“The elephant in the room” is a metaphorical idiom that can be traced back to an early 19th century fable by a Russian poet. It is invoked in situations where attention is being diverted from something that is or should be glaringly obvious because it would be too uncomfortable, embarrassing, dangerous, or difficult to address it head on. It is a favorite of addiction counselors and family therapists. It also frequently finds its way into political rhetoric, as a tool for intimating that “the real issue” is being ignored.
I want to borrow this particular room-inhabiting elephant for a moment, but I want to squeeze him into a slightly altered form in order to use him as an allegory for our current political circumstances.
Imagine a room that is occupied by an elephant, but everyone in this room openly acknowledges the elephant’s presence. Imagine further that the people in the room are desperately trying to limit the elephant’s ability to damage the room’s furnishings but everyone has a different idea about how to handle the situation; no one can agree on what needs to be done to keep the elephant calm, where in the room it should be standing, which direction its trunk should be pointing, how each of its feet should be positioned, what to do about the rapidly accumulating volume of elephant dung, etc.
As with the original Russian fable version, this altered version is also meant to convey the underlying moral that something obvious is being ignored. And, as with the original, the obvious thing has something to do with the elephant. But in this case, the reason the obvious thing is being ignored has nothing to do with avoiding discomfort or embarrassment or danger or difficulty. Instead, the real issue is being ignored because the way the problem has been framed renders it invisible. The real issue is not apparent to the people in the room because they have identified the problem as the need to limit the elephant’s destructive potential, they have framed the problem in terms of the question: “How do we best control the elephant?” rather than in terms of the most glaringly obvious question: Why the hell is there an elephant in this room?
In part 1, I suggested that a common cognitive bias might help explain some of the differences between folks on the extreme left and the extreme right regions of the political spectrum. Specifically, folks on the far right tend to make internal attributions when rationalizing their policy agenda, and those on the far left are more likely to frame things in terms of external, situational factors. The right sees individuals as ultimately responsible for their good or bad fortune in life: poverty is a sign of personal failing; wealth is a sign of personal merit. The left, on the other hand (the left hand?) is more sensitive to the influence of external, contextual forces: poverty comes from lack of education and opportunity, and is exacerbated by systemic racism and an economic system designed to increase income disparity—a system that actually requires income disparity in order to function properly, a system that intentionally leverages the desperation that attends the threat of poverty.
I went on to say that, because of the focus placed on the role of systemic forces, I see the “radical” left as the lesser of evils, and then went on to clarify that the left reflects the lesser of evils, but is still very much an evil. And I ended with: “The truth is that everyone on both the far left and far right—and all points in between—is making a fundamental and critical mistake in their judgment of things.” Here I want to suggest that the fundamental and critical mistake in judgement is a result of how the problem is being framed. As with the people in my altered elephant-in-the-room account, the real issue is being ignored by everyone on both the left and right and all points in between because the problem is being framed in a way that obviates the asking of the most glaringly obvious question.
Before I go on, let me quickly address my use of the singular problem in the above sentence. Despite an expanding number of specific issues and concerns, there is really only one main problem that is being addressed: the system needs to change.[1] Everyone differs in terms of which particular parts of the system they think need to change, and in which specific direction, and by how much. But the problem—the only problem—is with the current state of the system. Poverty, climate change, pandemic response, healthcare, most if not all mainstream political policy disagreements ultimately come down to whether or how or which direction or to what degree the system needs to be changed. Once the problem has been framed in this way, all proposed solutions will naturally involve making—or not making or reversing—changes, tweaks, alterations, and adjustments to the system.
The system, of course, is the elephant in my allegory. And despite all the massive damage and destruction and pain and suffering it is causing, everyone continues to act as if its presence in the room is a natural thing, as if it belongs in the room. Everyone on all sides of every debate wants the system to be different than it is, but they all fully embrace the system itself as a necessary feature of human social life. The idea that there needs to be a system to begin with is never questioned. It is, in fact, unquestionable.
“Why the hell does there need to be a system in the first place?” should be the most glaringly obvious question. And the fact that humans have existed as a species for a long, long time before their lives were made systematic, the fact that people flourished for hundreds of thousands of years in the complete absence of a system of any kind, provides pretty clear evidence that a system isn’t an essential feature of human life.
Yes, there are all kinds of problems with our current system. But none of these problems are the real issue. The real issue isn’t with the nature of the system, with the details about how it is currently structured or organized or with how its operative rules are or are not being applied in any specific situation. The real issue is that our lives are being structured according to the operative rules of a system. Our very thoughts have been systematized—and even our emotional responses are being structured according to systematic patterns.
We need to flush the system out of our hearts and minds. But before we can do that, we need to acknowledge that the real issue is the system itself. The real issue is that we are daily (hourly, every second) obliged to superimpose a mechanical, systematic overlay atop all of our organically human activity, framing our experience of the world in terms of civilization’s mechanistic thought-forms. Until we acknowledge this particularly gargantuan elephant in the room, any revolt against the current system is doomed to fail.
Consider what Robert Pirsig had to say about this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government […] because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself […], and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government,[2] but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
It isn’t a matter of deciding whether internal motives or situational influences are more or less important. They both emerge from within a systematize way of living that is rapidly destroying the living planet. Instead of arguing about how best to fix the system, we need to stop living in systematic ways and reembrace organic and authentically human modes of life.
[1] By “system” I mean the collection of laws and policies and procedures and technologies and bureaucratically organized conduits of power that control and structure and direct and otherwise impact the activity of people.
[2] “Systematic government” is redundant.
