Why We're So Screwed Up

In writing about the Penn State scandal, New York Times columnist David Brooks provides another piece of the puzzle as to why humanity is so hopelessly screwed up.

Here are a few excerpts from his column:

Some people suffer from Motivated Blindness; they don't see what is not in their interest to see. Some people don't look at the things that make them uncomfortable. In one experiment, people were shown pictures, some of which contained sexual imagery. Machines tracked their eye movements. The people who were uncomfortable with sex never let their eyes dart over to the uncomfortable parts of the pictures.

As Daniel Goleman wrote in his book "Vital Lies, Simple Truths," "In order to avoid looking, some element of the mind must have known first what the picture contained, so that it knew what to avoid. The mind somehow grasps what is going on and rushes a protective filter into place, thus steering awareness away from what threatens."

And there's more:

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don't. 

And he concludes by saying:

The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it's a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

The last sentence is well stated and explains our obsession with myth worship (i.e. religion), climate change denial, and debt crises denial.

On a personal level, I know people who simply deal with things by not dealing with them. This is often the case of families who live with an alcoholic. On a national level, our political leaders are also simply playing the fiddle and not dealing with the obvious, serious problems. This is what we call "ignoring the giant elephant in the room," and, man, we humans are good at that.

Destiny

It's hard to get motivated these days to do my environmental activist work or anything else. I am feeling that our self-denial is leading to our rapid self-destruction, and our fate is now beyond our control. Half of me still has hope, but the other half feels it is time to simply enjoy the present as best I can and accept the fate of my species. No worries, within a few thousand years Mother Earth will have recovered from the short reign of destruction caused by the big-brained apes. Aside from our concrete bridges, there will be little evidence that we ever existed here.