Member-only story
Destructive Distractions
Why our firm belief that nothing is ever our fault means we end up crippling ourselves
One of the enduring glories of human nature is our desire to avoid taking any responsibility for the outcomes we engender. Children blame bad behavior on inanimate objects and siblings while politicians blame their follies on extra-national organizations and damn’ foreigners. In the corporate world, avoidance of blame is a prerequisite for advancement while scapegoating has been elevated to a fine art in most military organizations. And as we all know, every financial disaster resulting from the greed of a few powerful executives is always and forever the fault of some rogue junior employee.
The problem with our willful pretense that we’re never to blame for anything is that while it’s a pleasant self-soothing fantasy, the real world doesn’t buy into our fairytales. The real world operates deterministically and this means that doing stupid things results in harmful outcomes. It would be delightful if we were capable of learning this very basic lesson but, alas, the human brain has been hardwired by evolution to avoid attempting any effort at thinking because of the calories such efforts consume. As calories were scarce and uncertain for 98% of our evolutionary history, indolence both physical and mental was highly adaptive.
Would that it were still so today! Alas, not only are we surrounded by a superabundance of nutrient-free calories (hence the modern obesity epidemic) but due to the cumulative effect of thousands of inventions made by the miniscule percentage of people actually capable of thinking, our world has changed beyond all recognition. Yes, we still use modern technologies for age-old behaviors: social media is nothing more than electronic gossip, and modern weapons are merely superior jaw-bones and pointed sticks. We now use cars and (to a much more limited extent) public transport to avoid physical exertion instead of sitting under a tree. But we live in a world denuded of everything our brains need in order to orient ourselves. Our groups are too large, events are too fast-paced, and the Internet has turned everyone into a phone zombie incapable of even noticing the external world. Global interconnections mean that soundbite “solutions” to complex problems reliably and…
