New Ideas

We can no longer rely on instincts and let nature take its course. Nor can progressive humans carry on with outdated social, religious and economic ideologies based on misunderstandings of human nature, human history and planet ecology. Smart people can break through old paradigms and recognize patterns in human nature that determine human conduct. Good, new ideas always impress me and I always ask -why didn't I think of that?  A new, good idea can spread from person to person and can make people smarter and more effective in the world. A good idea may seem obvious once you understand and accept it, but before someone comes up with the idea, you are ignorant. Unfortunately, old and bad ideas are more common and propagate more easily through human groups. New ideas are not readily accepted and are opposed by people who are disabled by bad ideas. Old programs nested in the limbic system continue to dominate the human experience.

New ideas face perseveration, the tendency for a fixed behavior to repeat or persist, even when the benefits old behaviors have vanished. If you try to block old behaviors, you face resistance and anger.

Humans do not act alone, but participate in groups that accomplish both good and bad results.  The natural and spontaneous level of human thought is superstitious story-telling, based on false beliefs that perpetuate errors in judgment and attribution. Humans who do not have access to new ideas and learn only a few of the old, worn-out and bad ideas are stuck with being ignorant.

We have to think ourselves out of dangerous predicaments and develop new ideas of political and economic organization.  For example, the tendency to increase the size and power of corporate and government organizations is contrary to our understanding of human nature. These enlarging organizations must not acquire autocratic authority.

The best idea is to continue to develop forums of cooperation that are organized around local groups and serve the interests of local groups. Humans can do well, even with marked cognitive limitations, because most transactions of life are carried out by innate, expert systems in their brain that do not require educated and rational thinking.

Education is important, but what education?  The old idea of education based on classrooms, desks in a row, reading and writing may have served humans for a while, but new ideas and new practices in education are urgently needed. Hands-on, real world, tool-using, cooperative interaction of humans in skill-requiring and action situations should be the new paradigm for education.

Each new human that arrives on the planet has to transcend innate behaviors that are self-destructive and harmful to their species.

Humans have to re-examine what they care about and advance new vocabularies that allow them to proceed into new domains of thought and understanding. There are growing delays in the assimilation of new knowledge and a rapidly widening schism separates the few who know how things really work and the majority who do not. The result is a steep gradient of understanding and skill that separates groups within each technically advanced country and separates countries with disparate systems of government, education and religion.

Even though crude thinking dominates human society and will probably dominate for a long time to come, a small percentage of humans with especially clever minds will keep evolving toward some ultimate encounter with the really real. We can hope that smart and nice come together, since smart and evil is an undesirable combination.

Diamond suggested that we can learn from societies that collapsed quickly and unexpectedly and from others that thrived longer. He asked: “Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they contemplate the world's growing population and human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity's biggest problems today are entirely of our own making. …I draw hope from a unique advantage that we enjoy… we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of societies remote from us in space and in time.

“When the Maya and Mangarevans were cutting down their trees, there were no historians or archaeologists, no newspapers or television, to warn them of the consequences of their actions. We, on the other hand, have a detailed chronicle of human successes and failures at our disposal. Will we choose to use it? “ 

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Group Dynamics

Group Dynamics is part of the  Psychology & Philosophy series, developed by Persona Digital Books. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from Group Dynamics published online and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason and the publisher is Persona Digital Books. The most recent date of publication is 2010.  The URL to the book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/groupdynamics/