BECOMING GUISE-WISE

A sweeping view of how to improving the world through better communication.

Waters frankly admits that the claims he makes about educating the world by making people “guise-wise” (i.e., heightening their awareness of how they perceive others and how others perceive them) make him sound “absurdly ambitious and…like either a fruit-case or someone with a very bloated ego,” but he’s convinced that he’s discerned the central problem underlying most of humanity’s problems—people either can’t or won’t shift their identities, which informs the ways they view the world. Humanity’s “Response Default Setting,” he claims, is to notice and then emphasize (even magnify) difference, all in the service of tribalism. This “default setting” is behind all the ills humans import into the world, the “demonization, dehumanization and genocide.” Here, Waters, a consultant and coach, expands on his belief that only by addressing this universal internal setting and changing it to something more broad can humanity survive and advance from its current state. “From family feuding to global warming, our problems aren’t just of our own making, they are of our own make-up,” he writes. “This means they will persist as long as we stay as we are.” In order to fix these problems, he asserts that people must exercise far more awareness of their commonalities to move all of humanity through an “upgrade.” Waters writes in an engaging style that’s both clear and substantive: “Messages are generally injunctions,” he warns at one point. “They tell us to believe or do something, but they don’t require us to engage or act in line with them.” At every turn, he respects his readers’ intelligence and is fully aware that he’s presenting a perhaps unrealistic solution for impossibly complex world problems. His calm, nonjudgmental synthesis will give readers food for thought, though, even if his one-trick fix remains ultimately unconvincing.

A challenging but soaringly optimistic blueprint for upgrading the human race.