers are likely to remain in the first quadrant as long as their fantasies define their inner identity. In preferring the shadow characteristics, the Daydreamers choose to organize their lives around a delusional inner world where they mistakenly feel they are the masters of their own fate.
On the other hand, the Visionary’s need to translate ideas into action necessitates a migration into either the Rational or the Arational spaces. Because Visionaries want to leave a mark on the external world, they will have to test their theories in the realms of either the physical or the social worlds. This means, unlike the other three quadrants, there is less of a need to resolve the paradox between the luminous and the shadow characters.
Visionaries who create new technologies or new scientific theories tend to move into the Rational territory where their ideas can be tested and proven true or false. The Wright brothers initial flight at Kitty Hawk provided clear evidence of the world’s first humanly controlled flying machine, and Sir Arthur Eddington’s expedition to observe a total solar eclipse definitively verified that, as Einstein’s theories had predicted, mass causes space to curve. When ideas are verified by evidence, they are no longer theories; they are facts. And when this happens, the Visionary becomes a Scientist residing in the Rational space and now has a new paradox to resolve, which will be discussed in the next article.
Visionaries who postulate new ideologies tend to move into the Arational territory because ideological frameworks are often either metaphysical concepts or social constructions and are not subject to the protocols of the physical realm. For example, whether or not there is a supernatural force that is exempt from the physical laws of the universe is a matter of faith rather than empirical evidence. Also, whether or not a particular social or economic theory is valid or not tends to remain open for decades—sometimes centuries—because both advocates and adversaries are able to produce numerical or causal analyses which support the validity of their differing opinions. Ultimately, there are many occasions where differing opinions morph into strongly held beliefs. In these instances, the Visionary becomes a Believer, also with a new paradox to resolve, which was discussed in a previous article.
In questioning things and seeing things differently, Innovators highlight two uncomfortable attributes of the world around us: ambiguity and uncertainty. And while these two attributes are often necessary conditions for motivating people to learn new things, our tolerance for having questions remain unanswered is generally low. This is why people tend to move in one of two directions when they find themselves in the Prerational territory. If the pull of understanding physical reality on its own terms is most compelling, people will move into the Rational territory to engage in actual science with an open mind to accepting whatever results the evidence shows. On the other hand, if the pull of the demands of social reality is more compelling, they will move into the Arational territory and satisfy the need for closure by going along with whatever the established thinking is, sometimes despite evidence to the contrary. The fragility of theories explains why few remain long-term residents of the Prerational space. And because the vast majority ultimately migrate to the Arational space, it is clear that the lure for closure by constructing or adopting new beliefs is far stronger than the pull to pursue objective evidence wherever it may lead.
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Excellent article, Rod!
Please keep up the great work!
You do a great job of breaking down the complex issues that define mankind's ability to either advance or decline according to our ability to be objective and open-minded.