Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and Our Worlds

by Lee Thayer

"This is a book about how we invent ourselves and our cultures by how we explain things. We invent our explanations, and then they invent us. It is a book about how we create our virtual worlds – the habitat of our minds – by how we explain things. It is a book about how our explanations get embedded in the stories we tell and ingest – from gossip to advertising to the pernicious “social media.” It is a book about how everything we say or do or have is an explanation.
Whatever we say or do or buy explains who we are. We multifariously explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. We talk, we daydream, we do, we all evolves from how we explain things. Our explanations are the seeds from which everything human and social sprouts and evolves. They are the sources and the sinks of how we live our lives. It is a book that offers a non-biological and thus a superior theory of the human trajectory, of specifically human and social evolution.
We have turned our lives over to our pundits – our “experts,” our celebrities, our advertisers and entertainers, and our fashionistas. We invite them to tell us what’s what, and how to live. They are our predators. We are their prey. It is an unprecedented sea-change for civilization. As our lives go, so goes our civilization. We evolve out of our explanations of things. But to what end?"

186 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 7, 2011

About the author

Dr. Lee Osborne Thayer was a leadership expert, educator, consultant, and author.

Thayer was an instructor at University Oklahoma, 1956-1958. He took a position with Pratt & Whitney, then returned to teaching in 1959 as an Associate Professor at the University Wichita. In 1964 he took a position as Professor and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Communication at the University Missouri at Kansas City. In 1968 he became a Professor of Communication Research at the University of Iowa. In 1973 he became Professor of Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University. In 1976 he became a Visiting Professor at the University Massachusetts, and in 1977 he became a Professor at the University of Helsinki. In 1978 he became Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.