Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares [10] [10]
Tales from the Bizarro World
Back in the 1960s, DC Comics introduced a parallel Earth called Bizarro, where everything is inverted and everyone is insane. They even have their own wacky Superman, which ends up being a formidable foe of his sane counterpart in our world.
Or not in our world perhaps. Some events make us question in which of the two we might actually be living in: what if it was some version of Bizarro?
Over the last decades scientists have been researching certain quirks in our brain, or cognitive biases, that make us act in rather illogical and peculiar ways under certain circumstances. Since Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first introduced this notion in 1972, a growing body of evidence suggests that we may not be as rational as we once thought. And this impacts many areas of our lives, including our beliefs, attitudes towards certain events, political affiliations and so forth.
A less scientific explanation for our illogical behaviors is that they may simply be the result of our imperfect human condition. That, or something in our environments could be poisoning our reasoning (we would argue, quite acutely in the case of Keynesian economists) similar to what happened to the Romans after they started using led in everyday life artifacts.
Whatever the reason, consider the examples presented below, drawn from the fields of economics, politics, health, society and even religion. Now, to be clear, we don't mean to pick on any country or anyone in particular, much less on their beliefs (except for those Keynesians). Remember, in the Bizarro World everyone is mad so presumably we are all in this together.
Let’s proceed...
- If you want to market a new medicine, first you need to spend years in a very expensive approval process to make sure it is completely safe to the public. However, at the same time, any adult can buy a particular and ubiquitous consumer product where it is clearly written in the package that if you use it will eventually kill you and all those around you
- Keynesian economists tell us that in order to get richer we must save less and get deeper into debt
- Obesity is estimated to kill three times as many [11] as malnutrition
- World governments spend trillions on weapons every year when we already have the capacity to blow up the planet many times over. But they always come up short when it comes to cleaning water supplies, providing healthcare, upgrading infrastructure, restoring nature and feeding people
- How does a desert-like region such as Southern California decide to become so dominant in food production [12]? All the water exported in the form of fresh produce, dairy, fresh fruits, rice and so on will NEVER return to that ecosystem
- Hemp consumption can become a destructive addiction; but so can alcohol consumption. Why is only one of them illegal, or, depending on your views on the matter, why aren’t both legal in the same places?
- A google search of “Kim Kardashian” generates 197 MILLION results (we speculate, to figure out what she actually does), just a tad less than the current US President “Barack Obama”
- Some 30-40% of global food production is wasted [13]
- Western leaders, once the biggest supporters of free markets, now spend trillions intervening in the economy. The US government has been the world's biggest employer for many years. The (Keynesian-inspired) theme is “we had to destroy capitalism in order to save it”
- Everyone talks about the need to reduce debt levels, and yet since 2007 total debt around the world has increased by almost US$60 trillion
- Politicians in the US seem to have gotten into the habit of approving major legislation without reading it [14]
- Pursuant to the Eurozone financial crisis in 2010, the Portuguese government was advised by international lenders to implement an aggressive austerity program. But public sector debt as a percentage of GDP ended up exploding as a result, reaching 166% last March [15] from 108% in December 2009 – the exact opposite of the program’s goal. Nevertheless, the Portuguese government was recently praised by the architects of the program for delivering outstanding results (while being told, perhaps unsurprisingly, that more austerity is needed)
- A famous actor passionately demands [16] in front of a UN assembly that world governments take drastic action to reduce carbon emissions and tackle global warming. Maybe they could start with him. Just a few months earlier he rented a mega yacht (complete with its own helipad) off Rio de Janeiro to watch the World Cup in style and supposedly flew his mother and himself multiple times on a private jet [17] while shooting one movie in the US
- A country known as the "Land of the Free" has one of the largest prison populations on the planet; another with "Order and Progress" written on its flag has 19 of the world’s 50 most dangerous cities
- A UK scientist achieves worldwide fame through his widely publicized efforts to debunk the existence of God, while admitting at the same time that creation might in fact be the result of intelligent design [18]
- In China, provincial governments have spent billions building new cities when most of their citizens can't afford living there. Many remain empty
- The Japanese government is so desperate to create inflation that it is printing more trillions of new debt, when even a modest increase in nominal yields will explode its fiscal position
- The West's financial system received trillions in financial support in 2008 to avoid an implosion of the global economy. However, it has since become even bigger and more concentrated, and as such the associated systemic risk might now be larger than ever. The people who designed this financial system are also doing better than ever
- Countries with the most abundant natural resources often have the poorest people
- Most parents unconditionally love their children and would do anything to secure their future. So why are we bequeathing a world with ballooning financial debts, less freedoms, lower education standards and increasingly broken ecosystems?
In his book “1984” George Orwell created his own version of an inverted world, where “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”. That was quite a frightening vision.
If we indeed live in the Bizarro World, what does that look like to you?
