In Order To See The Light, Think Dark

Recently Peggy Noonan entitled her weekly column in the Wall Street Journal, “Think Dark.” If it’s still up, you can find it here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/ .

Noonan is writing about the Pentagon/commission plan to close military bases which the president and Congress will review in November, and which she wants them to reject. She wants them to “think dark” which “takes imagination—and something more,” “When you think dark,” she says, “you’re often and inescapably thinking with your gut, a vulgar way of referring to a certainty that lives somewhere between your spirit, soul and intellect. Your gut knows things your brain can’t assert as fact because they’re not facts, not yet.”

Gut feeling (or instinct) is another term for intuition, a way of knowing without knowing how you know, and it’s often the only way we can make some of the hardest decisions we face. Presidents, lovers, leaders, mothers, military geniuses, and you and I use this all the time when the data runs out, and it always does.

How do you know what to say to your wife when she’s about to leave you, or the best way to get your daughter off drugs, of what stock to invest in? How do you know whether to choose chemo, radiation or surgery, what will sway the jury, who to marry, or which house to buy? How do you know what to say to a relative who’s suicidal, or how to convince the interviewer you’re the best on for the job?

All these decisions require using intuition. With time pressure, limited and inconclusive data, conflicting advice, and high stakes, our intellect is not of much use. Noonan confesses she can’t back up her opinion with data. “It can take guts,” she writes, “to listen to your gut.”

Colin Powell, by the way, is an intj on the Keirsey – introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging. If you read his leadership principals, you get glimpses of this sort of thinking.

Some of our intuition is based on depth of experience, individual, or borrowed from the collective. Noonan lists some of the things we “know as adults living in the world”:

· That if something can go wrong, it will, (Murphy)
· To expect the unexpected. (Harrison Salisbury, journalist and historian)
· That “there’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word” and does something disastrous (JFK)

What we know, those of us who’ve been around the block a few times, is that we live in a world we can’t control with people we can’t predict, so there’s a limit to what rational analysis can accomplish. As Eisenhower said, Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you ust start with this one thing: the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected; therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.” (speech to National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, 1957)

We are rational, but we are also emotional and in any contest, the emotional will win because it has to do with survival. Therefore people do irrational things, things we couldn’t eve imagine, much less predict. And so do systems, like economies, the weather, and the stock market; and so do people in groups, like voters, and nations, and armies.

“What do you think will happen,” a newspaper columnist asked me in recent interview, “if employers allow employees to wear shorts to work?” I couldn’t possibly predict

something like that. Could you? Imagining the unimaginable, I thought A worst-case scenario could be a woman coming in wearing ONLY shorts, but my gut feeling is that reality will outdo fiction, it always does, and the manager had better be prepared to … think darkly … and have a good bit of EQ.

“Gut feeling” by the way, may be vulgar (not the clinical term), but it is not an accidental term. Our “guts” (intestines) and the brain in our head originate from the same embryonic tissue which eventually separates into two nervous systems connected by the vagus nerve.

The longest of the cranial nerves, and arguably the single most important nerve in the body, the vagus nerve runs from the brain stem down to the intestines. Therefore many of the same neurotransmitters, hormones and chemicals exist in both systems and that’s not where the similarity ends. Our brains and guts have similar 90-minute cycles when idle (See research of David Wingate, U. of London). Emotions and the medicines we use to modulate them effect both systems simultaneously, thus all the familiar GI side-effects that go with anti-depressants, and the butterflies we get in our stomachs, and the sudden cases of diarrhea when we have to give a speech; and anger has been shown to kill off “friendly” bacteria in the GI tract. This is why the gut has been called “the second brain”. (See by Michael Geron, M. D.’s book by the same name)

When we only think rationally, and not darkly, when we think the data leads to a logical conclusion, or that 1 and 1 always adds up to 2, we are always surprised. Here are some of the things adults living in this world didn’t know, didn’t anticipate:

· “The price of oil wasn’t supposed to go down,” Gar. H., bankrupted in the 80’s oil decline.
· “There’s no logical reason why she should have left me. It doesn’t make sense,” John A. who thought his wife was happy.
· “He blind-sided me. He bought a red Porsche and ran off with a woman half his age. He’s the last person in the world you would expect to have a mid-life crisis. He’s an accountant for Christ’ sake.” Rhonda H. whose rational husband acted irrationally.
· “How could he give me an outstanding performance review one week and fire me the next?” Becky L. who was asked to give her resignation “out of the blue.”
· “I never once suspected my son of doing drugs. He was a straight-A student, a star on the soccer team, and president of his class.” Annette P. whose son died of an accidental overdose.
· “I didn’t know a man could talk and act that way and not mean a word of it. I guess I was naïve.” Alice T. whose boyfriend wrote her a Dear-John she never saw coming.

What we can predict, we can control. Could these things have been prevented by “thinking dark,” by “imagining the unimagineable”?

You would have to use your intuition on that one, too.

Written by: Susan Dunn