Dreams in Blog - The way of Icarus

28/Sep/2009

The way of Icarus

Dedalos and Icaros

Problems are everywhere. And the solutions?

The way of Icarus
Prof. Stefano E D’Anna

Humanity is enclosed in a labyrinth, languishing since time immemorial in a prison of repetitiveness without ever finding a solution to its age-old problems. The possible way out comes from the myth of Daedalus which recalls the condition of man imprisoned by his own creation. The solution is the problem seen from the top. The way of Icarus.

Minos closed all the doors to us
However, he could not close the sky...

The progeny of Sisyphus

The myth of Daedalus, the man imprisoned in the labyrinth, his own creation, is the oldest myth that our civilization recalls. Its origin is lost in the mists of time. In the western culture there is no prototypical idea more emblematic of our own condition.

Humanity is enclosed in a labyrinth. It languishes since time immemorial in a prison of repetitiveness without ever finding a solution to its age-old problems. The calamities and global challenges we have to face are innumerable and grave: from world pollution to the poverty of countries, from the death of a child every seven seconds due to hunger to the thousand conflicts and hatred between countries and different ethnic groups. The domineering characteristic of man’s problematic reality seems to be its unsolvability. Everyone is searching for solutions. Men, governments, civilizations would like to know the way out of this labyrinth, to possess Ariadne’s thread and the wings of Icarus.

In the sphere of research conducted on leadership and of the studies on the decision-making process done in the Institute of Entrepreneurial Psychology of the European School of Economics, we asked ourselves why humanity’s problems are not only unresolved but with time they have become more acute. Even the phenomenon of famine in the world has worsened. Though we possess the most advanced means and techniques, paradoxically, we are now producing less food for the third world then forty years ago.

We are the descendents of Sisyphus, condemned to the same torment. Since millennia we push uphill our problems as heavy huge stones, to then see them rolling down to the bottom before reaching the top. And to start again, endlessly. We shift our problems to another place or pospone them to another time and then we call this solution. We were inadequate in the Stone Age when we could only count on our bare hands and we still are now in this digital era with atomic energy and internet. It is time to identify the reason of our powerlessness.

The problem seen from the top

ESE works on the hypothesis that the problem and solution are not opposites but they are in fact the elements of the same reality. If we were able to rise into our being, if we were able to rise above ordinary vision we would realize that the solution is not divided from the problem. They are the same thing. The only difference is the levels on which they stand.

The solution is the problem seen from the top. This vision is what distinguishes a leader.

The discovery is revealing itself to be of huge practical value in the preparation of a new generation of leaders, visionary men, pragmatic dreamers that do not believe in the search for an external solution but in their very own capabilities.

‘It is your vision, it is your pace that creates the path. A leader does not need to choose a direction because he is the direction, the inventor of the dream that is unfolding itself and that takes on the appearance of reality’ (from The School for Gods)

These men know that what other commonly call problems are in reality solutions in disguise. There is always a solution, it comes together with the problem, it is one with it, but to reach it we must overcome our conflictual psychology, must get over lower worlds where any reality cannot but take on problematic forms. Only through passing time, we can identify the solution where before we only saw the problem.

Waiting for Godot

Man searches outside himself. He runs around and looses breath all his life following external solutions that with time transform themselves in problems and in this way a ceaseless perverse cycle is formed. For an unhappy destiny, we will never know that outside ourselves there is nothing and no one that can help us out. As the characters in the tragicomedy of Samuel Beckett we will be endlessly “waiting for Godot” (God-ot) believing in a deus ex machina that can resolve us from the outside. Never realizing that we are the solution. Like reindeers we run after the fragrance of musk, enraptured by that essence without ever discovering that it is not out of us, but secreted by our own glands.

Man searches for freedom, happiness, love, he searches outside himself but the journey of the “prodigal sun” is not external…it is an internal adventure; it is the journey of man returning to the unity of his being.

Man ceaselessly tries to regain his integrity, a state of completeness, of interior unity but nothing seems capable to bring him back to his paradise lost.

The Art of Decision Making

All organizations, and companies especially, live as arks scourged by an ocean of problems. Their life could be defined as a set of intervals of apparent success from one crisis to another until the last one, which will mark its decline and consequently its death. Organizations, aware of their fragility and vulnerability, are continuously searching solutions and looking for the best way to take the right decision under various circumstances. Decision-making and problem solving techniques were formed due to the need to have guidelines to follow when it is time for taking a decision, a ritual to follow that can appease this exhausting, stressful condition of continued uncertainties. There is no executive education programme or master in Business Administration and neither a very least certificate in management that does not provide the teaching of decision-making with relative curriculum, books and exam. The goal of these courses is to equip the manager with a variety of techniques to render him able to identify possible solutions and be able to weigh disadvantages, limits, strengths and weaknesses attached to them.

Gut-Feeling. The Decision-Making Instinct

From Harvard down, from the colleges of the American heavy league to the eighteen noblest British universities of the Russel Group, in the academic and scientific circles the world over we find that the domineering conviction is that the solution is external to ourselves. If we only knew how to handle, if we had the right  techniques, everyone could discover the way out, the solution; become a decision-maker, a leader. This belief in choosing the right solution between all possible solutions is just as incorrect as it is undisputed. The reality is that if we abandon the academic towers of ivory and we poke our noses outside the classrooms, we discover that decision in modern contexts, in the background of high competition are taken in a completely different way. Outside of routine decisions on simple questions that can return to the discretion of an employee, for the vaster and more complicated questions, and in general for the decision making processes of complex systems where the variables are innumerable like in the case of big multinationals, the only solution is instinct. In fact, the journal Business 2.0 has recently entitled an article on the argument with the significant title: Think with your guts. The invitation to managers to think with their ‘guts’  announces the revolution in the way of viewing leadership and in the preparation of a responsible governing class, a decisional aristocracy. And while all universities in the world still believe in techniques and mental approaches to the “problem solving” and are in fact intellectual gyms, there is a need for new schools and universities of being, capable of preparing decision-makers, pragmatic visionaries, equipped with an intelligence of the heart and of new senses: a sixth sense, intuition, and a seventh sense, ‘dreaming’.

‘A man pointed towards the top, impeccably aimed at his improvement, can find solutions for situations that appear without a way out, transform adversities into events of  superior order’.

The Decision of Washington

Towards the end of 1776, veteran of a series of conflicts: Harlem Heights, White Planes, collimating in the abandon of New York, the American army is adrift, exhausted, deprived of everything. Followed by 20.000 ‘red jackets’ rested and well equipped. Washington tries to flee towards the south, toward New Jersey. His goal is to save his young soldiers that would have been otherwise hanged or executed as rebels. The English did not take prisoners, as they did not see them as enemies. On the eve of Xmas Washington arrives on the banks of Delaware, he takes over all the boats that he can find and he crosses the river hoping that it will not freeze completely and that it will slow down his followers. He manages to transport all his soldiers but once on the other side he receives bad news: Trenton, one of the last bulwarks still in the hands of the patriots has been taken by the army of German mercenaries at the service of the English. Five hundred patriots have been executed. At that point, with a decision that was anything but rational and that will go down in history, George Washington re-crosses the river and attacks Trenton on Christmas Day. The conquest took just one hour and was done without the use of guns as they were without ammunitions. It is the beginning of what then be called ‘Christmas Campaign’ that overturned the destiny of the war until the Victory of Yorktown and the birth of the United States of America.

Before any solution comes our change

Who knows how to produce intentionally in himself the smallest rise in his being can move mountains and projects himself like a giant in the external world.

Intervening on our being, on the quality of our thoughts, our ways of feeling, to circumscribe negative emotions- starving some while nourishing others, not only do we modify our aptitude and therefore our way of reacting to the events that come from the external world, but it is also changes the very nature of events that follow one the other, day after day.

Only a man capable of betting everything on himself, only a man that ‘wants’, that asks and tries to change with all his forces, can make it. And even if to the eyes of ordinary humanity he appears to be a daredevil, a person that lives riskily or even as a hell-bent, a man guided by integrity and seriousness is constantly accompanied by this ‘sense of salvation. Only he knows that in reality is not risking anything. In business, as in any undertakings that appear as reckless, he who has this certainty cannot be attacked, cannot fail. Whatever he touches grows richer and multiplies; under any circumstance, even the most desperate, he always finds a solution. He is always successful because he himself is the solution.

To Decide

The very etymology of the word ‘decide’ has something mysterious to it. If we take the root, caedere, to fall down, to be knocked down, or if instead prevails the element cida, which means to eliminate, whichever the case, we hear in it a terrible warning. That human feature which we proudly consider our noblest ability, indissolubly tied to our free will, in reality hides our fall, our ruin. One of the most diffused prejudices, and in truth the architrave on which the common description of the world lies on, is that there are objective decisions that any of us could take provided we had all the necessary information and all the decision-making techniques to assess, read and weigh them out.  In truth, the most extraordinary thing to discover about decisions and decision-making processes is that good decisions, objective and valid in absolute, do not exist.

Solutions are as good as the individual that takes them.

America would not be here and it would have been impossible even to imagine its existence for centuries if the certainty in the greatest and most wonderful of all miscalculations did not support Christopher Columbus who until his death remained convinced that he had discovered the route to the Indies. The American Indians still carry the legacy of this erroneous certainty registered forever in their names.

In the world of events, in the realm of opposites, you cannot encounter solutions. Solutions are not on the same plane of the problems.

Solutions come from above and not in time! We have to know how to enter into the world of solutions. When you rise your being all that looked blurry becomes clear and the apparent problems that seemed  unconquerable mountains reveal themselves to be nothing more than light protrusions, humps on which to step on and go further.

Change Your Dream first, Reality Will Follow

For millennia, nothing has happened. The planetary problems from poverty to crime, from conflicts to war are the same as always, now in the Digital Era as in the Stone Age. Yet we delude ourselves that we are in fact improving.

‘To improve’ is the password for those who want to leave everything as it is, who indulge in a way of thinking that is obsolete and deprived of vitality. Believing that the world can be improved from the outside is the conviction of an fideistic, old humanity that does not have the strength to face the evil at its root. We need a revolution of our way of thinking. An overturn. In order to change reality we need to change the dream. Only the individual can accomplish this. Time bends and so does man; and all the civilizations he has created bend and break down with a cyclical procession that always brings them to the starting point of their past whilst they have the illusion that they are going towards the future.

The solution, in the life of a man as in the history of a civilization, is never in time but in a ‘vertical time’, in a time without time, in the raising of the quality of thinking that can only happen in this instant.

Only being able to manage the hanging instant between nothingness and eternity will humanity be able to mould its destiny, create events of a superior order.

The Greeks dreamed cities where architecture, theatre, music, sport, everything was at the service of being, of its elevation towards the world of ideas, of solutions. Especially in the classic time of Greek civilization, always with the aim of entering areas of greater freedom where the individual is the solution, invented universities, created Schools of thought around a teacher. Not by chance, these schools were located in enchanting places chosen for the magic of their legendary history, near rivers and sources of water. The Academy was near the Cefis river, the Lyceum, east of Athens, was where the waters of Eridanus touched it lightly and Cinosarge, where the cinic Antistene taught , was created near the Illisso river, south of Athens. Water not only symbolized life and knowledge but it was used for ablutions. In these schools, the culture of the body and spirit were the two inseparable faces of the same reality. If we would know how to give centrality to man, how to put him back to the top of any priority, at the centre of attention, we could start healing humanity, individual by individual, one by one, cell by cell.

ESE is only the emerging, visible top of the iceberg, an example that we can make it, that we accomplish this task. Classic culture, the search for truth, self-knowledge can and must live in contemporary with modernity, with internationality, with pragmatism that the new challenges ask for, in politics as in economics, to the young governing class, to the decision-makers of the future. Our culture must re-establish education, re-create schools and universities of being. We have to return to our roots, we must go back to that wisdom, that love for beauty and for truth  and for that knowledge of oneself which is the solution.

‘We have regressed from the wonderful project of the Academy and the Plato’s dream. The universities of the future will do what they do not currently do: teach the art of ‘self-discovery’.

Every student is a light that is waiting to be turned on in order to disperse obscurity- said Ben Okrri, a Nigerian poet and writer, ex alumnus of Cambridge, concluding an historical conference organized in London by ‘The Times’ by the title: What are universities for?

From the School for Gods by Stefano E D’Anna

Become the solution…inside! - commanded the Dreamer - Outside this there is no problem to fix, nor is there any villain to defend from or any enemy to fight. To give an answer to the world you have to become the solution… Enter in sincerity, simplicity, lightness of your being…. If you are able to see the ‘game’ from the top you will discover that for an man of integrity the solution always comes before the problem.

When you meet difficult situations rub your hands and rejoice because it is the very reason why you are here for. When you see a problem coming down the road, say to yourself: I was waiting for you. I have been training for you all my life.

We must realize that all man have in themselves all the power to turn things around.

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