Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [271]
The final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial. This is a technical term with a precisely defined meaning in individual psychology, and it has been taken over into the pop culture. If something that you perceive arouses in you a painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress or deny your perception in order to avoid the unbearable pain, even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous. The emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety, and grief. Typical examples include blocking the memory of a frightening experience, or refusing to think about the likelihood that your husband, wife, child, or best friend is dying because the thought is so painfully sad.
For example, consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That’s because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst. Although psychological denial is a phenomenon well established in individual psychology, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well.
Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late. Some attempted solutions backfire and make the problem worse, such as the Cane Toad’s introduction into Australia to control insect pests, or forest fire suppression in the American West. Many past societies (such as medieval Iceland) lacked the detailed ecological knowledge that now permits us to cope better with the problems that they faced. Others of those problems continue to resist solution today.
For instance, please think back to Chapter 8 on the ultimate failure of the Greenland Norse to survive after four centuries. The cruel reality is that, for the last 5,000 years, Greenland’s cold climate and its limited, unpredictably variable resources have posed an insuperably difficult challenge to human efforts to establish a long-lasting sustainable economy. Four successive waves of Native American hunter-gatherers tried and ultimately failed before the Norse failed. The Inuit came closest to success by maintaining a self-sufficient lifestyle in Greenland for 700 years, but it was a hard life with frequent deaths from starvation. Modern Inuit are no longer willing to subsist traditionally with stone tools, dogsleds, and hand-held harpooning of whales from skin boats, without imported technology and food. Modern Greenland’s government has not yet developed a self-supporting economy independent of foreign aid. The government has experimented again with livestock as did the Norse, eventually gave up on cattle, and still subsidizes sheep farmers who cannot make a profit by themselves. All that history makes the ultimate failure of the Greenland Norse unsurprising. Similarly, the Anasazi ultimate “failure” in the U.S. Southwest has to be seen in the perspective of many other ultimately “failed” attempts to establish long-lasting farming societies in that environment so hostile for farming.
Among the most recalcitrant problems today are those posed by introduced pest species, which often prove impossible to eradicate