This book, "The Watchman's Rattle" by Rebecca D. Costa is one of the most view altering books that I have read in some time.
The basic premise starts with the idea that the point where a society can no longer "think" its way out of its problems is called cognitive threshold. Historically, this is when most great societies collapse, i.e. the Mayans. Society can advance when there is a balance between two human needs, belief and knowledge. But when things become too complex, beliefs take over in the forms of super memes. A meme is any widely accepted information, tradition or theory. For the Mayans, the idea that human sacrifice would solve very complex problems started to make sense when knowledge took a back seat.
She describes 5 super memes that are causing our world to fail in our attempts to solve very complex problems, such as climate change, terrorism, economic collapse, hunger, water shortage, over population among others.
1-Irrational opposition It is easier to be against something than to offer a solution. I often see this with the anti-abortion groups. They never offer up any real solution but just oppose, oppose, oppose. But in general, this seems to be rampant in all political discourse today. Anti-gay marriage groups are another classic example. They define their selves by what they are against.
2-The personalization of blame If a terrorist gets through security, the fault goes back to an individual, not the systemic root cause. Again, this is easy, get rid of the "person" and you are good to go. That also happened with the economic collapse and the failure of the automakers, it must be the fault of the CEO alone. No one wanted to look at the complex situation that led to the collapse.
3-Counterfeit correlation Raising taxes causes job loss. Really? or does it correlate. Knowing the difference is pretty important.
4-Silo Thinking This comes from too much specialization. No one keeps their eye on the big picture.
5-Extreme economics Everything cannot be solved with economic solutions. What about human kindness?
So, what do we do? How do we avoid the path of all prior civilizations?
1-Acknoweldge the patterns of collapse
2-Guard against super memes
3-Buy time using venture capital models which include parallel incrementalism. This means trying lots of different things at the same time, some will work and some will fail. That is how venture capitalists make money, they invest in lots of ideas and a few of them turn out to be so successful that it makes up for the failures.
4-Developing our brain power that will ultimately result in insight that leads to solutions.
And there are lots of things we can do to improve our brains, some very simple such as walking on un-even surfaces. That sounds dumb but it is really a challenge and not something you can easily program a robot to do because it so complex though we do it easily. It challenges the mind in a similar way to puzzles, like crosswords or sudoku.
In conclusion, we need to challenge our brains to make new connections, think of things in new ways and perhaps our planet will have an epiphany, an Ah-ha moment that changes everything.
And that is what this blog is all about. We need to avoid the polarized political discourse. And instead frame things in new ways. This is NOT the same old stale liberal vs conservative arguments of the past.
