One of the chapters in my first published novel was called “paradigmatic paradoxes.” In that chapter there were many examples of paradigms that seemed to operate in reverse, deliberately disguising truths they paradoxically revealed. What appeared unnatural was actually natural. What action might be termed predictable proved not so. My protagonist could no longer be the person others defined, nor act as prescribed by others. The paradigms that had previously governed him were disrupted by a new found reality. Today, we need to disrupt a few paradigms, else lose our moral focus and perhaps our future.

Both paradigms and paradoxes place something before us (from the Greek prefix, para, “before”). A paradigm simply displays or shows us a pattern, form, perhaps a model or archetype (from the Greek, deiknynai, “to show”). A paradox, on the other hand, has a subtle undercurrent of meaning that must be derived: it forces us to think (from the Greek, dokein, “to think”). My combination of these two words is in fact a paradox: my way of saying that appearances can be deceiving. For example, here are a few examples of contemporary paradigms that can also function as paradoxes for those brave enough to think through their implications:

• In the current political climate, it is common to hear the Reaganesque claim that “government is the problem.” This is the paradigm advocated by many politicians. The paradox here is the fact that our government was founded as a rebuttal to this mantra. A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” must be self-governing and be led by duly elected representatives of the people who reflect their will and serve their general welfare. Reagan understood his role as an elected representative tasked to reform government in the interest of the electorate. It is doubtful that he intended his tax and regulative reform efforts to become an anti-government paradigm. Today, it has become that paradigm. Accordingly, the American government is characterized as intrusive of our privacy, as restrictive of our rights, and as regulative of our liberties. But if we accept the paradigm, then we must admit our failure to preserve the government bequeathed to us by our founding fathers. In more blunt terms, we are no longer self-governing. If the paradigm accurately reflects the current status of our government, then we are slipping into the moneyed oligarchy that Hamilton feared and that we already may be living. Realization of this underlying paradox could be the impetus to vote for systemic change in the upcoming elections (see “American Revolution 2016”).

• With respect to science and technology, we often hear that “global warming is a hoax.” This is the paradigm advocated by those who want to preserve the hydrocarbon energy system that currently fuels the advanced economies of the world. Because paradigms are prescribed ways of seeing the world, they can be hard to dislodge. In fact, disrupting a paradigm is very uncomfortable, for it forces a new way of seeing and, perhaps, of living. Climate change deniers resist this disruption with many arguments, none of which admit to clear reasoning. The House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space and Technology, for example, believes in the paradigm. Its representatives have argued that global warming has been disproved by comments in the public press, that scientific journals debunking this hoax are not believable because they are published purely for financial gain, that scientists who ignore the irreversible impact of earth’s wobble offer no justification for the massive lifestyle changes they advocate, that it has never been established at what level rising CO2 levels present a direct hazard to humans, that the melting of floating icebergs cannot raise sea levels, and that promotion of climate change is an appalling scare tactic. (If you find these positions unbelievable, check the congressional record.) Actually, the scientific literature is clear on all of these points. CO2 levels have risen sharply over the last hundred years, and not as a result of the earth’s wobble that spans tens of thousands of years. Rising CO2 levels are not an immediate health hazard to humans, but their effect on climate change will be. A rising sea level occurs when glaciers melt on land and empty into the sea, not when seasonal changes alternately freeze and unfreeze Artic/Antarctic seas. But rational attempts to disrupt this “hoax” paradigm cannot succeed against sophistry and emotional recoil. The latter protects believers in this paradigm from their fear of a reality that would change their lives. The paradigm is protection against the paradox.

There are many paradigms lurking in our social consciousness and impinging on our personal reality. They are the mental models formed by our experience, too often reflective of our conditioning and our fears. But Americans have built a nation that has disrupted some seemingly ironclad paradigms of the past. We no longer count slaves as fractional humans, as we once did in our Constitution. We no longer consider marriage between different races unnatural or even illegal. In fact, we now even recognize same sex marriages. These paradigms were disrupted because we grew to recognize the underlying paradoxes: the nobility of every human being and the sanctity of love.

Paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out years ago, often emerge as a result of crisis when old paradigms are proven unreliable. Before we face crisis, however, we can admit the paradoxes in the two paradigms I have enumerated here. Neither belief in nor support for the anti-government or anti-climate change paradigms will result in better government or a better planetary environment—which is why these paradigms are paradoxical. In truth, these paradigms harbor prophetic portents for the American republic and the human race. They jeopardize both.