The Poverty of Our Thinking and Inaction

Madame:

Good observation.  I guess I had not noticed that about sci-fi movies.  Amazing the mind-scatomas that one can have!

War is a trait that may be altering its status as a universal one.  While it is still too early to pronounce on it with anything resembling high probability, what it APPEARS to have happening is this:

The universality of war is slipping.  More cultures, including even our fairly heavily involved own, are finding it out of the norm.  Wars between large groups of people are becoming less frequent, less lengthy, and less deadly per capita.  The world culture itself is coming to treat war (that surfaces to the level of its notice) like a bad case of the flu that must be treated and come to some sort of resolution, even if recovery is rarely complete or wholesome.  And while wars of the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries often tended toward increasingly thorough involvement of a society, those since have tended to become less, with civilians often either becoming crossfire targets only, or even effectively as observers (with various levels of interest or disinterest) of groups of mercenaries or small forces as those move through or go off to fight, briefly.  Of course, some conflicts that have not risen to the level of “war” have targeted civilians often and directly, but even those rarely have total per capita casualty rates of previous wars, and not just because of infrequency of infliction.

As I said, these are preliminary observations.  Data is still narrow.  But it will be nice to observe to see if this trend continues!

Poverty is a much more complex (and yet in some respects simple!) phenomenon than one might first realize.  There is individual-caused poverty, that is, where an individual causes themselves or their families, by some really bad decisions or lack of decisions, to become poverty-stricken.  There is also society (including world society) caused poverty, where marked imbalances in resource availability, institutional robustness, infrastructural capability, exploitation and selfishness by the few and/or the powerful, etc. make the poverty structural for many people (they can do little about it). While the first kind of poverty will likely remain, barring some marked change in the human condition, stubbornly resistant to amelioration, the second kind of poverty is a result of the choices we make or don’t make as a whole.  As an increasing number of individuals, including even some statesmen, are coming to realize, so many of our problems are so integrated with this second kind of poverty.  As Lester Brown writes in his book Plan B, dedication of resources and attention to this second kind would pay incredibly synergistic and system strengthening dividends.

As for misinformation/disinformation, religion, and consumerism, I will leave those aside for now, remarking only here that there are vailings and countervailings about each.

However, I can’t argue with your statement that we seem destined for quite a while to be plagued with issues of power, control, greed, and foolishness! :)  And I agree with most of your last paragraph of course, well said.

So often, we fixate on policy crises, instead of strategy, and so we lurch from crisis to crisis, and never achieve what we want.  It also plays into our psychology and physiology, both of which are designed to respond to immediate and near-immediate stimuli.  It also explains much of why we have the MADDENING propensity to ignore or dither about obviously foreseeable problems, failing to address them when we could do so with far fewer resources, pain, suffering, destruction, waste.  And so we ignore them until they become crises.  And THEN, what was always IMPORTANT becomes also URGENT, and we act (often tragically, wastefully, or foolishly) or perish.

I remember the words of the man from 2050 in the documentary like film, After the Warming (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4aWFDCMqQ

and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc): “I was thinking about that the other day, that 20^th Century attitude that’s caused us all this grief.  It always reminds me of that joke about that fellow who falls off the skyscraper.  You know it?  I think it explains everything that’s happened.  The fellow is falling past the 17^th floor, and somebody calls out to ask him how he’s doing.  And he shrugs and says, ‘so far, so good.’  (looks wistfully)    And so they left it to us.  And we nearly solved it.  But it was a close thing wasn’t it?  And it DIDN’T HAVE TO BE…”