Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [29]
Context Ten: The Framework of Our Response
Our responses to these interwoven, reinforcing challenges of our era can be organized into three inter-related levels:
--family/household
--community/networks
--nation
Each level requires different skills, resources, inputs and solutions. I will cover these topics in the second section.
Key concepts in this chapter:
Simulacrum of thinking
Monopoly capital
Politics of experience
Positive feedback
Negative feedback
Disequilibrium
Pareto Principle
Power law
Scale invariance
Self-organized criticality (SOC)
Stick/Slip hypothesis
Chapter Four: Complacency and Fatalism
Let's begin by considering Context One: Human Nature in more depth. Entire libraries have been written on the subject of human nature, but for our practical purposes those which probe humanity's "default settings" such as Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal and E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis are the most useful.
Although we can slice and dice complex human responses in hundreds of ways (for instance, Who am I? The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalities), for the purposes of a stripped-down practical analysis we can group our "default responses" into four basic categories: inertia, fear/panic, casting our lot with a "Big Man"/leader or fatalism/giving up.
While we can collectively sacrifice short-term gain for long-term security, as Jared Diamond describes in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, it is equally likely that a society will continue down the path to complete collapse. One of the key conditions Diamond identifies is a society's understanding of its primary challenges and dilemmas. Those that did not grasp their limitations and restricted options failed. So our first step must be to adequately understand the limitations and options we face while avoiding the denial and complacency that will doom our economy to collapse.
The emotionally charged state of fear/panic ("fight or flight") requires a quick reaction, but decisions made in this instinctive mode tend to be rash, hasty, impulsive and poorly planned. Thus the key is to recognize this mode and consciously avoid making decisions with long-term consequences while in the grip of this "instant response" survival-mode.
Humans, like our relatives the chimpanzees, are social animals. Like chimps, we are "wired" to form groups and select/follow leaders who reach their high status by offering something back to the community: protection, "potlatch" type sharing of wealth, etc. We will examine this political/social response to crisis in a later section.
But humans also have the capacity to be alone, like our other primate relatives the orangutans. Thus withdrawing from the community has deep roots in human nature and history.
Being creatures of habit—and habits are a survival mechanism, for why change anything when "everything's working"?-- humans prefer the status quo until crisis forces us to change. This inertia/attachment to the status quo is complacency, which acts as a cognitive trap or emotional attractor, as does fatalism/withdrawal.
Complacency and Fatalism
Complacency and fatalism are both seductive cognitive traps and emotional attractors which we have to avoid if we are to think clearly. Each is an attractor because each is highly appealing for several fundamental reasons.
1. Human nature veers between these basic social/anti-social emotions: complacency/status quo (inertia) and fatalism/resignation (withdrawal).
2. History reveals these attractors (complacency and fatalism) were active in previous great declines/collapses, such as the Roman Empire circa 400-576 C.E. (see below)
3. Humans prefer simplistic "answers" to challenges/problems, and a blind faith in the status quo or resignation both fit the bill.
Complacency is best understood