Upstream Thinking In A Downstream World by ‘Brother Bill’
On finding the True Cause before reaching for the nearest remedy
My dear friend,
I wonder if you have ever consulted a physician who, after only a moment’s inspection, pressed a pill into your hand and sent you on your way — satisfied, it seemed, to have quieted the complaint without once asking what gave rise to it. You left no better than you came. The pain returned. And you returned with it, week after week, like a man who mops the floor beneath a leaking roof and congratulates himself on his efficiency. I confess I have known the type, and I have been the type; and both encounters were equally unsatisfying.
Let us call this what it is: the downstream solution. It addresses the symptom as though the symptom were the disease. It answers the echo rather than the voice. It is, in its own modest way, a kind of lie — not malicious, perhaps, but lazy; and laziness in diagnosis, whether of the body, the society, or the soul, is a form of cowardice dressed in the clothing of pragmatism.
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I. The Leaking Roof and the Mop
Consider the matter plainly. If the water that flows into your home is corrupt, you may place a filter at the single tap where you drink — and this is not nothing. But you bathe in the same water; you breathe its vapors in your morning shower; you absorb more through your skin in those few minutes than you drink in a whole afternoon. The downstream fix has attended to one outlet while the corrupted stream runs on unimpeded. You have treated the river’s mouth while the poison from the power plant pours in at the headwaters.
Or consider the chiropractor who adjusts precisely where it hurts — at the insertion, as they say — never once working upstream to the origin of the tension. You feel relief for a day, perhaps two. Then the same familiar ache settles back into its accustomed place, as comfortable there as an old tenant. You return. You pay. You return again. The practitioner is well-fed; you are no closer to being well. Something has been served in that exchange, but it is your wealth not your health.
I do not raise these examples to be harsh toward any profession. I raise them because they illuminate, by analogy, an error that runs through nearly every domain of human effort — an impatience to treat, a reluctance to delve in deep enough to understand, and a deep institutional incentive to keep the patient returning rather than to send him away cured. As a very great mind once observed, no problem can be solved by the same level of thinking that created it. We would do well to sit with that remark longer than we do.
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II. The Veil and What Tore It
Now here is where the matter becomes, as all serious matters eventually do, theological. For if our physical ailments resist downstream thinking, how much more do our social, moral, and political ones? The Scripture does not mince its language on this point. St. Paul, writing to the church at Ephesus, locates the true origin of human conflict not in flesh and blood at all — not in the politician, the rival, the neighbor with disagreeable opinions — but upstream, in the invisible realm where the actual war is prosecuted.
Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV)
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Mark what this means. If Paul is correct — and I believe he is — then the man who devotes himself entirely to political solutions to moral disorder is in the position of the householder who battles the mold on his walls without ever addressing the damp in the foundations. He may scrub furiously and at great expense. The mold will return. The damp is upstream.
This is not to say that political engagement is worthless. It is to say precisely what Paul says: that politics is downstream from something deeper, namely the spiritual condition of persons and peoples. And the spiritual condition of persons is itself downstream from a yet more fundamental question — whether the veil over human perception has been removed.
For there is indeed a veil. There was always a veil. Our Lord, from the cross of all places, described its effect with a terrible and merciful precision: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” The men hammering the nails were not, in their own estimation, doing anything particularly wicked. They were maintaining order. They were following procedure. They saw through the glass darkly — so darkly they could murder God and file it under housekeeping.
1 Corinthians 13:12 (NKJV)
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
The tearing of the Temple veil at the moment of the crucifixion was not incidental. It was the upstream event — the removal, for all who would receive it, of the clouded glass through which we peer at reality and mistake the shadows on the cave wall for the world itself. Those who accept Him as Lord and Saviour receive not merely forgiveness but sight. The prescription is not a downstream pill. It is a new pair of eyes.
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III. Why We Fight, and Why We Ask Wrongly
The epistle of James takes up this theme with a directness that is almost uncomfortable. He does not locate the origin of human conflict in bad policy, failed institutions, or insufficient legislation. He locates it upstream, in the disordered desires of the human interior.
James 4:1–3 (NKJV)
Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.
Here is the full upstream diagnosis, and it is a humbling one. We want something. We cannot obtain it. We fight. We escalate. We form factions. We pass laws. We conduct investigations. And all the while the root cause — that the human will is bent toward itself rather than toward God — has not been touched. We have mopped the floor. We have not fixed the roof.
Notice further what James says about prayer. We do not have because we do not ask. And when we ask, we ask amiss — with impure motive, for self-serving ends, with what I am tempted to call the theology of vending machines: insert prayer, receive desired outcome, depart satisfied. But prayer conducted from that posture is itself a downstream activity. It has not gone to the root. It has not first submitted the will. It is, in a phrase, asking God to bless our plan rather than asking God to replace our plan with His.
Pride, James tells us elsewhere, promotes strife. And pride is precisely the condition of the man who already knows the solution before he has properly understood the problem — who rushes to the aspirin before he has considered whether the headache might be, as headaches sometimes are, the last warning before something serious. Pride whispers that downstream thinking is sufficient. Humility is the willingness to trace the stream all the way back.
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IV. The Plank, the Speck, and the Upstream Vision
Our Lord’s instruction in the Sermon on the Mount is, among many other things, a lesson in diagnostic humility. The most famous passage in that sermon on the subject of judgment is precisely an upstream argument.
Matthew 7:3–5 (NKJV)
And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
The man with a plank in his eye has a perception problem upstream of his judgment problem. He cannot see his brother clearly because he cannot yet see clearly. His proposed solution — removing the speck — is not wrong in principle. But the sequence is wrong. He has skipped the upstream step. He has gone to work on the world without first going to work on himself. The result is not surgery; it is injury, inflicted by a man who cannot see.
I find I must be honest here about my own tendencies. How often I have arrived at a conversation, a dispute, a moment of conflict, with my solution already prepared — already certain that I knew where the problem lay and that it lay, conveniently, not in me. The Scriptures are given to us, as our Lord made plain, as instruments of life — not weapons of judgment against our neighbors. When I reach for a verse to win an argument rather than to heal a wound, I have mistaken the tool for a sword. I have gone downstream when the upstream work of self-examination was what the moment required.
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V. The Vacuum and Being Filled
Nature, the old philosophers told us, abhors a vacuum. This is true not only of physical space but of the inner life. The man who empties himself of nothing is filled with everything he was already full of. The man who attempts self-improvement by will alone adds a new coat of paint to walls that are structurally unsound. But the man who presents himself empty — genuinely empty, not performatively so — will find, as George MacDonald perceived with such clarity, that the whole architecture of the universe is arranged to fill precisely that space.
Loving our neighbor is a downstream virtue. It flows, necessarily, from loving God. We cannot love our neighbor properly sacrificially until we love God who first sacrificed for us, because loving our neighbor properly requires seeing our neighbor as God sees him — which requires our seeing to be corrected. And our seeing cannot be corrected by any act of will. It can only be corrected by submission: total surrender, absolute obedience to the One who is upstream of all things.
He will give us the feeling of love, if He pleases, in His own time. But we shall learn gradually — painfully, perhaps — that the feeling is not the substance. It is, as I once wrote to a correspondent, only the echo in consciousness of the real thing which lies deeper. The real thing is not an emotion. It is a condition of being. And conditions of being are changed upstream, at the root, in that quiet place where we stop moping the floor and at last allow the Roofer above to begin His work.
Proverbs 4:23 (NKJV)
Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.
Out of it spring the issues of life. There is your upstream source. There is where the stream begins. Every policy, every relationship, every conflict, every prayer, every act of healing or harm flows downward from what is kept — or lost — in the heart. The chiropractor works at the insertion. Christ works at the origin. That’s how frozen shoulder, carpal tunnel and shingles are all solved.
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A Final Word
I have been speaking of upstream thinking as though it were chiefly an intellectual discipline — a matter of asking better diagnostic questions, tracing causes more rigorously, resisting the seductive efficiency of the nearest remedy. And so it is. But I want to be precise about where the discipline ultimately leads. Sooo Is it your calling,career or job?
It does not lead to a cleverer version of yourself arriving, at last, at the correct upstream solution by the sheer force of rigorous analysis. That is still a downstream posture wearing an upstream costume. The habit of upstream thinking, properly pursued, leads to the recognition that we are not the headwaters. We are somewhere in the middle of the river, already flowing — already shaped by forces and choices and inheritances we did not the author and cannot, by ourselves, correct.
The upstream source, traced to its origin, is not a principle. It is a Person. And the Person has made Himself reachable — not through our ascending to Him by intellectual effort, but through His descending to us in the form of a servant, a criminal’s cross, and a torn veil.
John 7:38 (NKJV)
He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.
The river that flows from a surrendered heart is upstream to everything else. It is the one source that does not run dry, does not grow corrupt, and does not require you to return each week for another adjustment. The chiropractor works at the insertion. Christ works at the origin. That’s how frozen shoulder, carpal tunnel and shingles are all solved. It is the True Cure — not a tranquilizer for symptoms, but the Living Water at the headwaters of a redeemed life that will never thirst again.
Yours in the pursuit of the truth that sets us free for our greatest adventure. Blessings ‘brother bill’
About the Author
Mychal Massie
Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here
