Imagine two people playing ping-pong in front of an audience. They ask the audience to keep score.
The first serve leads to a long volley, back and forth between the players. Then player one misses the ball.
Then in the second volley player two misses the ball.
Then in the third volley player two misses again.
They stop the game.
What’s the score? And who won?
The audience says the score is two to one. Player one wins.
But the players disagree. They ask a judge, who had been standing at the sideline, to tell them the score.
The judge simply says, “fourteen.”
And the judge is right.
Seems senseless, doesn’t it?
It turns out the audience misunderstood the game. They thought they were watching traditional ping-pong. But it was “high-volley” ping-pong, where players score the times they hit the ball back and forth without a drop. The first volley was fourteen shots back and forth. It was the longest of the three. The second was ten shots. The third, seven.
Same ping-pong table. Same paddles. Same motions. But a different game.
And different behaviors. In high-volley, slamming the ball is stupid. But in traditional ping-pong, it is expected. In high-volley, it’s bad when the other misses. But in traditional ping-pong, it’s good.
The way we define reality, choose goals, keep score, and behave all depend on the type of game we’re playing.
Not just for literal games. But the game of life too. The way we think and act is very much a result of the way we see the world. Our frame of reference, our way of interpreting the world, affects the way we “play the game.” When the way we see the world changes, everything changes.
And when two groups of people see the world in different ways it creates a fundamental confusion and conflict. If they don’t see how they’re starting from different frames of reference, they’ll never resolve their differences.
In the ping-pong match, the audience saw the game one way. And the players, another. They brought different ways of interpreting, different frames of reference, and different standards for evaluating the game to the game itself. In this sense, the players and the audience approached the game with different paradigms. A paradigm is a frame of reference, a way of seeing, a model by which we interpret reality. And when the paradigms are different, things that make perfect sense to one group are completely senseless to another.
Point is, the game change (the paradigm shift) changes all the thoughts about what should be and what is.
It changes the behaviors as well. Whenever we think someone’s behavior seems senseless, it often isn’t senseless at all. It makes perfect sense for the criminal to commit the “senseless crime,” when we understand their starting point. But when we don’t share their starting frame of reference, it doesn’t make sense at all. The choices of a North Korean dictator, the policies of an opposing political party, the thinking of the opposite gender, often seem senseless because we view the world in a different way.
This doesn’t absolve anyone of moral obligations, of course. But it does tell us how important it is to seek understanding. We can make sense of so many seemingly senseless things when we first understand each others’ paradigms.