Millions of people want to Save the Planet from human-caused catastrophe.
Millions of people want to Save the World from poverty and poor health.
Billions of people have millions of other noble aspirations.
When these aspirations succeed the world is a better place. And, thanks to humankind's astounding material prosperity in the 21st century, many of these do in fact make the world a better place in which to live.
But many don't, which is sad. What is even sadder is when an aspiration that doesn't work, a failure, is not given up on. When instead time, money and attention keep flowing into the failure for years or decades. This is waste, and it is waste that isn't saving the planet or people from misery. The iconic examples of this for me are the Wars on Drugs and Terror.
The first question I will address in this book is: Why? Why are some people and communities ready and willing to spend these dollars and time on waste?
The second question I will address is: how can we identify this kind of wasteful spending when it is happening? Clearly the waste is hard for supporters of these causes to see.
A big challenge of life in the 21st Century is coming up with ways to make these kinds of waste visible enough that supporters and non-supporters will see them and agree that other solutions are called for.
That's what this book is about.
Modern civilized society is filled with wonders. At the very basic levels we have reliable food, shelter and transportation. Compared to living in the Neolithic Village environment - the Stone Age - this reliability is truly amazing. The Neolithic Village environment has full doses of capriciousness and catastrophe. (This view of Neolithic Village as a capricious and catastrophic environment is contrary to many romantic notions held today. Also, keep in mind that we still have Neolithic Village environments today in remote places such as the Amazon basin and the Indonesian archipelago. So I do not refer to the Neolithic environment as ancient history. It is ancient, but it is also with us today.)
Yes, civilized living is a wonder. It has made tremendous advances in our understanding of how the world works - sciences and engineering - and in how our bodies work - biology and health care. Along with these advances, we have embraced some strange practices that at first glance don't seem to improve our lives at all. Some are just strange, some are strange and deeply wasteful.
This book examines some of these strange practices and analyzes the human thinking that not only supports these practices but also believes they are very, very right.
The core of this book examines human thinking. When we understand why we are thinking in certain ways, and those ways are leading to deeply wasteful behavior, we can get directly to the root of fixing the problem. We fix the problem by indentifying the thinking that is causing the problem. Then we work at fixing that thinking. Once the thinking is straightened out, finding a good solution becomes fast and easy. As in, “Ah… Of course! Why didn't I think of that before?”
Let me explain how I am going to talk about thinking.
Human thinking is a complex process. To simplify things enormously for this book, I'm going to break it into two styles: Instinctive Thinking and Analytic Thinking.
Instinctive thinking is the style that handles those thinking challenges that have faced humans for thousands of generations on a day-to-day basis. Humans have faced these challenges for so long that genetic selection has hard-wired the brain to deal with them. Balance and vision are extreme examples of instinctive thinking. By comparison, two-legged walking is something robots are just now mastering, and human vision is so high performance that computers still can't match it. At higher levels of thinking we have the instincts to look for food when we get hungry and fall in love when that right person comes along. Instinctive thinking is easy to do and provides quick results. When it works to handle a situation we are facing, it is a wonder at producing fast, good results, and it feels really right. But the catch is - it can't handle everything. Those situations it can't handle are handled by analytic thinking.
Analytic thinking is learned thinking. It handles obvious learning challenges such as adding two plus two, and it handles more physical challenges such as learning to ride a bicycle and drive a car. Analytic thinking originally evolved to handle one-shots. In other words, those situations that don't come up very often, but if the organism facing them can find the right solutions, it helps a lot, as in, the organism survives. In most organisms analytic thinking is a tiny part of the thinking package. In humans it is much larger and much better developed.
In particular, we humans use a whole lot of analytic thinking in dealing with the civilized environment. When viewed from the evolutionary perspective, human civilization has happened in an eye blink. Our instinctive thinking is well adapted to living in the Neolithic Village environment. That has been going on for thousands of generations. Its first replacement, the Agricultural Age, began about five thousand years ago, which is just 250 generations ago. Two hundred fifty comes nowhere close to the thousands of generations needed to create the new hardwiring in the brain for new instinctive thinking. Now consider that the Industrial Age has been with us only fifteen generations. And we haven't had a smart phone generation even reach adulthood yet! In other words, instinctive thinking hasn't caught up with the demands of the civilized environment.
But instinctive thinking isn't giving up! It wants to be used, and it is constantly looking for places where it can provide answers. Much of this book is about where instinctive thinking sneaks in (like someone with good intentions) and provides fast and comfortable answers, but sadly, they are wrong answers. They create waste, not good solutions.
For more reading about the concepts of Instinctive and Analytic thinking, check out my books:
How Evolution Explains the Human Condition
This book is about sacrificing... strange sacrificing.
Humans make sacrifices all the time. It's part of life. Some sacrifices are clearly beneficial - sacrificing to give children a safe, well-provisioned home and a better education pays off on many levels.
All sacrifices are tradeoffs - something desirable must be given up to get something else desirable. So far, so good. But some forms of modern sacrifice are not so clearly beneficial on all levels. In fact, some sacrificing choices are most peculiar - at times, there seems to be a whole lot given up and almost nothing received in return.
Why are many people making such odd choices when they encounter such an unfavorable tradeoff? I find this curious because what is being given up seems quite valuable compared to what is being obtained. In this quote Benjamin Franklin is describing what he considers a strange sacrifice: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
When soothing a dread with a ritual or turning away from progress to maintain the comfort of status quo is at the heart of what is being gained, I call this kind of tradeoff a goat sacrifice. It is about making sacrifices that don't do what they are intend to do: They don't make the world a better place. Instead their benefit is solely allowing the person or community doing the sacrifice to feel less guilty, or less fearful, or less something that disturbs their instinctive thinking.
The term goat sacrificing was inspired by reading the history of Fabius Maximus - the Roman Consul who had to deal with Hannibal's spectacular successes in the Second Punic War (218-201BC). Through much of the war, Hannibal defeated every Roman army that faced him in open battle; Fabius's solution was to follow him, not face him. Fabius avoided conflict, but thwarted all the diplomatic efforts of Hannibal to unite the other tribes of Italy against Roman domination. The Romans won, but the war was not smooth sailing. There were a lot of people in Rome who vigorously disagreed with the “Fabian Strategy”. They mocked Fabius calling him Fabius Cunctator (the Delayer), a play on Fabius Dictator, his official title.
Fabius was competent. He did win. And he recognized the importance of public opinion - he dealt with it. Fabius gave assurance to the Romans when he was installed as Dictator (just after the announcement of another spectacular Hannibal victory). By calling for a city-wide sacrifice, he picked up on a classic theme - the Romans were suffering because the gods were angry, and as a first step to regaining their favor, everyone in Rome must sacrifice a goat (as well as other things). So, many goats lost their lives, many Romans slept better that night, and Rome ultimately won because it stayed unified and dedicated to the cause.
Did the goat sacrificing contribute to Rome's winning?
Yes! ...in the sense that it made the Romans feel better.
Was it an important and necessary contribution?
That is hotly debated to this day - some say yes, some say no. The important issue is to recognize when what is being done is, in fact, a goat sacrifice. Something being done to soothe the soul, not directly fix the problem.
Fast forward to modern times. Do we make any sacrifices which have this same relation to our success? Are they:
Umm... we may have a few of these.
The problem I have with goat sacrificing, and therefore the reason I'm writing this book, is three-fold.
Whoops! Ritual and Intolerance: Welcome to a style of thinking that works well in the Agricultural Age when what the ruler utters becomes the law of the land. These two costs - one physical and one social - are why it's important to identify when we as a society are engaging in goat sacrificing. There is a third important cost as well. Because goat sacrificing is faith-based, not fact-based, it is easily twisted by conflicting interests. Harking to the Romans, it would not be too far-fetched to imagine a “goat merchant lobby” advising Fabius that he should pick goats to sacrifice, not sheep or vegetables or something else.
Keep in mind, goat sacrificing is very much an “Eye of the Beholder” issue. Those advocating and willingly doing the sacrificing don't see the waste. They instead feel the serenity that comes with thinking, “I'm doing the right thing.” I call this blind-spot-thinking.
That said, here are some examples I see of modern goat sacrificing:
All of the above are good examples because they:
Finally, it is necessary to understand that there are huge unseen costs being paid beyond the obvious “goat”. These are the opportunity costs, which include intolerance/enfranchisement costs, social corruption costs, and attention costs - we are being distracted from thinking about real, solvable problems.
And... the root problem that is causing sacrificing is not being solved!
The fundamental reason the goat sacrificing is not solving the problem is that the problem has been defined incorrectly to begin with - Fabius called for goat sacrifice on the grounds that the gods were angry with the Romans. He described the issue as a God problem. He didn't mention Hannibal and he didn't call for raising more troops. (Those came up after people had calmed down a bit.) Defining a problem properly is a big part of ending goat sacrificing.
As mentioned earlier, the goal of this book is to help you, the reader, identify when goat sacrificing is happening. If you can see it happening, if you can successfully point out its instinctive thinking based nature, then the community you are part of can begin to move forward to find a real, cost-effective solution to the problem. And when that happens many “goats” in your community will breathe easier, and so will community members, because the problem really will be solved, and the world really will be a better place.
“This may not have worked out well, but I meant well.”
Good intentions going sour is at the root of much modern day goat sacrificing. Thanks to modern prosperity, The Road to Hell is a well-paved super highway.We start lots of projects based on good intentions, but then don't follow through to see if those good intentions are actually realized. This is something we need to be aware of. This means we need to be vigilant, constantly vigilant, about both the results and the effectiveness of what our good intentions are suggesting we do. We need to be watching for the surprising and unintended consequences of what we support - there will always be some. If the surprises are big and unpleasant ones, we need to seriously rethink what we are supporting.
This requires that we train ourselves to be aware. When we give to a worthy cause we need to expect good monitoring of program outcomes. Giving or supporting without watching the results is a grand invitation to hypocrisy, corruption, serious waste, and deep disenfranchisement. The deep disenfranchisement happens because those harmed or obstructed by good intentions get deeply frustrated by, “Those idiots who can't see the damage being done by this choice.” Feelings of disenfranchisement are at the root of much crime.
Goat sacrificing is also closely linked to “blind spots” (my term) in community thinking. When a community has a blind spot, it sees a problem, but it can't see the huge cost incurred by solving the problem the wrong way. This cost is incurred because the problem is defined poorly - using hot-blooded emotion, not cool-headed analysis - and the efforts at solving the problem miss the real issue entirely. The result is not a solution but a chronic, institutionalized expense - a ritual. The iconic example of this is the War on Drugs. This “war” goes on and on and on because the problem is defined by emotion. The waste caused by this poor definition is sustained for decades by the community's blind-spot-thinking and fear that surrounds the issue. The blind spot is not recognizing that recreational drug use has a lot in common with recreational alcohol use, and both should be treated similarly.
This book is intended to provide you with a valuable tool: insight. If you can see when goat sacrificing is happening, if you can see when blind-spot-thinking has taken hold, if you can see when too much instinctive thinking is being used, then you can work at finding a better solution to the problem.
When you find that better solution, a lot of waste will stop, and the world will be a better place.