Project Vision 21

Recently, an organization asked for my help with a community project that involved conducting a certain number of interviews with a group that had no prior contact with the organization. I implemented my strategy, and within a few hours, I surpassed the minimum number of interviews they had requested. That’s when the problems began.

The conclusion reached by the leaders who hired me was that I must have cheated or committed some kind of fraud or deception because, as they told me, "there was no way" to achieve the result I had, given that they had tried themselves and couldn’t get a single response.

Naturally, they had no interest in hearing about my decades of experience in community work, my background in the humanities—including education and languages—or my work on community outreach projects in various countries. The only thing that concerned them was that if they couldn’t do it and I could, then I must be doing something wrong.

Another example: Someone called me, having been referred by someone else, saying they urgently needed my translation services. Since it was a short document, I completed the translation and sent it over. A week later, the same person called again to ask when I would be sending the text. I told them I had already sent it a week ago and resent it to them.

A few days later, I received another call—this time to inform me that they wouldn’t be paying me because, after back-translating from Spanish to English using an automatic translator (since they didn’t speak Spanish), the result didn’t match the original text they had sent me. There was no way to explain to them that translation is not about swapping words from one language to another.

These are examples of people who, due to their arrogance and lack of intellectual humility, believe that if they don’t know something or can’t do something, then no one else can either—or if someone else manages to do it, they must be cheating or don’t really know what they’re doing. Arrogant ignorance is one of the great ills of our time, though it is by no means new.

The ancient myth of Procrustes teaches us that there have always been people unable to tolerate any divergence from what they considered "normal," seeing themselves as the "measure of all things." I wonder how much more damage Procrustes would have caused if he had had access to social media.

We might also think of the unfortunate prisoners in Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, who believed that the reality within their reach was the entirety of reality.

Or consider the case (recounted by Dr. Otto Scharmer) of U.S. automotive executives who visited automated car factories in Japan and thought they were being deceived because there was no noise, no people, and no inventory in those factories.

As theologian and philosopher Arturo Bravo Retamal aptly said, every Procrustes is "the antithesis of dialogue."