.I am happy to be an animal. It seems to be more fun than being either a plant or a mineral.
Of course, I am biased being an animal, and being equipped with the ability to believe that I as an animal, especially a human animal, outrank other animals. In fact, we humans have officially designated ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens (wise, wise humans) That perhaps remains to be seen.. Dinosaurs ruled the roost for about 130 million years. Termites have been around for 250 million years We split off from the primate tree 6 million years ago, but we lived as hunter gatherers until the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred about 15,000 years ago — a mere instant in geological time. It is supposedly a good thing to be part of a species that is around for a long time. How long are we going to last? Certainly not forever unless we change the way we act and get more honest about how smart we are. We are smarter than other forms of life, but not nearly as smart as we think we are. Hence I prefer to think of us as Homo Demi Sapiens (Half Wise Humans)
We need to think a bit more about our place in the grand pageant which is the planet Earth, and use our relatively powerful ability to be creative to get more serious about attacking some of the major problems involving large numbers of people (all of us?)— such things as exploding population and urbanization, rapid change in technology, obsolete forms of government, climate change, and so on. From the messages I get from residents of a broad selection of countries, these problems are large and many.
W e need to use our creative ability to better think our way through such problems. I have studied creativity since I was in college 65 years ago, but focussed on individuals, groups, and such larger collections of people as companies, universities, and non-profit organizations. Increasing the creativity of nations, religions, and cultures requires more than shows up in books on how to manage creativity such as mine. The conceptual blocks are more difficult to handle, as they have evolved over large spans of time, and evolution is slow, so many of them must be fought by intellectual effort. I gave you an example of one ( short term thinking} in my last post, when I brought up our reluctance to tackle problems that sneak up on us and take a long time to solve (if ever).
Let me list a few more here. I will repeat our reluctance to tackle what I call long term problems. I will throw in short term thinking again, since I think it is of major importanc, and follow each with a one line explanation about what was good about them before the Neolithic revolution when we stopped being hunter gatherers, , and what may be troublesome about them now. I will continue to touch upon them from time to time in this blog. I don’t want go deeply into all of them in this post, because that would be a book, not a blog, and I am writing a book on such things and attempting to not become depressed. Feel free to add “blocks” and argue with my list. There are more, of course, so feel free to argue with mine and add your own.
- We focus on the short term
Good then - Food and shelter for today and tomorrow
Bad now -complex problems such as carbon emissions, medical care, poverty
- We like power, and order
Good then - Following strong leaders, and becoming one
Can be bad now - Dictators, governments making more rules and laws than necessary, less freedom
- We are selfish and competitive
Good then - More food in times of scarcity ,motivation
Bad now - Endless desire for growth and wealth, GNP fixation
- We want others to think like we do in large numbers
Good then - Reinforcement, social agreement
Bad now- Fights between Christians and Muslims, capitalists and socialists, liberals and conservatives
- We are drawn to small tribes
Good then - Strength, Identity, Sharing of values
Can be bad now - Hell’s Angels, Tea Party members, youth gangs, Ku Klux Clan
- We resist change
Good then- Strong tradition and building of expertise, tradition, stable societies
Bad now – Resistance to getting rid of nukes, preparing for cimate change, opposition to vaccinating children, retention of outmoded ethnic and cultural biases.
- We rely too heavily on science and technology breakthroughs
Okay then - Not much science and yechnology
Bad now – reliance totally on atmospheric engineering to stop global warming, driverless cars to solve traffic problems, etc in the future
- We depend on faiths—religion,science, our political party,— to find answers to our problems
Good then - We didn’t have to think about difficult problems
Bad now – Time to think more deeply about difficult problems,such as health cae.
- We want simple answers, even to complicated problems
Good then - We could rapidly implement the answer
Bad now - There are no simple answers to many (most important) problems
- We ignore expertise if we do not like what it says
Good then - We might discover a better way to do things
Bad Now – Leaders ignoring opinions of people who have spent their lives seeking better understanding (scientists, economists, psychologists, etc)
- We have a limited feeling for big/small quantities— light years, national debts, nanometers—but throw them around anyway
Okay Then - Big/small quantities not as common in life
Bad now -We fool ourselves constantly
- We depend on increasingly complicated and fragile systems
Okay then - Systems weren’t that complicated then
Bad Now – Failing systems have high costs – Boeing Max
- We take our environment and other resources for granted —open space, clean air
Okay then - Low population – no apparent problem
Bad Now - An increasingly critical problem, since we continue to place it low in our priorities
- We kill each other with little improvement of our lives or species —war
Okay then - Casualties low and expected, economic cost low
Not okay now -Costs high, wars seem to no longer resolve issues in the long term , and we have weaponry capable of sending ourselves back to before the Neolithic revolution.
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