by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
There are times in history when people act nuts -- just plain old, head-scratchingly, nuts. When does the fabric of history support this kind of action?
This is panic thinking and blunder response. This happens often enough, and the actions taken are so off-the-charts expensive, that it deserves its own section -- which it is getting here.
Humans like to solve problems using instinctive thinking when they can. It is fast and comfortable. When they can't use instinctive thinking, they experiment and learn a good solution. This learning is analytic thinking. It takes time but it produces good solutions, particularly to Industrial Age problems.
But what happens when...
o action is called for because the situation is really scary
o this is not a familiar problem, so no kind of previously learned drill can solve it
What happens is: you get panic thinking and a blunder response. I go into this in greater detail in a following section.
This part of the fabric doesn't get called into play often, but it is important because the actions taken are so expensive in the long run.
There are times when people act totally nutty in how they respond to a problem. This happens on the community level as well as the individual level. It happens when people get scared, and the problem that is scaring them is so strange, so new to them, that no conventional solution they know of will solve it.
What comes up as a solution is something I call a Blunder. It is crazy, and expensive, but because of the deep fear and instinctive thinking happening at the time of the crisis it feels like a very right solution.
--The End--