# 2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises Another of J. Forrester's famous system sayings goes: It doesn't matter how the tax law in a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of society about what a "**fair**" distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the **rules** say, by fair means, or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions, or deductions, but constant snipping at the rules, actual tax payments will push right up to, and against the accepted idea of "fairness".
The **shared idea** in the minds of society, the great big, unstated assumptions – unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them – constitute that societies's paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.
There is a difference between nouns and verbs. Money measures something real, and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is a good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of _Homo sapiens_. One can "own" land. Those are just **a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture**, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
**Paradigms are the sources of systems.** From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems. No one has ever said that better than Ralph Waldo Emerson:
_Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to...their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man's mind, clothes itself with societies houses, cities, language, ceremonies newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day... see how lumber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons...It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas... would cause the most striking changes of external things._
The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they **believed in**an afterlife. We build skyscrapers because we **believe that** space in downtown cites is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe. or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam. Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, **people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.**
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system. and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there's nothing necessarily physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. **In a single individual** it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, **a new way of seeing**. Whole societies are another matter. They resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else. **Societal responses to paradigm challenge have included crucifixions, burnings at the stake, concentration camps, and nuclear arsenals.**
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science has a lot to say about that." In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with reactionaries; rather you **work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded**.
Systems folks would say **you change paradigms by modeling** a system on a computer, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.