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How Our Aversion To Change Leads Us Into Danger
Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
The deeply embedded, genetically determined aversion -or resistance- to change that we are all born with is an important survival tactic. Since change equals potential danger, our aversion to it keeps us out of danger.
We are ‘programmed’ to prefer familiar surroundings, to first look at what we recognize, and to ignore what we do not until we feel comfortable enough about what we do know.
Ironically, though, the aversion to change can also lead us into danger. Because it prevents us from preparing for change, and therefore preparing for danger.
Yes, people can adapt, they have that ability too, but we don’t fully adapt to change until and unless we’re forced to. And while it may not be too late then, it certainly tends to make adaptation much more difficult.
We prefer to focus on those things that stay the same, or seem to stay the same, ignoring those that don’t, even if they change in -comparatively- radical ways, until we no longer can. But by then we have most often missed a significant part of the time and the opportunity to adapt to them. Our resistance to change causes us to miss those changes that happen despite our efforts at keeping things the same.
The deeper problem, as every thinking human can recognize, is that things always change, life changes, the world does. Nothing ever stays the same. Change itself is the only constant. Life equals change. Without change, there would be no life.
And arguably -since time is perhaps not a constant-, changes come even faster today than they have historically, in the perception of our ancestors, both in human designed systems and in natural systems. And the faster the changes come, the more vulnerable our inborn aversion to change makes us. Which in turn reinforces that aversion all the more.
In today’s world, plant and animal species go extinct at a far faster pace than ever in human history. The planet warms, sea levels rise. Pollution of multiple kinds increases at an exponential speed.
Our initial genetic reaction to all of this is to withdraw deeper into the cocoons we’ve built, and ignore, if not deny, that these things are happening. Or we may care up to a point, donate some money or even wave a banner, but always with an eye to returning to the safety of our cocoons.
The way it appears to work is that our aversion to change turns against us because, and when, it is amplified by our propensity to lie to ourselves and to each other.
That’s also the point where we let the sociopaths of the world into the picture, and that’s where we allow them to be our leaders. They thrive on our denial of change, of problems, of dangers. They know to tell us just what we want to hear. Recovery, hope, wealth, clean energy, whatever sells on any given day.
Politicians eagerly use our resistance to change, because they don’t want change either, lest it costs them their positions. The world’s wealthiest, too, seize on to our inbuilt drive to hold on to what’s familiar, and they use it to get even wealthier.
It is nothing new that people’s fears can be used to control them. Fear of the unknown, fear of what’s different, fear of change. But also fear of communists, fear of muslims, fear of people who have different skin colors, customs, rituals and cultures. We possess a myriad of -often dormant- fears, and it is very easy to play into them, and get people to support those who promise to protect them. “Trust me, I’ll keep you comfy, I’ll make sure things stay just the same. And better.”
What is true for changes in climate, pollution, extinction rates, is also true for the economy and our perceived wealth status. We try to ignore the biggest changes, and elect people to represent us who feed into that denial.
Together, politics and big money, through the media they firmly control, today paint a picture of a world in recovery – a beneficial change, a return to what we are comfortable with-, albeit a recovery that requires job cuts and pay cuts and austerity and other miserable measures for ‘normal people’. It’s the price you’ve got to pay for being allowed to stay in your comfort zone.
The reality, however, is that there is no recovery, and there can’t and won’t be until huge amounts of debt have either been repaid or restructured. Meanwhile, the rich and their bankers continue to increase their profits and upscale their lifestyles, as everyone else gets squeezed while dreaming of what they once had, or were once dreaming of.
This way we have entirely missed out on perhaps the biggest change to our economies in human history. That is, our economies, and therefore our societies, no longer run on what we produce, they run on what we borrow. This is not that recent a development, but what is new is that we have reached a stage where the inevitable shadow side of the arrangement is becoming ever more obvious.
The optimum, the sweet spot, for our western economies can be debated, but the range is not that wide: it will be sometime between the late 1960s and the mid-to-late 1970s. That’s when our societies -and their private citizens- would have been at their richest, and it’s all been downhill from there, something that becomes obvious especially when looking at what debt levels have done since.
At first debt went up slowly, but then it started to accelerate faster, in a classical hockey stick model. Around the year 2000, again not a solid date but close, we began to need to issue more debt just to service existing debt. And since then, we’ve dug a much deeper debt hole for ourselves.
Which we will only be able to climb out of after a painful sequence of deleveraging and deflation. It will be so painful that it’s pretty much useless to think about what we’re going to do at the other end of it; the world will have changed so profoundly by then we wouldn’t recognize it anyway. Talk about change.
The process of trying to ignore the changes taking place around us has had many perverse effects, but perhaps none more than our inability to see how a wide range of organizational structures in our world have changed their roles, their goals and their purposes.
NATO has always been presented as beneficial to our safety, as well as that of the entire world. It lost that role a long time ago, but we’re ignorant of that change. The IMF was supposed to instill balance into the global economy, and provide support to weaker nations, but it’s become a tool for the rich to squeeze the poor. The same holds for the World Bank.
The US was born as a union of free states, but it’s rapidly becoming a force of suppression for both its own citizens and just about all other nations on the planet. The EU was meant to unite European countries in a manner that should prevent yet more wars, but it‘s become an authoritarian bureaucracy that divides and will, if it is not stopped, provoke fighting among nations once our economic facades start to crumble for real.
We used think of our media as independent organizations whose goal it was to provide us with objective information on local as well as world affairs. Today, there is very little left in the media that could be labeled objective even with the best of intentions.
There are many more examples of things that have changed profoundly, and where we entirely missed out on the changes. And as we may start to realize the reason why we didn’t see the changes as they happened, i.e. we are genetically pre-disposed not to notice them, we may also come to perceive the role these changes are set to play in our future lives, and the dangers they pose to those lives.
It’s a remarkable PR and spin achievement that we have been led to -still- believe our societies need megabanks to survive, and it’s just as remarkable that trade deals like NAFTA, TPP and TTiP are sold to us as beneficial to our lives, even as they are concocted in the most flagrant anti-democratic way imaginable. “Trust us”.
Alas, the moment we finally wake up to what these deals represent, we won’t own a single square inch of our own world anymore. The very people who claim to bring freedom to the rest of the world are very busy taking our freedom away at home.
The relentless invasions by US/UK/NATO military of a dozen or so Muslim nations, all of which resulted in utter political chaos in formerly largely peaceful societies, in bloodshed among their citizens and even sometimes in the murder of doctors and nurses, all these things find widespread support among western populations thinking “we” are still on the right side of the equation, or even that God is still on our side.
Even if the murder of civilian populations has long been constituted as a war crime, and even if we all intuitively understand that those who volunteer to work in the world’s most volatile regions in order to help ordinary people in mortal danger, like the doctors and nurses in Medecins sans Frontiers’ numerous locations around the world, are arguably the best among us, they get bombed and shot at, and their lifeless remains discarded as collateral damage, and we pretend that somehow that’s alright.
Russia has been carefully positioned by our governments and media as the new/old baddest enemy we have, but Stalin is long gone and our representatives are unable to provide us with any evidence of the evil deeds Moscow is alleged to be guilty of this time around.
Today, with the Russian army stepping in where the west, at least if we may believe its stated goals, has failed -Syria-, NATO cries wolf as loud as it can. And we believe it, because we believe it’s protecting us from evil. That it may well be the agent of evil itself is a matter that cannot be discussed, and isn’t.
The persistent claim emanating from Washington that America spreads freedom and democracy around the world has been exposed as ludicrous numerous times and in many parts of the world, but not in the US itself, and that’s what counts; most.
It’s easier for us to ignore the changes that the behemoth political, economical and military structures in our own societies have undergone, and that’s who they like it. At a certain scale, an organizational structure gets too large too wrap a human mind around, nobody oversees what happens and why, and the organizations therefore attract the wrong people as leaders, the sociopathic types who thrive in exactly such situations.
But sociopaths know exactly which buttons to push, or they wouldn’t rise to their positions. And one of those buttons is your aversion to change, and all the fears change can give way to. Through the same methods you are being sold detergent, you are relentlessly pushed to trust a political system and its representatives that once may -may- have acted in your best interest but no longer do.
In the same vein, economic growth may once have been a valid goal to strive for, but today has not only become impossible because of the aforementioned debt levels, it must also be seriously questioned in view of massive pollution, mass extinctions and changing climates.
The notion that we we can grow our way out of the mess that our previous growth spurt has gotten us into, rests at best on very flimsy foundations. To shake off this all-encompassing growth ideal, however, we would need to radically change our ‘model’ of the world.
Unfortunately, we are pre-disposed not to like change, let alone the radical kind.
The combination of our pre-disposition against change and the accelerating rate of change we ourselves have induced, means we are entering what may be seen as the ‘dark side’ of that disposition.
And while we can try and ignore that dark side for a little bit longer, the days of our ignorance are numbered. Our blinders are about to be ripped off our faces, in a violent fashion. We’re not going to like it.
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According to ZH end of world happened 10 y ago or so, but for some weird reason whole mankind refuses to see it
This commentary was boring until Raul started talking about sociopaths. As to a general aversion to change, after being duped by traitor president Obama's "change we can believe in," I can understand why people look at the word "change" in the public arena now as a buzzword used by POS politicians to lie to the people they claim to represent.
On another related subject dealing with U.S. government corruption, the attempted assassination of Spencer Stone:
The cover-up is continuing with the attempted murder of Spencer Stone, a key figure in stopping the New World Order planned August massacre on the French high speed train.
The fight outside the Sacramento bar was staged, the guy who tried to kill Stone will not be found alive and the dumb bell press will move on to more important stuff like Michelle Obama’s improved school lunch program.
---
[Sacramento Deputy Police Chief Ken] Bernard said that the stabbing was “not related to terrorism in any way” and that there’s no indication whoever stabbed Stone knew who he was.
Police have not named any suspects, but they are seeking two men believed to have fled in a 2009-2012 dark Toyota Camry. They released a blurry image of the two men, and later posted security camera footage of the suspects. In the video, three people run up to a car that stops on the street for them to jump in.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-spencer-stone-stabbed-in-sac...
http://beforeitsnews.com/opinion/2015/10/steven-segal-says-mass-shooting...
cognitave dissonance...
According to morator. . .
If the money system doesn't change into something sustainable, everything else is moot.
Because the money system controls the other systems, so it will always do what is best for it, ie exponential growth.
pods
Sticking with what has worked in the past has saved more lives than it's ever cost. By a metric shit-ton.
"Change" is what politicians say when they want to take your money, your liberty or both. (And they all say it).
Real change happens organically. A few try out a new idea and they either get cut to ribbons or find it's a better way. Others follow, or not, depending on that outcome.
This whole idea of one leader having the vision to drag his country out of the wilderness into a bright new future like he's fucking Moses leading the Israelites or something is idiotic beyond comprehension.
So a single leader can drag a nation down to the depths of shit....but it's inconceivable that one could drag that same nation out of those depths. Guess what, it's happened already. The world went to war against that nation because the leader was just such a man. You know who!!!!!
It's a lot easier to tear-down than to build up. When what was built was mostly smoke and mirrors to begin with, it's even easier.
I mean sorry bro but history proves your assertion wrong. Check out Germany 1930-1940, it was pretty easy actually...he did it in less than 10 years.
As an example of which? Success or failure? They did both.
With most of the nation united behind Hitler they rose up.
With Hitler trying to run the whole war by himself, ignoring his generals and foolishly invading Russia as winter came on, they failed.
Referring to economic success of the nation and nationalist hedgemony. The fog of war can ruin the best of nations, mistakes are bound to be made, the war wasn't started by Germany unless you take the simplistic traditionalist zio view.
Whether the war was started by Germany or not they could have won it. Easily. ONE MAN fucked that war up for them- the guy at the top. And the whole nation paid the price.
Missing the point, I think we both agree the world would be a better place if it had...won.
We definitely fought the wrong enemy.
I think it should also be said that in a war the last thing you want is an "organic movement" or a democracy. Unfortunately war tactics are defined by single men, just like boats are captained by single men. Sometimes they're wrong, sometimes they're right, but wars are always won or lost based on the decision of a single man, it's the nature of the beast.
THE INTERNET REJECTS YOUR COMMENTS
NAZIS ARE LOSERS WHO PLAYED LEATHER DRESS UP
PLEASE HANG UP AND DO NOT CALL BACK
Read The Wages of Destruction:The Making And Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze, and then get back to me.
Short version: no, they were not destroyed only by the war. The War was the original reason for the uptick in the economy, with full employment in war industries. It was also the reason for sudden shortages in necessary goods like FOOD. It was used as a substitute for local production, through the looting of the first, easy conquests, and the brutal enslavement of their populations as forced labor. And it was always a mad gamble, in the hope that sufficient territory could be conquered and goods stolen, to make Germany self-sufficient and therefore not dependent on world capital markets controlled by Britain and the Unmentioned Ones, and that Britain and America would stand down and let them retain their conquests in peace. A bad gamble, because Churchill was just waiting for an excuse to "finish" the destruction of Germany he hadn't been able to complete in WWI.
They did a lot of brilliant things economically, but fundamentally, the Nazi economic miracle came down to 1) defaulting on their debt, 2) full employment due to massive military industrial expansion, and 3) use of slave labor.
Spreading "Democracy" to foreign lands yet trying to remove Democracy for U.S. citizens? Makes sense.
"At first debt went up slowly, but then it started to accelerate faster, in a classical hockey stick model. Around the year 2000, again not a solid date but close, we began to need to issue more debt just to service existing debt."
This is because the U.S has been in a depression since the collapse in 2000 and everything has been masked over by moar debt and SNAP. If the blinders were ever pulled off and the illusion of prosperity through the artificial propping up of asset prices were stripped away people would see that the country looks much like it did in the first great depression. But, it's getting harder to cover up the truth. All a person has to do is look around them and you can see the infrastructure crumbling around them
The 'hockey stick" of national debts began their steep rise in 1974, immediately following the formation of that ten nation abomination known as the Basel Committee. Prior to that, national budgets were frugal, deficits were relatively insignificant.
Eg.,
http://qualicuminstitute.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/fedebt1.png
So what happened?
"the Basel Committee was established by the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the member central banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)... A key objective of the Committee was and is to maintain “monetary and financial stability.” To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free and encouraged borrowing from private creditors, all in the name of “maintaining the stability of the currency.”
The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books ( Ed.-McGeer monetary policy, which served prudent nations adequately for ~7 decades) would inflate the money supply and prices. Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money. What the bankers did not reveal, although they had long known it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do. The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy." E Brown
Some might dare call it conspiracy.
All people have a resistance towards change ... because change often appears threatening.
The USA has many large power strutures. These power structures operate as "kingdoms" and there is great resistance to change. People who operate inside any large bureaucratic organization are surrounded by many other people with the same viewpoint. So they keep repeating the same 'worldview' to each other. this suppresses diversity of thought. Resistance to change is inevitable.
The same pattern has affected civilizations throughout history.
How Change for Change's sake Leads Us Into Danger
Fixed it.
IGNORE THIS HISTORY!
http://showrealhist.com
KEEP YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND!
More boomer retirements, SNAP cards, printing by the Fed to buy treasuries and burying them in off-balance sheet.
Game goes on until the Fed burys the US dollar.
Fed playing a huge PhD shell game.
It's regretable that grwoth is attacked in articles like this. There is a Malthusian strain of thought behind some of this. My kids and gradchildren are going to space, where the limits to growth are almost unimaginable.
Let me know how they enjoy breathing vacuum, being fried alive by ionizing cosmic rays, and eating rocks. Agreed, the view is gorgeous, but there are some SMALL kinks to be worked out before the neighborhood can be developed.
Gaoptimize - we are out of time' on Planet Earth. The great dream that Space would save us, and we would all move away to the planets and stars has failed. UNLESS our scientists make a truly redical breakthrough in the next 20-30 years - which is always possible - we are stuck on Earth.
It's certainly possible that we coudl get a few thousand people into space by the end of this century - people living on the Moon and maybe Mars. People mining asteroids. But the cost of space travel is too high right now. We literally need "antigravity" to make a major jump.
Otherwise - we are beaten by demographics. WE have 7.2 billion people on Earth now, and by 2060 we will have 9 billion. There is NO plan for how we are going to FEED these people and give them clean water, energy, houses and medical care. That's it. Our entire plan for the future, which is only 45 years away, is nonexistent.
We have a world civilization on a non-sustainable path.
The cost of space travel will always be higher than the returns. That said Raul's worship of Malthus causes him to write imbecilic articles like this one. A few correct facts and a totally wrong conclusion.
There is a plan, at least for the US - it's called Heroin. And it's available really cheap these days thanks to the CIA. They use the money to fund all types of activities and proxy wars, and in turn, lots of kids here get hooked and die young (before they can procreate). It's a win-win.
I'm not sure what the plan is for the rest of the world. At one point I thought it might be Ebola...but that trial balloon seems to have failed.
I imagine they're cooking up something good - and when the elites have what they need to survive without a lot of people (technological singularity), and have figured out how to get rid of the majority of the population without either f'ing up the entire planet, or harming themselves...they will.
For the time being, they'll just keep letting things deteriorate to the point where the average Joes fight amongst themselves. It looks like they're doing pretty good in that regard.
The problem is not the earth's capacity, for it could handle 5X the current population; it is a few who believe they are superior are running and controlling the resources the earth provides. It is and always has been man's moral failure.
Then again, what one believes about origins will determine their world view, which is why depopulation among the elite is quite logical based on an old age view. Why? You must think about the view of man is evolved and to continue with finite resources, then some are superior and many are inferior and therefore the superior is more desirable to sustain given finite resources. I disagree with the original premise, but as I said ones view of origins will determine their worldview whether a person thinks it through or not.
It's funny how this thread really lets the Luddites self-identify.
Personally, after waiting for over five years I think it is long overdue for a plausible, alternative way forward to come from the post-hardcore-pre-apocalyptic-drone-loving-renaissance-mans peanut gallery
but all they ever seem to have to offer is self-righteous (but rarely right) snark, rainbow shitting unicorns, or
<crickets>
Regrettably, none of the alternative ways forward seem plausible in our nuclear age because our political science dwells in the sticks and stones epoch.
Thanks for that link!
Lies backed by violence gravitates towards the path of least morality. More radical truth backed by violence, which begins with the threat of violence, would result in a new model. Militarism remains the supreme ideology. What's the radical truth? We need exactly zero more children at this moment in time. That sounds mean, heart-breaking, to me too but look in, look out, look around.
"Rising falling at force ten we twist the world and ride the wind."
Rush / Hold Your Fire / Force Ten - 1987 - (Live R30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBKCg25RBpQ
Tough times demand tough talk
Demand tough hearts demand tough songs
Demand...
We can rise and fall like empires
Flow in and out like the tide
Be vain and smart, humble and dumb
We can hit and miss like pride
Just like pride
We can circle around like hurricanes
Dance and dream like lovers
Attack the day like birds of prey
Or scavengers under cover
Chorus
Look in -- to the eye of the storm
Look out -- for the force without form
Look around -- at the sight and the sound
Look in look out look around...
We can move with savage grace
To the rhythms of the night
Cool and remote like dancing girls
In the heat of the beat and the lights
We can wear the rose of romance
An air of joie de vivre
Too-tender hearts upon our sleeves
Or skin as thick as thieves'
Thick as thieves'....
Chorus
Tough times demand tough hearts
Demand tough songs demand...
Look into the eye of the storm...
Look out for the force without form
Look around at the sight and sound
Look in, look the storm in the eye
Look out for the sea and the sky
Look around at the sight and sound
Look in, look out, look around...
Tough times demand tough hearts
Tough times demand tough talk