Many of us living in this world have deep concerns about running out of resources.
Many of us have deep concerns about fighting poverty, ill-health, inequality and injustice.
Many of us worry about crime, violence and protecting our children.
These are all important things to worry about and take action on. But, if we support taking action on these worries, and the actions we support prove ineffective for long periods of time - as in, they aren’t working - we are wasting our time, attention, and money. We are goat sacrificing not solving problems.
This is important because this happens a lot. It happens a lot more often than we think it does because of blind- spot-thinking. The root source of this blind-spot-thinking is using too much instinctive thinking and not enough analytic thinking. It’s okay to let our hearts be our guides… as long as our heads are checking to make sure that real progress is coming from our heart-felt efforts.
If we are wasting resources, then we are going to run out of resources faster, we are going to prolong poverty and ill-health, and we aren’t going to solve crime and violence issues. For this reason it is important that we apply good head-thinking to carefully direct our from-the-heart instinctive thinking.
This book has been about building insight. It has been about showing how to spot blind-spot-thinking and goat sacrificing. When you can see these, you can do something about them. But this book is just a “tips and tricks”. It is a start, not a full answer. The root ability needed to spot blind-spot-thinking is learning how to think analytically. This is something that is learned by combining many activities. Here are a few that I use:
• Get a good education. Analytic thinking is something that has to be learned. The more you learn, the more you will apply learning to problem solving. Learn about many topics. This will help you see the patterns of harsh reality and be able to spot when evangelizing and instinctive thinking is being taught. (This happens a lot.) This means that learning how to learn is a vital part of a good education.
• Read a lot and read widely. Read the works of authors you agree with, and read the works of authors you don’t agree with. This widening web of knowledge helps you distinguish between fact and fantasy in what people are writing and talking about.
• Listen to people who have different points of view explain why they think the way they do. This is practicing tolerance. You listen, but you don’t have to agree or change their points of view. This is important to do because these people are telling the truth from their perspective. Listening to different points of view helps us understand the roots of various kinds of instinctive thinking and the blind spots they support.
• Experience different cultures. Be an immigrant. Go and live among other people as a worker. Tourists see the “strange” in other cultures then quickly leave. Workers stay and get deeply involved in day-to-day living. This lets them see the “practical” in the way things are getting done in other cultures. These other cultures can be in other lands, but there are plenty here in the US, too. Think about the difference between living in urban New York City and rural West Virginia. Going to college in a strange city is another, milder, way of experiencing this.
In sum, when we simply let our heart be our guide, we waste, and the world is a worse place for it. We need to use head as well as heart!