Breaking Frames

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

-Dag Hammarskjold

Frames are powerful and too often taken for granted. Frames are more easily changed than people think.

What’s normal in one context is extraordinarily awful or weird in another context. Asking someone if they want to have sex would be horrible in a work setting but expected at a play party. What’s funny in one context isn’t in another. If a professor drops a marker while solving a problem, students laugh. If you’re alone and drop a marker, you pick it up and keep going.

This gets more extreme when we look across cultures and time. Pedophilia was the norm in Athens during Socrates time. We now know the harms of pedophilia, and it isn’t acceptable in our time in any culture. The same way disease, mothers dying due to childbirth, and high infant mortality rates used to be the norm.

Talking to my 100yr old buubi (grandmother in Yiddish), about what was normal most of her life would be considered terrible today. When her family was in Poland, their farm was taken away. It’s because they were Jewish. When a manager at P&G learned a middle manager accidentally hired a Jew (her husband/my grandfather), the Jew was fired and so was the middle manager. This was normal. She isn’t bitter about it. It was how things were back then.

When talking to an investor about living in San Francisco, they told me the city cleaned up the tents across the street from him. “Now it’s back to normal,” they said. I asked what normal means. They said “Tents, feces, and needles.”

Great leaders change what’s normal. They say things others think but aren’t allowed to say. They say things others didn’t know. They push boundaries. They break frames.

To be an innovative thinker, you have to break frames. You have to understand the frames of the culture and time you live in and decide whether you want to abide by them. You have to see the matrix. 

This is particularly relevant when groups, for political reasons, attempt to change what is acceptable in society. Groups who change what words we can say. Groups who change what we can laugh at. 

More than ever, certain views aren't allowed to be shared widely. Society used to be more accepting. Now offense permeates all. When you’re offended, you assume intentions, you give into your feelings. When you’re offended, you’re telling the other person that they can’t be honest with you. You’re telling them to filter themselves as what they think or even joke about is “not ok”. When you’re offended, you’re limiting your worldview and giving into your pride and biases. Look in the mirror.

When the public acts offended, someone has to proclaim the emperor has no clothes. Satire is an effective way to express this. So is calling out the offended for how elitist they’re being.

The first step to being an NPC (non-player character) is letting society’s frame affect how you perceive the world. Breakthrough. When you do, you see the second and third order consequences of the well intentioned, e.g. how PC culture is elitist. PC is a new way of acting/speaking with new rules that the lower classes who weren’t “educated” don’t know. It’s similar to when the British aristocracy started talking with an accent. Everyone started copying them and now everyone in Britain speaks English differently. I’m sure the British had justifications for doing it at the time, but zooming out, the whole practice was ridiculous.

The solution for the brave is to consciously ignore what’s supposed to be polite vs impolite. Act surprised when someone corrects you. Have them explain their reasoning from first principles. They will destroy their own arguments when you ask the right questions.

In the meantime, one relief is being in small groups with people we trust. We don’t need to always be at war. It’s fun to express views that may be offensive. Make fun of silly frames. Break frames. Make your own frames. It’s your own life. Live it.