Last week I was jetting around the US drumming up some business. For part of my stay I was down near Norfolk in Virginia, not far from Virginia Tech which has been in the news following the terrible shootings. Clearly many people there are hurt and upset at the event, and some people I met had either attended the school or had children there, so it was a tough time for everyone, including the poor Englishman looking for business at that particular time. My heart goes out to a nation of kind people affected by the tragedy.
Staying in hotels as I was, I found the debates on television about the situation and what to do about it fascinating. Strangely, most of the ideas involved providing better defence against such events occurring in the future - better armed guards, arming teachers etc etc, were serious suggestions on major TV stations. It seemed to me that there was a much simpler one:
Ban guns
This is of course easy for me to say - I live in a society where it is supposedly very hard to obtain firearms. That’s not to say that we don’t have problems with guns - of course we do, but our incident rate is considerably lower even when pro-rated by population and I would like to believe that this is mostly attributable to our culture and the greater difficulty in obtaining firearms.
And I did speak to people about this whilst I was over there, and I got an almost unanimous reply.
“You can’t ban guns - it’s part of the Constitution - the right to bear arms”
And then it dawned on me - this right to bear arms is buried so deep down in the foundations of their society that they can’t consider it as a possibility.
Argyris called this “single loop learning” - the ability to only improve what you currently do within current belief paradigms. We all do it about many things in our own lives, however to make quantum or changes, we need the conviction and perspective to question our beliefs and values when something clearly isn’t working. Deleting or shifting a belief or value opens up new possibilities and opportunities that were previously closed to us.
I admit that this is a tough thing for people to do, let alone societies, and in most people it requires some life-changing event or trauma to cause you to re-evaluate your fundamental beliefs and values, and as crazy as it seems, perhaps even this terrible event isn’t enough to have the nation question one of its founding rules. Unfortunately I am scared of what sort of event will have to occur for the straw to break the camel’s back.
That doesn’t mean that individuals need to wait for trauma to change their lives. The first step in breaking limiting beliefs is coming to an understanding that all beliefs are inherently limiting, and then considering which ones are having the greatest impact right now on who you want to be.
