Signals

He was in his eighties. Chairman of several companies, extremely successful by any standard, sharp, deeply knowledgeable and still surprisingly engaged. Perhaps not to the extent he was twenty years before, but still. He was a man who had built and bought companies and managed them and understood the levers of power with the ease of long familiarity. I had been brought in to work with him on something unrelated, and it took me longer than it should have to understand what was actually happening.

It turned out he watched pornography with the same intensity he allocated to his business. The only difference being that his attention span was shorter regarding the former and once he lost interest, he walked away and often left it playing on his laptop or desktop in the office, at home; wherever he was in fact. Staff would walk in and find it running on large monitors on his desk. He seemed, genuinely, not to notice. Or not register that others noticed. Or, he simply didn't care. It was so rampant however, it became a serious issue in the office. I watched this for a while before I began to understand what I was looking at.

Firstly, this was not a man simply indulging a vice. At the risk of being overly apologist about it, this was a man sending a signal he could not send any other way. I was looking at a man approaching his natural end, expressing a loss he had no other language for. What had once been a central and vital part of his life was no longer available to him, except in this ersatz, flickering form. I do not think he was watching pornography. I think he was mourning something. And the signal was so clear, so insistent, so visible to everyone around him, that it had become invisible to him entirely.

I found it, and still find it, poignant. A man of that accomplishment, that intelligence and capacity for manifesting, that accumulated understanding of the world, unable to read the most direct message his own life was sending him.

It stayed with me. Not as a cautionary tale, but as a question. How much of what surrounds us, what moves through us and around us and between us, are we simply not receiving? Not because the signal is faint. But because we have not developed, or have lost, or have never bothered to build, the capacity to receive it.

We see only what we know how to see.

This is not a figure of speech. Stand in front of a Greek temple and you will see columns. If you know the difference between a Doric column and an Ionic column, you will see something specific, more layered, more connected to a tradition and an intention and a set of structural decisions made by people long dead. The column has not changed. What you bring to it has. Awareness is not simply attention. It is vocabulary. It is the accumulated framework through which raw experience becomes legible.

Most of us are walking through an extraordinarily rich signaling environment with a very limited vocabulary for receiving it. The body is transmitting continuously. Relationships are communicating constantly. Organizations are generating information at every level, most of it never reaching the people who need it. The world, in the broadest sense, is speaking in a language whose full complexity we have barely begun to learn.

What we receive is a fraction. And of that fraction, we filter further, retaining what confirms the story we already hold about ourselves and the world, and discarding, or simply not registering, what challenges it. We are not bad receivers. We are selective ones. And the selectivity is not random. It serves us. It protects what we need to protect.

Werner Erhard, whose work on self-knowledge and accountability has been more influential than is fashionable to acknowledge these days, had a particular insistence on naming things directly. Not interpreting, or contextualizing, not softening, but looking at what is there and calling it what it is. The gap between that practice and our habitual way of processing experience is, I think, where most of the important things get lost.

Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman, whose Voice Dialogue work I have spent years with, offered a different but complementary insight: that the filtering is not weakness. It is protection. The parts of us that manage what we allow ourselves to see, are doing a job they were developed to do, and they do it with extraordinary efficiency. The question is not how to override them, but how to integrate alongside them the capacity to see what they are screening out. Not to eliminate the protection, but to understand what it is protecting, and at what cost.

Two different relationships to the same phenomenon. Erhard confronts it. Stone and Winkelman work with it. Together they give a much richer account of why we receive so selectively than either does alone. None of it needs to be stated more explicitly than that. The reader who knows the work will feel the tension between them. The reader who does not will simply sense that the question is being approached from more than one direction, which is, in itself, the right experience.

As you sit and read this, your body is in motion.

Signals are being sent between cells, across systems, from one part of you to another. You are not aware of them. You do not need to be. Over the next few minutes, tens of thousands of these signals will pass quietly through your body. By the end of the day, there will have been billions.

Most will arrive exactly where they are needed. Some will not. A receptor may fail. A signal may be weakened, delayed, or misread. When that happens, other signals follow.

Adjustments are made. Compensations begin. Long before anything is felt, the body has already noticed.

This is how complex systems maintain themselves, not through constant intervention, but through continuous signaling, adjustment, evaluation and response. And most system failure does not begin with collapse. It begins with distortion. Signals that once moved cleanly begin to arrive late. Information that was once clear becomes ambiguous. The system continues to function, often for a long time, but it is no longer operating with the same precision.

This is also the real message of aging. A muscle tightens after exertion. Something has been stressed, repair is required. Left alone, the body responds, blood flow increases, tissue rebuilds, strength returns. But the signal can be overridden. Pain might be reduced with medication. The symptom is suppressed, activity continues, the underlying strain remains. The message was sent, but wasn't acted on.

Or something more subtle. A growing fatigue at the end of the day. Recovery that takes slightly longer than it once did. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that demands attention. And so it is ignored. But these, too, are signals. Not of failure, but of change. The system is adjusting. Or trying to. And whether that adjustment succeeds depends entirely on whether the signal is recognized, or dismissed.

As we age, this becomes more rather than less important. Hormonal messages that once drove repair become less pronounced. Cellular responses that initiate recovery are slower. The body requires stronger, more consistent signals to produce the same effect. And that, in turn, requires something more of us. Not intervention in the sense of control, but participation. A conscious recognition that the system will not maintain itself in the same way it once did, and that the signals it is sending deserve rather more of our attention than we have perhaps been giving them.

The same pattern appears wherever complex systems operate under pressure.

In organizations, signals do not always travel freely. They are filtered, delayed, or stopped altogether. Information sits within a team, never reaching those who need it. A concern is softened as it moves upward, losing urgency at each level. People see the signal. They hesitate to pass it on. Or they adjust it, subtly, unconsciously, so that it fits expectation instead of reality.

At Enron, for example, the warning signs were embedded in the numbers themselves: profits reported without corresponding cash, debt moved off the balance sheet through structures designed to obscure rather than illuminate. Internal concerns were present long before the company unraveled. The signals were not subtle. They were clear, but didn't alter the trajectory.

In the Madoff case, the signals were more visible still. Consistent returns appearing even when markets were falling, with a strategy no one could verify. Warnings were raised to regulators: detailed, specific, repeated, ignored. When the collapse came, the question asked was how it could have happened without anyone knowing. The more precise question, as it always is, is how it happened when so many people did know.

The Catholic Church offers something harder to explain than either of these. At Enron and with Madoff, money distorted judgment in ways that are at least legible. The Church had no such excuse. Across decades and continents, in culture after culture, an institution entrusted with the spiritual care of the most vulnerable deflected, reassigned, and ignored what it could not afford to acknowledge. The signals were specific, repeated, and documented. They were passed from one diocese to another like a problem child, to be managed rather than a truth to be faced. The scale of the denial was possible only because the alternative, acknowledging what was actually happening, threatened something on which too much had been built. The comfortable lie, in this case, had a cost measured in destroyed lives. It still does.

In relationships, the signals are quieter but no less persistent. A glance held a fraction too long. A hesitation before answering. A shift in tone so slight it can be dismissed, even by the person who notices it.

R. D. Laing caught this particular dynamic with characteristic precision:

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

— R. D. Laing, Knots

The signal is present. It is recognized. But it is not permitted to take form. This is not denial exactly. It is something more careful: the signal is allowed to exist, but not to connect. Recognized, but not pursued. The system maintains its coherence by containing what it cannot afford to acknowledge.

For years, women described experiences that were consistently minimized or

reframed. Comments dismissed as harmless. Behavior excused as normal. Patterns of discomfort explained away as oversensitivity. Individually, each instance was perhaps small enough to reinterpret. But they accumulated. And when those accumulated signals eventually broke through in movements such as MeToo, they appeared to many as a sudden rupture. There was nothing sudden about it. They were the consequence of signals that had been present, repeated, and systematically unacknowledged for decades. What changed was not the signals themselves. It was the threshold at which they could no longer be contained. And as with any system in which pressure has been suppressed rather than addressed, the release carried more force than the original signal warranted. The overcorrection was itself a signal, of how much had been held back and for how long.

In public life, the consequences of ignored signals are visible at their largest scale.

In the years leading up to 2016, the signals were not hidden. A candidate publicly

mocking a disabled reporter, the moment passing without lasting consequence. A

proposed ban on entire groups entering the country, first treated as rhetoric, then as

policy. The phrase 'fake news' entering common usage, not as critique but as dismissal. Crowds chanting to imprison a political opponent, the language becoming normalized through repetition. Each moment, taken alone, could be dismissed as an outlier. A tactic. A reaction. But they accumulated. What changed was not a single event, but the threshold of what could be said without consequence. And as that threshold shifted, so did the range of what could be accepted. The outcome did not arrive without warning.

It arrived after a sequence of signals that were visible, repeated, and largely discounted in real time.

Daniel Kahneman observed that what you see is all there is, that the mind accepts

what is immediately available, coherent and consistent, and sets aside what is not. But the mechanism runs deeper than selective attention. To follow a signal to its

conclusion is rarely neutral. It carries implication. A pattern, once acknowledged, may require a response. A concern, once voiced, will almost certainly disrupt stability. A conclusion, once reached, will alter how things are seen. And so, the signal is not rejected. It is contained. Allowed to exist, but not to connect. Recognized, but not pursued.

My client, in his eighties, on his laptop, with the door open: he was not a cautionary

tale. He was a human being doing what human beings do, which is to find whatever

channel remains available for the things that matter most, and to use it, even when the channel is wrong, even when the message is garbled, even when no one, including himself, can quite read what is being transmitted.

The signal was there. It was unmistakable, once you knew how to receive it. The

question was never whether it was present.

Across the body, in organizations, in relationships, in the societies we inhabit: the

system is communicating. Continuously, insistently, in forms that range from the

cellular to the civilizational. Most of it passes without notice. Some of it we see and set aside. A small fraction we receive, process, and act upon.

What might change, in any of those domains, if we received a little more?

That is the question this essay, and the work that surrounds it, is trying to open.