The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [49]
But we humans are contrary creatures. We have found ways to use our scientific methods to make ourselves afraid of the future in really big ways. The fact is that if there are no real fears on the horizon, we create some. With determined perversity, many among us seem to take ghoulish glee in using the most sophisticated kinds of mathematical computerized projections to forecast an imminent disaster of some kind coming at us from somewhere—everywhere. Take the little South American bee and rename it the “killer” bee. Or how about the panic over avian flu? Every newsmagazine, every newspaper, every TV anchor worried over the impending doom of large segments of the human race at the beaks of the flu-carrying birds.
In fact, while doomers and gloomers have always been with us from Jeremiah to Cassandra to Chicken Little, they have become especially persuasive since the Enlightenment, when various scientists began to apply scientific methods and statistical models to produce predictions that were not only dire, but seemed the more so because they were reinforced by what purported to be hard empirical evidence and seemingly logical thinking. It’s one thing for some scraggly haired soothsayer to divine the end of the world in a cup of tea leaves. One could be skeptical. But when a man of science stands up and cites apparently irrefutable data proving a similarly catastrophic conclusion, it is difficult to argue with the data unless you have your own set of facts and figures, which not too many laymen do.
Pessimism: Two Hundred Years of Fearmongering
Pessimism became a growth industry that really kicked into high gear with Thomas Robert Malthus, an English country parson, mathematician, and political economist. Malthus is regarded by many as the father of demography. He is most certainly the father of modern pessimism.
In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, Malthus predicted that all of mankind was doomed because population would inevitably outrun food supply. He thought this would happen sometime soon, probably within the next century. The only check on this inevitable disaster was, well, disaster itself. Therefore, true Malthusians welcomed the Irish potato famine, which drove my ancestors to emigrate to America, as a natural correction to overpopulation. Periodic famines in India were viewed with similar benign neglect by “enlightened” Victorians who believed in the good parson’s dreary math.
To this day, Malthus is the foundation and inspiration for much of the contemporary pessimism industry. In my lifetime, I’ve already survived the bleak prognostications of Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. He predicted in 1968 that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s and that life expectancy would plummet in the 1980s. It didn’t happen. In 1972 the infamous Club of Rome report had us running out of all sorts of essential raw materials by the 1990s. It didn’t happen. The group published a couple of Limits-to-Growth updates, both pretty much dead and discredited on arrival mainly because the projections assumed a static supply of resources. Human advancements in technology that find or create substitute resources were essentially ignored in these reports and human beings were viewed as if they were the same as a flock of sheep. It’s true that sheep, left to their own devices, will graze in a field until all the grass is gone. Homo sapiens (Latin: “Man, the wise”), on the other hand, will, presumably, seek to find ways to raise more grass—or move the sheep.
Yet there is always a ready supply of despair. In raising more grass we are undoubtedly throwing some dimension of the ecosystem into imbalance, and someone will surely point it out to us. Meanwhile, to lighten the mood, turn on