Welcome to everyone who has found their way here from the Tempo blog.  To regular subscribers who received an unfinished draft in their email or rss feed, my apologies.  [One of the downsides of automation is that it magnifies small mistakes...one misplaced click and an updated draft is instantly published, tweeted, rss'd, and so on.]

The completed draft is now a guest post that can be found here: The Cloistered Hedgehog and The Dislocated Fox.

The hedgehog and the fox archetypes were popularized by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of the same name:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

One interesting aspect of these archetypes that I only briefly touched on in the guest post is the desire to transcend (or escape) them…to break out of the personas that have been established through countless encounters between constitution and environment.  The grass is always greener.  Yet when we attempt to do so we undermine ourselves by smuggling in essential elements of our comfort zone.

For the hedgehog that comfort zone is a certain performance regime entailing known rules of the game.  For the fox that comfort zone is the exploration of novel domains for what we might call universal strategies, or colloquially – wisdom.

The trouble is that real change is necessarily preceded by disequilibrium.  But psychological disequilibrium is painful…I believe intrinsically so.  To be clear, I don’t mean pain in the sense of fetishized pain that is coupled with pleasure…your workout may be painful and the demands of your job may be painful, but that is the kind of stress with which we grow comfortable, and which is easily fetishized into pleasure.

I mean real unequivocal psychological Pain.  I mean suffering.  Real change requires suffering.

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Though it might seem like the fox seeks out disequilibrium, it would be more accurate to say that - by adapting existing mental models to multiple domains - the fox actually constructs a stable equilibrium.  Eventually the fox develops a nose for those domains likely to yield to a particular brand of wisdom.  Environments that won’t yield, and that do in fact provoke disequilibrium – for example hedgehog environments that demand deep credulity – are avoided by foxes at all costs.

The analogous behavior for the hedgehog can be found in moments of crisis: mid-life crises, existential crises, crises of faith, and so on.  The common theme is the swapping of one central vision for another.  The stereotypical over-achiever who has a mid-life crisis goes out and buys a sports car.  He doesn’t skeptically contemplate his most fundamental assumptions…refusing to jump to conclusions and thereby leaving himself groundless.  Instead he goes all in on whatever shiny object first enters his awareness offering an alternative set of values.

***

Both types try to sneak in the backdoor, hoping to achieve change while subtly doubling down on existing foundations.  The fox – intent on discovering the commonalities underlying his explorations – responds by exploring all the more voraciously.  Berlin writes:

Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equalled, but he believed only in one vast, unitary whole.

The fox pursues that “unitary whole” by attempting to perceive multiplicity with ever more clarity.

Conversely, the hedgehog’s central vision becomes increasingly convoluted (we might even say multiplicitous) as it attempts to account for an accumulating mountain of exceptions and contradictions.

In a sense both do imitate the other, though not in the way they intend.

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To truly break out we need the help of an inescapable commitment.  Such commitments can take many forms: a coach, an institution, a new environment.  The only minimal requirements are that:

• the commitment once made cannot be renegotiated
• the consequences of failure outweigh the pain of disequilibrium

Real change is almost always forced, and for good reason, but I’ll leave that until next time…