From a review by Eleanor Bader of Howard Zinn's "Afterword" emerges the startling fact that the world's 793 billionaires have assets that total $2.4 trillion -- roughly equivalent to the entire income of the world's poorest 3 billion people.
In LA, where I live, it would be as if I had the same amount of money as all the other people living here.
My first thought on reading this was that you are either one of two kinds of people. You either find this statistic appalling, or you don't. But that probably makes it a little too easy for me to feel morally superior to those who might shrug at this number, instead of trying to understand why this is so.
I've decided that it's less that people don't care, than that they can't care. Not on such a scale.
Our brain will give equal weight to the story of one individual in a million as it does to a story about one million individuals. If a well is dug to bring water to a single Afghan village, we will accord it the same amount of cranial cells as the fact that one-third of the world's population does not have dependable access to clean water. We do not have the mental capacity to assign perspective on a proportionate scale. We can mourn Anne Frank more easily that we can cry for her six million fellows.
In the face of incomprehensible numbers, we are likely not to comprehend. That's because our physical evolution proceeds at the same glacial pace as it has for millions of years, whereas our cultural evolution now moves at relative hyper-speed. We are operating with basically the same brains that evolved to worry about the 40 or so others in our immediate tribal grouping, and maybe the three or four other clans in the surrounding valley. Whether the day's hunting or gathering would be successful occupied the lion's share of our consciousness. It's no wonder that such a brain prefers to concentrate on the bottom two couples on Dancing With the Stars than contemplate the bottom two billion of the world's human beings living in poverty.
I hold out some hope that the sheer volume of the world's population might increase the likelihood of positive mutations that used to occur over tens of thousands of generations. Because we need better brains. We need a less abstract comprehension of trillion dollars deficits, global warming, epidemics, and what 50,000 gallons of oil spilling a day really is. Otherwise the simple and the parochial explanations are bound to trump the complex but accurate realities.
Our cups runneth over: we need bigger cups.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
It really made me think. While I'll continue to focus on facts and figures and use logic, I'll keep in mind that a personal appeal can make it seem more real. It can also bring it down to a level that our inadequate brains can at least try to get a handle on.
So I search from macro-explanations to figure out the seeming contradictions. And I really think the information age is also the Age of Overwhelming. People--particularly north of 50--are craving explanations that don't require nuance, that reflect to some degrees the certainties they grew up with. It's hard to live in shades of grey, but let's face it, this is not a world of physical or moral or even scientific absolutes. I think doubt threatens a great many people. I, on the other, rather relish not being completely sure about anything.
Except that kindness is always good.
A very succinct summary of the limitations of the human mind to deal with rationality, equivalents, and perspective among other things.
Philosophically you have touched on the most vexing problem facing humanity... the critical imbalance between individual ability and our ever increasing dependence on human technological achievement.
In a world that requires multitasking, our single focused tribal brains often betray us. The whole question of long term human survival will eventually have to deal with this conflicting dualism.
of the human race lies more in the shallowness of our world views. World views are taught by culture
and the limits of your world view determine how deeply you can care, how many layers down you can
think. We have a great tool, the mind. The problem is we don't teach how to use it to its full potential.
Giving up our world views, our belief in beliefs, is the next stage in evolution!!!!
Whether our fabulous minds can come up with solutions faster than the cultures we create destroyithe planet remains to be seen. The nightmare in the Gulf might be the ultimate omen of what's to come.