Imagine a picture puzzle.... It comes in a box filled with hundreds of pieces. When assembled, it may depict a landscape, perhaps, with large swatches of blue sea and blue sky. Imagine my mind is like one of those picture puzzles, and so is yours. I take one of those blue puzzle pieces, give it to you, and declare, “Here's a bit of the picture in my mind. I give it to you so you can see the picture I see.”
“Oh, you and your conspiracy theories!”
Yeah, well, I tell ya what:
When a small group of people try to fool a bigger group, I call it conspiracy.
When a small group of people try to fool themselves, I call it denial.
When we all try to fool each other, I call it culture.
It appears that Dr. X found this to be a useful model.
I take that piece from the sky portion of my mind's picture puzzle, but you find it fits best in the sea portion of yours.
“Thanks!” you say, as you join my sky piece to your sea puzzle. And off we go, cheerfully believing we have accomplished something, that we have communicated.
George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Sometimes I think of it as the illusion of information. If I hand you a blue puzzle piece from the picture in my mind, but I don't describe the surrounding picture from which it came, I set up both of us to misunderstand each other, to miscommunicate, to see only an illusion of information.
This site offers a collection of puzzle pieces. These are the pieces I find most helpful to create a coherent picture of the world around us.
Some pieces I have yet to assemble or integrate can be found at the companion blog, Another blue puzzle piece.
![[composite photo of an iceberg, both exposed tip and submerged bulk]](/graphics/iceberg-clevenger-small.jpg)
This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License
The concept of “culture” is a model I find useful.
For a longer, more serious take on culture, please see: Seeking solutions in the culture domain
Two comments so far. Add yours?