Facts Can Tell You What To Do

Facts Can Tell You What To Do

  • L. Michael Hall, Ph.D - 20 August 2024

From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #78
December 6, 2021
Facts #8

FACTS CAN TELL YOU WHAT TO DO
The Transition from Is to Ought

First, the is.  What exists—where, when, and in what way.  What we can assert as a true and valid statement about the data we discover in the world. Normally facts point to grounded sensory-based information.  Yet Maslow also noted that they also point in a direction, i.e., they are vectorial.

“Fact just don’t lie there like pancakes, just doing nothing; they are to a certain extent signposts which tell you want to do, which make suggestions to you, which nudge you in one direction rather than other.  They ‘call for,’ they have demand character, they even have ‘requiredness’ as Kohler [co-founder of Gestalt] called it.” (Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971, p. 26, italics added)

The discovery of facts, truth, and reality depends on what is, that is, on what exists.  When you know what is, often you then know what to do.  In fact, Maslow suggested that the facts, the is,  can tell you want to do.  He illustrated by referring to carving a turnkey. 

“Carving a turkey is made easier by the knowledge of where the joints are, how to handle the knife and fork —that is, by possessing fully knowledge of the facts of the situation.  If the facts are fully known, they will guide us and tell us what to do.  But what is also implied here is that the facts are very soft-spoken and that it is difficult to perceive them.  In order to be able to hear the fact-voices, it is necessary to be very quiet, to listen very receptively. ... If we wish to permit the facts to tell us their oughtness, we must learn to listen to them in a very specific way...” (Ibid., p. 120)

Now “to listen very receptively,” in NLP terms, is “losing the mind and coming to one’s senses.” It is coming into an uptime state (rather than down inside oneself) and into sensory awareness.  Then you can more cleanly see and hear reality for it is rather than for what you wish it to be.  As Maslow was modeling fully functioning people, he noted that the self-actualizing person is “a good perceiver of reality and truth” and has a “clear perception of facts” because he accepts reality for what it is.  He places no demands on reality.  This enables her to see what is the case and to end up be superior in perception of reality and in the ability to reason.

Who were these self-actualizing people that Maslow modeled?  Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Plato, Spinoza, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc. These were people who listened deeply to facts and allowed the facts to tell them what to do.

Fact: Math, science, even reading scores have been going down for decades.

Ought: We ought to refocus on teaching the basics of how to think and how to learn and stop the “woke” policies of political correctness.

Fact: In the most gun-restrictive city in the United States, Chicago where there are no gun shops— none.  Deaths by guns are the highest and 90% plus of all deaths of young black men are caused by other black men.  What can we conclude from these facts?  From these facts we can conclude that the problem is not the guns, it is the people wielding the guns. Ought: We ought to focus on creating better homes and schools that promote higher morals and a sense of responsibility, and promote more respect for law and order.

Maslow concluded that who you are, in terms of your personal development and actualization of your highest potentials, affects your ability to process information and to clearly see and listen to the facts.  That’s because it is human to project the constructions we have built in the inside world onto the outside world.

Many people today separate facts and values and treat them as if they not only are different, but incompatible.  They are different, but are they truly incompatible?  Where we have facts, does that not imply that we should treat factual statements as fundamental in our search for truth?  That we should speak the truth?  Here we transition from the is to the ought.  Here facts tell us what to do.

A different picture of reality comes into view when “the is reveals an ought.”  Maslow believed that by studying superior individuals, self-actualizing people who were fully functioning, he could find a common set of values which would enable this higher level of development.  In that way, he sought to identify right and wrong behavior, good and bad behaviors.  A characteristic of self-actualizing people is their low degree of self-conflict.  “He is not at war with himself; his personality is integrated.”  And that’s what makes his perceptions clearer and cleaner.

The Author
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D