"A young executive was preparing to leave the oɽce late one evening, when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand.'This is a very sensitive and important document,' said the CEO, 'and my secretary has gone for the night. Can you get this thing to work for me?''Certainly,' said the young executive eagerly. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the red START button.'Excellent! Thank you!' said the CEO, as his paper disappeared inside the machine. 'And please, just copy one sheet ...!'""Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?" asked Sansevieria while displaying several portraits by Jared Diamond. "Take a look at this: Education is a process involving two sets of participants who supposedly play different roles: teachers who impart knowledge to students, and students who absorb knowledge from teachers. In fact, as every open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers' assumptions and by asking questions that the teachers hadn't previously thought of.First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed. While all this discussion of reasons for failure and societal collapses may seem depressing, the flip side is a heartening subject: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps, if we understood the reasons why groups or society, often make bad decisions, we could use that knowledge as a checklist to guide groups to make good decisions.Groups may do disastrous things because they failed to anticipate a problem before it arrived. They may have had no prior experience of such problems, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility. One example that of societies understandably failing to anticipate a problem of which they lacked prior experience is the Maya at Copan, they could not foresee that deforestation of the hill slopes would trigger soil erosion from the slopes into the valley bottoms.Even prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten. That's especially a problem for non-literate societies, which have less capacity than literate societies to preserve detailed memories of events long in the past, because of the limitations of oral transmission of information compared to writing. For instance, Chaco Canyon Anasazi society survived several droughts before succumbing to a big drought in the 12th century A.D. But the earlier droughts had occurred long before the birth of any Anasazi affected by the big drought, which would thus have been unanticipated because the Anasazi lacked writing. Similarly, the Classic Lowland Maya succumbed to a drought in the 9th century, despite their area having been affected by drought centuries earlier. In that case, although the Maya did have writing, it recorded kings' deeds and astronomical events rather than weather reports, so that the drought of the 3rd century did not help the Maya anticipate the drought of the 9th century.In modern literate societies whose writing does discuss subjects besides kings and planets, that doesn't necessarily mean that we draw on prior experience committed to writing. We, too, tend to forget things. For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, we Americans shied away from gas-guzzling cars, but then we forgot that experience and are now embracing SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events.When the city of Tucson in Arizona went through a severe drought in the 1950s, its alarmed citizens swore that they would manage their water better, but soon returned to their water-guzzling ways of building golf courses and watering their gardens.In modern literate societies whose writing does discuss subjects besides kings and planets, that doesn't necessarily mean that we draw on prior experience committed to writing. What the so called modern society, too, tend to forget things. When the city of Tucson in Arizona went through a severe drought in the 1950s, its alarmed citizens swore that they would manage their water better, but soon returned to their water-guzzling ways of building golf courses.Another reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem involves reasoning by false analogy, when we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations. That's a good way to proceed if the old and new situations are truly analogies, but it can be dangerous if they are only superficially similar.A tragic and famous modern example of reasoning by false analogy involves French military preparations from World War II. In reasoning by false analogy after World War I, French generals made a common mistake: generals often plan for a coming war as if it will be like the previous war, especially if that previous war was one in which their side was victorious.After a society has or hasn't anticipated a problem before it arrives, involves its perceiving or failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. Why? First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible. For example, the nutrients responsible for soil fertility are invisible to the eye, and only in modern times did they become measurable by chemical analysis. Another frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it has arrived is distant managers, a potential issue in any large society or business.Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. The medieval Greenlanders had difficulties in recognizing that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier. Politicians use the term 'creeping normalcy' to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one's baseline standard for what constitutes 'normalcy' shifts gradually and imperceptibly. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.Societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived. This is the most surprising, and requires the longest discussion because it assumes such a wide variety of forms. Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term 'rational behavior,' arising from clashes of interest between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior 'rational' precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible.The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small, uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority's grab. A frequent type of rational bad behavior is 'good for me, bad for you and for everybody else'—to put it bluntly, 'selfish.'It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live? Millions of people in modern times have indeed faced the decision whether, to save their own life, they would be willing to betray friends or relatives, acquiesce in a vile dictatorship, live as virtual slaves, or flee their country. Nations and societies sometimes have to make similar decisions collectively. All such decisions involve gambles, because one often can't be certain that clinging to core values will be fatal, or (conversely) that abandoning them will ensure survival.Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years, the world's most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles. The world as a whole today faces similar decisions about its environmental problems.Common further irrational motives for failure to address problems include that the public may widely dislike those who first perceive and complain about the problem. The public may dismiss warnings because of previous warnings that proved to be false alarms, as illustrated by Aesop's fable about the eventual fate of the shepherd boy who had repeatedly cried 'Wolf!' and whose cries for help were then ignored when a wolf did appear. The public may shirk its responsibility by invoking 'It's someone your problem!'The last speculative reason for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial. This is a technical term with a precisely defined meaning in individual psychology, and it has been taken over into the pop culture. If something that you perceive arouses in you a painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress or deny your perception in order to avoid the unbearable pain, even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous. The emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety, and grief. Typical examples include blocking the memory of a frightening experience, or refusing to think about the likelihood that your husband, wife, child, or best friend is dying because the thought is so painfully sad.Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late. Some attempted solutions backfire and make the problem worse.Now, we will turning back to Kotkin's photos. Historically, feudalism was hardly a monolithic system, and it lasted much longer in some places than others. But certain salient features can be seen in feudal structures across medieval Europe: a strongly hierarchical ordering of society, a web of personal obligations tying subordinates to superiors, the persistence of closed classes or 'castes,' and a permanent serflike status for the vast majority of the population. The few dominated the many as by natural right. Feudal governance was far more decentralized than either the Roman Empire that preceded it or the nation-states that followed, and it depended more on personal relationships than does liberal capitalism or statist socialism. But in the feudal era, a static ideal of an ordered society, supported by a mandatory orthodoxy, prevailed over dynamism and mobility, in a condition of economic and demographic stagnation.History does not always move forward, to a more advanced or enlightened condition. The collapse of classical civilization is a case in point. That civilization had its cruel and unjust aspects, including the extensive use of slaves, but it also engendered cultural, civic, and economic dynamism that spread from the Near East to Spain, North Africa, and Britain. It developed a body of philosophy, law, and institutional forms that laid the basis of modern liberalism. But as classical civilization unraveled—from a combination of internal dysfunction and external pressure—its territories devolved into political disorder, cultural decline, and economic and demographic stagnation.Like all social structures, the liberal order brought its own injustices. Most shamefully, slavery was revived and extended to newly colonized territories. In addition, the industrial revolution replaced cottage industries with factories and created an impoverished urban proletariat living at the very edge of subsistence. But during the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, life became measurably better even for most of the working class, and the middle orders continued to grow in prosperity and numbers. Some government action came into play—for example, subsidizing homeownership, building new infrastructure, and permitting labor unions. Linking such policies to the engines of economic growth promoted a mass movement to affluence, the premier achievement of liberal capitalism.Just as the clerical elite shared power with the nobility in the feudal era, a nexus between the clerisy [Kotkin's term of the people who dominate the global web of cultural creators, academia, the media, and even much of what remains of traditional religious institutions] and the oligarchy lies at the core of neo-feudalism. These two classes often attend the same schools and live in similar neighborhoods in cities. On the whole, they share a common worldview and are allies on most issues, though there are occasional conflicts, as there were between the medieval nobility and clergy. Certainly, they hold similar views on globalism, cosmopolitanism, the value of credentials, and the authority of experts.This power nexus is enabled by technologies that once were widely seen as holding great promise for grassroots democracy and decision making, but have become tools for surveillance and a consolidation of power. Even as blogs proliferate, giving the appearance of information democracy, a small group of companies exercise tightening control over the flow of information and the shape of the culture. Our new overlords do not wear chain mail or top hats, but instead direct our future in jeans and hoodies. These technocratic elites are the twenty-first-century realization of what Daniel Bell prophetically labeled 'a new priesthood of power' based on scientific expertise.The modern clerisy often claim science as the basis of their doctrines and tout academic credentials as the key to status and authority. They seek to replace the bourgeois values of self-determination, family, community, and nation with “progressive” ideas about globalism, redefined gender roles, and the authority of experts. These values are inculcated through the clerisy’s dominance over the institutions of higher learning and media, aided by the oligarchy’s control of information technology and the channels of culture.One consequence of the current economic trends is growing pessimism throughout the high-income world. Half of all Europeans believe that future generations will suffer worse economic conditions than they did, according to the Pew Research Center. In France, the pessimistic view predominates by seven to one. A pessimistic trend is also marked in the usually more upbeat societies of Australia, Canada, and the United States (57 percent). Pessimism is also growing in East Asia, which has been the economic dynamo of the current era. In Japan, a full three-quarters of those polled expect things to be worse for the next generation, and that expectation also predominates in such successful countries as Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Many young people in China have reason for pessimism: in 2017, eight million college graduates entered the job market to find they could only earn salaries that they might have gotten by going to work in a factory straight out of high school.Another sign of pessimism is declining birth rates, particularly in the high-income countries. In Europe as well as Japan, and even in the once relatively fecund United States, fertility rates are nearing historic lows, even though young women state a wish to have more children. This demographic stagnation, another throwback to the Middle Ages, has various explanations, including women’s high levels of participation in the workforce and a desire for more leisure time. Other reasons are economic, including a shortage of affordable family housing. Liberal capitalism in its heyday built large stretches of affordable housing for the upwardly mobile middle and working classes, but the new feudalism is creating a world where fewer and fewer people can afford to own homes. A trend of diminishing expectations has weakened support for liberal capitalism even in solidly democratic countries, particularly among younger people. Far more than older generations, they are losing faith in democracy, not only in the United States but also in Sweden, Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. People born in the 1970s and 1980s are less strongly opposed to such undemocratic assertions of power as a military coup than are those born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.Lately, there is a turning away from democratic liberalism around the world. Authoritarian leaders are consolidating power in countries that previously appeared to be on a liberalizing path—Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia. In more democratic countries, we can see a new longing for a strongman, some of them more functionally authoritarian. Many people who are losing faith in the prospects of liberty look for a paternalistic protector instead. Authoritarian leaders often rise by evoking the imagined glories of the past and stoking resentments both old and new. At the end of the Cold War, the world seemed to be traveling on a natural 'arc' to a more democratic future, but today’s new world order has instead become a promising springtime for dictators.We'll finished our session this time and we'll going through the next session, bi 'idhnillah. Now, allow me to go to the back room for a moment, because 'I'm going to sleep!'"And as walking to the back room, Sansevieria sang a song,You may say I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will live as one *)
Citations & References:
- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005, Viking Penguin
- Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feodalism: A Warning to Global Middle Class, 2020, Encounter Books
*) "Imagine" written by John Winston Lennon
