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Blog
Archive October 2015
by Christopher G.
Moore*
George Orwell in 1941
wrote an essay titled Wells,
Hitler and the World State that deserves to be revisited in
2015. The re-examination is timely given the release of the 2015 World Press Freedom
Index.
The Reporters Without
Borders 2015 World Press Freedom Index report observes, “The worldwide
deterioration in freedom of information in 2014. Beset by wars, the growing
threat from non-state operatives, violence during demonstrations and the
economic crisis, media freedom is in retreat on all five continents.”
The reasons cited for the
decline, include:
Stretching sacrilege prohibitions
in order to protect a political system is an extremely effective way of
censuring criticism of the government in countries where religion shapes the
law. The criminalization of blasphemy endangers freedom of information in around
half of the world’s countries. When ‘believers’ think the courts are not doing
enough to ensure respect for God or the Prophet, they sometimes take it upon
themselves to remind journalists and bloggers what they may or may not say.
(2015 World Press Freedom
Index)
Another freedom report for
2015 by Freedom House also notes the trend of “discarding
democracy” and a “return to the iron fist.”

Freedom on
the Net 2015 finds “internet freedom around the
world in decline for a fifth consecutive year as more governments censored
information of public interest while also expanding surveillance and cracking
down on privacy tools.”
George Orwell understood
fully that the chain and ball of traditional belief systems hobbled minds
through religious or ideological dogma and channeled our innate cognitive biases
to filter for the inbox only that information and opinion reinforcing and
tightening the chains and increasing the weight of the ball. Orwell wrote about
beliefs and prejudices long before the Internet and social media promised a
digital hacksaw to break the chain and ball. Why hasn’t that promise been
delivered? Orwell has some answers worth considering. The promise of freedom of
expression and access to a huge pool of information is a danger signal for the
existing ruling classes. The prospect of unrestrained information and opinion
has caused official anxiety as institutions, dogma, and authority run into an
era of open challenges, criticism, and doubts. No dogma can sustain the assault
of the scientific method without appearing shallow, defensive, narrow and
vindictive.
The same was true in
Orwell’s time. H.G. Wells thought we were at the crossroads of humanity where
the scientific method would succeed and the ancient mindset based on beliefs and
biases would be replaced. George Orwell’s view was people like H.G. Wells
overplayed their scientific mindset hand. They hadn’t properly calculated the
strength of their opponents’ traditional hand. In the digital age, social media
is filled with the modern successors of H.G. Wells making the same claims and
arguments from nearly a hundred years ago. The decline in freedom of expression
is a wakeup call, one that should make us reassess what is at stake, and who are
the stakeholders, and what weapons are being assembled to protect
beliefs.
In this essay, Orwell
shows the frailty of H.G. Wells’ worldview of power, authority and superstition.
He asks what is the mindset that moves people to violence, war and barbarity.
H.G. Wells was a writer whom Orwell greatly admired as a boy. As an adult, he
found his hero wanting. Orwell revised his view of Wells in light of Hitler’s
army laying waste to Europe and threatening Britain with invasion. It would be a
mistake to consider the essay of only historical interest. Orwell had an uncanny
way of unearthing the truth that transcended the immediate historical context in
which it applied.
Several quotes from
Orwell’s essay warn of the limitations and dangers of accepting Wells’ view of
the scientific man and the scientific world. His reservations about whether the
scientific method of thinking will over take and tame our emotionally filtered
system of thinking remain as valid as they were seventy-four years ago. Despite
all of our advances in science, psychology, and communication after seventy-four
years, a case can be made that we are repeating the same mistakes about the
nature, role and scope of human emotions.
In 1941, Orwell
wrote:
The energy that actually shapes the
world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief,
love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as
anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves
as to have lost all power of action.
*
The order, the planning, the State
encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all
there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is
fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells
to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his [Well’s] own
works are based.
*
He was, and still is, quite
incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal
loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as
sanity.Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and
if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay
them.
The modern world deceived
the progressive liberal intellectuals in 1941 and continues to deceive them in
2015. The idea that our great scientific achievements and vastly improved social
media networks have changed the forces that drive the emotional reactions of
people is as bogus now as it was for Orwell who clearly saw how Hitler combined
grand pageantry, mythology, industrial achievement, and military capability into
a powerful emotional package. Hitler had repackaged the Dark Ages and sent his
army marching. He succeeded as his successors in the world succeed through
nationalistic and racial, theocratic, and feudal patronage where merit, skill
and talent are carefully controlled, isolated as a contaminating virus as deadly
as Ebola.
“Science is fighting
on the side of superstition,” seems a strange statement.We expected science
to choose a better ally. But science never is in a position to decide its
alliances. That is a political decision, and such decisions are underwritten in
feelings such as anger, hate, jealousy, envy, resentment and fear. The great
irony is that science, which expands our horizons has been feeble to break the
hold of our emotions.
As in 1941, we struggle to
accept that we largely remain ‘creatures out of the Dark Ages’ only far more
lethal and deadly as the means of repression, terror and intimidation have
vastly improved through use of modern technology. While our technology defines
the modern age, our emotional range is haunted by the primitive ghosts of our
ancient past.
We have great works such
as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and the fifty years of
research that have gone into better understanding the nature of how beliefs and
biases shape, filter, and distort our perceptions, comprehension, memories, and
attitudes. In other words, even when science has examined in detail the nature
of our emotional and cognitive limitations, there is a H.G. Wells temptation to
believe that this knowledge sets us free. It does not. It cannot.
Superstition will, for
most of us, prevail over the rational intellect. Our beliefs and ideologies,
which form the core of our identity, are resilient to challenge, facts, debate.
“Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of
war seemed to be all on the same side,” wrote Orwell. As for the opposite point
of view, history has shown the test audience for that alternative is vanishingly
small and narrow.
Orwell is too careful to
dismiss that H.G. Well’s rational, calculated and deliberately run society will
ultimately fall into the hands of leaders equipped with a scientific mindset
once the vast majority of the population alter its mindset to a scientific
setting. This may happen—“sooner or later,” to use Orwell’s phrase. He hedges
the timing issue and that was a wise decision in retrospect. Only a romantic
would predict that it is just around the corner. The 2015 Freedom Index suggests
that the so-called ‘corner’ in 2015 is no closer to us than it was to Orwell. I
suspect that the 2015 freedom reports wouldn’t have surprised him. Or that
future World Freedom reports have a high likelihood of showing further erosion
to freedom of expression. The scientific method and mindset shows no signs of
advancing to replace the old dogmatic belief structure. That would take a major
rewriting of our political, social and economic grid. Those with a vested
interest would likely lose in that changeover. Besides, they are mainly true
believers whose self is identified with their beliefs. And their beliefs provide
the raw courage and emotional strength to hunker down in the bunker to the last
man, woman and child.
Nor would George Orwell be
surprised at the likelihood that machine intelligence will vanish around that
corner, leaving our minds as they were in 1941 and leaving us behind to fight
new wars pretty much like we fought old ones.
* Author of
Crackdown and The Age of Dis-Consent.
Posted: 10/29/2015 9:45:36 PM |
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The Price for Being Different |
I have lived in Thailand
the better part of 30 years and hardly a year has passed without an article,
opinion piece, or letter to the editor about the dual-pricing practice. Entrance
fees to national parks, temples, museums and the like have two prices. The
non-Thai price can be as much as ten fold the price charged for Thais. I’ve
heard all of the arguments against this practice.
 By
Stephff (used with permission)
The Usual attack on the
dual-price system falls in several categories: (1) fairness; (2) discriminatory;
(3) harmful and a public relations disaster; (4) inconsistency—foreigners pay
the same auto tax and VAT for example; (5) arbitrary application or
enforcement—at some venues, on some days, with some staff a Thai driver’s
license or work permit is enough to allow the foreigner to receive the Thai
price; (6) mutuality—Thais going to public venues in other countries are charged
the same price as everyone else.
None of the above
arguments have moved the authorities for all of these years to change the
policy, and are met with a number of counter arguments to justify the different
price structure: (1) Thais pay taxes, foreigners don’t; (2) Thais are poor and
foreigners are rich; (3) Thais go to places to make merit, while foreigners go
for other reasons; (4) most countries impose higher prices for a number of
services on foreigners such as university fees.
The deeper question is why
does the dual pricing system prevail given the amount of bad feeling and
ill-will it generates, not to mention the negative publicity that circulates
each time this practice finds its way into the press or on social
media?
I have a couple of ideas
to explore. Dual pricing is an effect. It emerges from a psychological attitude,
a social construct of long-standing. One that is durable, immune from rational
argument, and like Teflon, isn’t scratched no matter how many logical bullets
you fire.
Dual practicing doesn’t
exist in isolation. Foreigners in general are seen as an outside group. They
work as slaves on fishing boats, on rubber plantations. History books in the
schools demonize the Burmese and Khmer. You start to understand a pattern, which
arises from a strong In-group Bias. This bias teaches that one should
always prefer a certain racial, ethnic or social group; and that membership of
the group defines identity. That identification leads to excluding others from
the circle of being in the in-group.
In Thailand, the in-group
bias is coiled inside the DNA of ‘Thainess’—definitions to which are a work in
progress. Of course there are Thais who see the bias for what it is—an effective
way to control a population by appealing to their identity as group based. The
bias is hardwired in all of us. History is overflown with examples of
xenophobia, ethnocentrism and nationalism. Geography or ethnic background plays
no difference. The precise expression draws from local traditions, customs,
language, myths—the usual machinery to construct communal and individual
identity. In times of crises, sizable populations in many countries retreat to
this core myth of tribal identity by default. But we are no longer bands of a
couple of dozen people. When millions of people chant their in-group truths like
mantras, like a weather report of a major storm heading your way, you should
notice the strength of how these emotions cascade.
For the Americans (and
sadly Canadians, too) this irrationality caused the government to relocate
ethnic Japanese to detention camps during World War II. These Japanese-Canadians
and Japanese-Americans lost their citizenship rights based solely on their
ethnicity. Americans had no trouble slaughtering native Indians at genocide
levels or enslaving blacks. South Africa used apartheid laws to separate blacks
and whites into different communities with different rights and opportunities.
In-group bias has cut a bloody and ignoble path throughout the history of most
cultures. In recent times the ethnic cleansing based on ethnic, religious, or
ideological in-groups left a trail of carnage from Bosnia to Cambodia to Rwanda.
More recently across the border in Burma the Rohingyas have been persecuted for
their religion and skin color. There is no end in sight.
What makes the in-group
bias invidious is how it operates without outward expressions of intention or an
awareness that the person is acting automatically. It would be the rare person
who stops and considers that what he or she is thinking is an act of irrational
prejudice. I suspect most Thais would be highly offended if they felt a
foreigner considered the dual pricing system based on racial prejudice. But
racial prejudice is part of the manifestation. If you happen to be an ethnic
Chinese, Burmese, Khmer, Japanese and can speak good Thai the chances are good
that you can slip through the Thai line and pay the ‘Thai’ price. As I said at
the start, dual pricing is only a minor irritant. The danger of in-group bias is
the way officials can use it to manipulate the emotions required to ramp up
xenophobia, ethnocentrism and nationalism.
Group Think is
the second feature that accompanies and sustains in-group basis. When a
foreigner questions discriminatory pricing he or she is criticizing not a bug
but a feature of group identity enterprise. That places him on dangerous
grounds. The arguments are irrelevant. The emotions are stirred by and outsider’
who is perceived to have attacked a basis of communal membership. There are
plenty of Thais who are uncomfortable with and seek to overcome this bias. But
they are the exception rather than the rule. Agreement and consensus forms the
basis of esprit de corps.
Groups which value
consensus discourage its members from questioning its official doctrines,
assumptions, and myths. Those in the group are taught that conformity is highly
prized and those who seek out contradictory evidence to show flaws or ways of
improving an idea or process are possible troublemakers to be discouraged. Facts
or evidence are monitored for inconsistency or contrary positions, and those who
transmit them punished. Disagreement and evidence of inconsistency or hypocrisy
are ignored. The challenge is to ensure all communications go through a single
pipeline in order to allow access for monitoring, evaluation and disposition.
It’s not just people who are marginalized, it is their access to information
that may adversely influence the official consensus.
Philip E. Tetlock author
of Superforcasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,
wrote:
“Groupthink is a danger. Be
cooperative but not deferential. Consensus is not always good; disagreement not
always bad. If you do happen to agree, don’t take that agreement—in itself—as
proof that you are right. Never stop doubting.”
A high value is given to
consensus in Thailand. Consensus, harmony and happiness are actively promoted.
Those who disagree are viewed with suspicion if not hostility. Questioning the
wisdom of the group is a kind of betrayal or disloyalty. When groupthink weds
in-group bias the children of ideas coming out of that union will likely be
inward thinking and emotionally attuned to the need to quell the noise of
outsiders. One way to accomplish such a goal is the creation of a single-gateway
for all Internet traffic into the country. As a way to protect groupthink and
patrol the boundaries separating in-group and out-group, such a system becomes
attractive much like the idea of building the Great Wall of China.
Dual pricing is the tip of
the cognitive iceberg shimmering in the tropical monsoon season. Isolate it at
your peril. It is a symptom of something far more important to understand about
a culture and political system inside that culture. When a culture sanctions
in-group bias and groupthink, and makes policies with strengthening these
cognitive defects, it is not cost free. A price is paid. How do we measure that
price? This is for the experts to examine. I would wager that the cost on the
‘whom’ is much higher than the cost on the ‘who’ and below you will see there is
an important divide between the two.
The cost is not so much
the much higher amount that a foreigner pays to gain entrance to a national
park. Price based on ethnicity is a crude (and emotionally damaging) way to
express the difference between in-group and outsiders. The political price is
another matter. Setting a higher admission price because the person doesn’t look
like us is repugnant to many people. It is in the same category as a price of
admission based on height, weight, shoe size or color of eyes. There is a
feeling such features should be sanctioned by government as a basis for price
discrimination. We don’t accept the argument that making tall people pay more
than short people and justifying it on the basis that tall people have a better
view. By opening the group to other ideas and encouraging an exchange of
conflicting ideas, and learning to question not just the other person’s idea but
the strength and weakness of your own, ideas can be improved, repaired where
flawed, discarded as no longer workable, or merged with other ideas gives such a
group an edge. The goals is to search for truths that have a broad general
consensus and not to be distracted by the myths to spin a spider web of
comfortable illusions to sustain in-group bias.
A problem yet to be
resolved in Thai culture is the fear of disagreement. In the Thai way of
thinking it is often assumed that disagreeing is a form of violence, the sign of
a troublemaker, rather than a healthy curiosity. Most of life is a puzzle and
the pieces never fit and new pieces crop up. Life is confusing given the amount
of noise we are subjected to. The main lesson is that the search for perfection,
certainty and predictability is a search for a unicorn. The incompleteness of
evidence is normal. Cognitive biases teach us that our thinking process must be
nudged to discover errors and mistakes in our theories, ideologies and ideas.
The heart and soul of modern science is the recognition our most cherished
theories never rise above the beta level.Inevitably the theories will change.
The aversion to change is creates a strong negative feeling. Add groupthink and
in-group bias and you ask whether a cage constructed from such constructs are
the highest and best way to preserve cultural identity.
Tetlock has a catchy
definition of politics: “Who does what to whom?” Our definition of the ‘who’ and
the ‘whom’ is never settled. Factions of the ‘whom’ will be unhappy with a
particular ‘who’ no matter what is the basis of their legitimacy to act. The
interaction between the two indicates that the ball is always in play. When the
rules of that game are expanded to allow and encourage questioning, debate and
different points of view, the ‘who’ find themselves accounting for their
policies to the ‘whom’. To stigmatize disagreement guarantees tyranny. In the
larger scheme, being a perpetual ‘whom’ in this equation, and a foreign ‘whom’
to boot, I acknowledge my bias—the ‘who’ doesn’t have my best interest in mind
and I am powerless, like all outsiders where in-group bias prevails, to change
the order of things.
Posted: 10/11/2015 8:55:23 PM |
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Thinking Fast and Slow: A literary radar gun to measure the speed of thinking in Thailand |
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking,
Fast and Slow has been the #1 bestselling non-fiction title on the
Bangkok Post arts page for over a year. I’ve lost track it may have been two
years. That is a long-time for a foreign title to occupy the top spot on a local
bestseller’s list. Kahneman’s book reveals how people process thoughts and
emotions and react to the constructs that thinking creates in their minds. It is
also an extensive discussion, based on fifty years of research, into the
cognitive biases that act as the filters through which our thinking
passes.
 
When someone says I have a
bias. I say that doesn’t go far enough. I have dozens and dozens of biases. Most
of them infect my process operating system and until someone like Nobel Laureate
Daniel Kahneman comes along, shows the evidence, and I discover I’ve remained
oblivious to the importance they play in the way I perceive and understand
reality. It is a humbling experience to accept that you and everyone else
suffers from the flaws and defects that cognitive biases cause in our assessment
of evidence, facts, opinions, and data. To learn about biases is to recognize
the role they play in your own life, inside corporations, governments,
entertainment, sport and family life.
None of this begins to
explain why in Thailand, of all places, it continues to be the top bestseller
(if Asia Books bestselling list is to be believed). I’d like to explore a few
ideas that may shed some light on why Thinking Fast and Slow has become
and remained a bestseller even in a country like Thailand where one of the
common expressions is “thinking too much makes one’s head hurt”.
We evolved over a
long-time frame—200,000 years—into a species of fundamentally shaped emotional
beings. Our emotions along with our perceptions and memory of the past are the
building blocks of what we think of as ‘self’. If you want to a truthful look of
who you are to yourself, take a day and audit the emotions you feel. Write them
down. Write down the reaction to each of those feelings. And the stories you
tell yourself to justify, explain, defend or advocate. Keep that list for a
week. Then go back and look in that narrative mirror. That is you, how you react
into the world. What sets you off, triggering the chemical reactions in your
brain? We know what those chemicals are and a fair amount about how they work in
the brain. That is, of course, a mechanical, science-based position. Others may
think that emotions magically appear like forest fairies.
We have been first and
foremost are emotional charged from the time we entered the world until the day
we depart it. Our emotional life gives us a roller coaster ride and we make up
stories to explain the spills and chills. The slow thinking, or the rational,
empirical, deliberate thinking doesn’t come naturally to us. It is cold,
calculated, time-consuming, uncertain, complex and tentative—all of these
attributes, when combined, construct a reality that can be measured, examined,
tested, evaluated by others, who may disprove a widely accepted idea or show
evidence of how it is flawed and how it might be improved.
This new, rational way of
thinking is recent. Many people think today is a dividend of the Enlightenment.
Newton came along in the 17th century, and with a new type of
mathematics, was able to predict motion and velocity with precision. The
18th century saw a new breed of thinkers from Hume, Voltaire and
Jean-Jacque Rousseau. Musician geniuses like Bach, Haydn and Mozart emerged. In
the 19th century scientific discovery bloomed through the empirical
methods employed by Darwin, Maxwell, Tesla, Faraday, Kelvin, Boltzmann,
Clausius, Doppler and Planck to name only a few.
If you picked two books
that changed the ‘method’ of thinking it would be Descartes’ Discourse on
Method (1637) and Newton’s Principa Mathematica (1687). The world
of magic, faith, and belief became challenged, along with unquestioned authority
as custodians of the truth. What was changed? Truth no longer had an official
master whose stories had to be believed. Truth left the domain of Sacred
Authority to be revealed in the labs by scientists with their charts,
instruments, procedures, formulae, and methods.
Kahneman’s Thinking
Fast and Slow about our psychological limitation to understand the truth is
a product of that Enlightenment process. We had a better understanding how
authority had traditionally acted as the oracle of our emotional lives. It also
manipulated those emotions to suit the aims of the powerful. The problem was
that there was no scientific method or explanation. People lived in a world of
ritual and ceremony, which channeled emotions as a collective, unifying
activity.
Pre-Enlightenment was like
a grandfather clock, solid, reliable time keeping device in well-off houses. The
problem with such clocks was the degree of accuracy required for advanced
technology need a more precise measuring instrument. Atomic clocks operate on a
different mechanism than the grandfather clock. Kahneman’s slow, deliberate
thinking incorporates a self-monitoring, self-correcting features that have
redesigned how our grandfather clock of emotions works.
When we think our
grandfather clock of emotions remains our timekeeper, what happens when a
culture or civilization has by-passed the Enlightenment generated system of
methods, process, and procedures? A case can be made that a large number of
people will be unhappy telling time the old way. Because they live in a vastly
more complicated and complex world where how a person thinks is key to
innovation, creativity and scientific advances in biology, nanotechnology,
robotics, AI, and neural networks. The age of the grandfather clock, however,
isn’t over. It continues to co-exist with the new realities. You see the
evidence of this everyday in Thailand. And when there is a problem to be solved,
confusion arises as to what problem-solving process should be used.
The Thais have embraced
social media in large numbers. Given the recent political turmoil, and the
attempt by coup-makers to turn the clock back, one would have expected more
unrest. That hasn’t happened. Part of the explanation is that the Internet,
games, and social media have provided a refuge, a place of escape from the
messy, unpleasant emotional terrain of analogue life. The emotional transfer to
the digital world has left a void in the analogue world. There may be few
scattered demonstrations but largely, on the surface, people go about their
lives as if disconnected from the political reality in which they
live.
Then the junta was
reported to have supported a proposal to reduce the digital interface into
Thailand to a single pipeline. Suddenly all of those silent people who had
disappeared from the analogue world of political discussion suddenly showed
their anger. The DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that crashed many
government and national telecom websites and hundreds of thousand tweets using
the hashtag #SingleGateway showed a surprising degree of
co-operation and collaboration to pull off the attacks. Whether this is the
beginning of significant digital mass protest remains to be seen. The number of
people involved in the attack is difficult to know. What is known is that more
than a hundred thousand people have also signed an online petition to oppose the junta’s policy to
install the Chinese-style “Great Firewall.”
Thailand’s digital
community finally reacted. The emotional reaction leading to the in protest with
the hashtag #SingleGateway found support on social media
across usual political lines. It is difficult to find another proposed policy
change that brought warring political factions to form a unified front. The
opposition may have surprised the government, in any event, surprised or not, so
the junta began to immediately backtrack on the idea.
Emotions about the
Internet like all emotions are passionately held and defended. It may come as a
surprise to the largely analogue core of senior government officials that a
single pipeline would strike a nerve and an emotional reaction would spill over
into the analogue world.
If the goal of the
government has been to de-emotionalize the political discussion and to refocus
that discussion to the grandfather clock era, the single pipeline policy
proposal suggests a long, emotional battle may result. The most radical book in
Thailand at present is probably Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and
Slow as it is a guidebook on the kind of biases exposed in the positions
and postures of government policies and proposals. The critics with this new
Enlightened way of thinking are online; on LINE, on social media, and they
argue, debate, become emotional, friend and de-friend each other with a large
degree of freedom. Removing that platform, this safe harbor for debate is no
small change. The Internet is a symptom of something else that is happening
under the surface. Many cultures seek the best of both worlds; there is an
uneasy duality of process depending on many factors from international treaty
obligations to the demands of modern technology, finance and communication
systems in order they can be coupled into a larger international
network.
Thailand is no different
from many countries, which seek to balance problem-solving processes in a
culture where dual mechanisms compete. There is the local environment where the
rules and regulations, law enforcement officials, judges, and regulators, for
purely domestic problems, use pre-Enlightenment ideas whether based on magical
thinking, non-scientific premises, forced confessions, or evidentiary techniques
of a prior time. It might be a news story but it hardly causes a ripple outside
of the country. The Sacred Authority model was once the worldwide model. There
was no other. The style of thinking that underscores Sacred Authority is
incompatible with the thinking style that created a complex, diverse and ever
changing digital environment with all the rough edged emotional tumble colliding
with games, videos, talks, articles, graphics, photographs, on countless
platforms seeking audience attention. It is a world of conflict, contention,
trolling, emotional vetting, and diverse ideas, big data, and large information
sinkholes. DDoS attacks are Thailand’s Millennial generations way of exerting
their values and priorities. They hadn’t melted away; they had escaped to an
online universe where they wished to be left to pursue their interests,
grievance, dreams, and desires.
After the Enlightenment,
(I am aware of literature of how National Socialism and Communist regimes used
these ideas to cause massive destruction and suffering), The Empirical Model
rose to challenge the Sacred Authority Model on a political, social and economic
battlefield and largely won most of those battles. The evidence of those
victories are everywhere in the way business and trade is conducted. If you wish
to use slaves to catch and can fish as the business model in your fishing
industry, you may argue that you didn’t do it, or if some meddlesome person has
evidence that you did, the back up is your domestic industry standards is no one
else’s business; it falls within your Sacred Authority.
The history of the West
illustrates the Sacred Authority lasted long after the Enlightenment had begun.
The US Supreme Court in the 19th century Dread Scott case didn’t
prevent a slaveholder from a Southern State to reclaim his ‘property’, an
escaped slave, from a Northern state where the slave had sought
refuge.
Most countries have a
blended system that draws from both the Sacred and the Empirical methods to
solve problems. A broad continuum exist in most cultures and groups argue often
emotionally as to what regime of methods and processes should be employed—with
one side arguing the solution is faith-based and the other that fact or
evidence-based problem-solving mechanism provides the solution. One expects to
find, and is indeed not disappointed to discover that all kinds of
contradictions, tensions and conflict arise. Sharia laws are an example of the
Sacred Method and way of thinking. The problem solvers are clergy. The
problem-solving mechanism is theocratic. The problem is cast in terms of
doctrine to be interpreted.
The Sacred decision-making
process is binary—good and bad, right and wrong. Applying that mechanism to,
say, construction and maintenance of nuclear power plants is a frightening
prospect. Complex and complicated problems require a different way of thinking.
A process where those in charge are accustomed to an environment of uncertainty
and doubt, and testing for weakness and defects is normal. Thinking about a
problem where the process is created as part of the sacred means honoring
boundaries of thought and inquiry, and the role of the authorities is not to
test boundaries but to defend them.
Less extreme forms of the
Sacred can be attached to flags or constitutions that make them above the
profane of daily life. How we think about problems and the methods for solving
them is a good indication of where it is placed along the continuum of Sacred
and Empirical. For example, to suggests that evidence from other countries shows
that banning or regulating guns or introducing universal health care in the
United States would have a positive results in saving money and preventing
deaths—and suddenly you have a fight on your hands. The Empirical Model vanishes
behind a super-heated cloud of emotions and appeals to the Sacred appear as if
the Enlightenment had never happened.
In the modern world, other
countries, which had gone through the Enlightenment (and notice that they are
the developed countries with money to buy large amounts of fish), will
collectively act and ban the sale of slave caught fish. Thailand’s fishing
industry, in response to international pressure from trading partners, seeks to
find solutions that can be audited by others to eliminate slavery. The real
problem lies in the absent of empirical experience and resources to detect,
avoid, and monitor such problems. The failure is the failure of processes and
enforcement mechanism that often uses aspirations of goodwill as a substituted
solution. (Aspirational goals appeal to emotions and can work effectively on
shaping public opinion in countries like Thailand, where having “good
intentions” is more highly valued than the actual quality or effectiveness of
the proposed policy.) A problem-solving mechanism that appeals to the logical,
analytical aspect of our nature and demands a different kind of thinking. It
will likely excite the emotions of those in the Sacred Method camp, on the basis
such an approach is a provocation to their beliefs.
The same problem arises
with rules governing aviation. If you wish to have a domestic aviation industry
where planes regularly crash for lack of maintenance, that may be a sovereign
right, but for international flights, the planes must comply with international
rules for operation and maintenance and violation of those rules will lead to
banning the offending aviation companies landing rights.
The number of cars
registered in Bangkok now exceeds to number of people registered as living in
Bangkok. Traffic is a domestic issue. No one in New York, Toronto or London
cares about lost time waiting in Bangkok traffic or the lack of parking space.
When transportation policy is decided under the Sacred Authority methods,
finding a systematic, rational and efficient system becomes elusive. The
empirical methods are not developed or trusted as they might spill over into
other areas pushing back the boundaries of the traditional way of thinking about
things that need attention. Law enforcement officials with inadequate training
or tools are discouraged from seeking professional assistance, for example, in
evaluating DNA and other forensic evidence to be used in a murder case, for fear
of losing control of the case to foreigners.
Emotions cause the best
analytical tools to be left on the shelf; the empirical studies filed in the
office filing cabinet. Emotions dictate the storyline; not necessarily the
actual evidence. The problem with modern technology whether it is
transportation, education, fishing, or forensic science is that the line between
domestic and global commerce, trade and communication has resulted in the
construction of an international system, mechanism, process and methods that is
very difficult to avoid, unless one decides to embrace something along the lines
of the North Korean or Saudi models (to name just two). Those bucking this new
international regime with the Sacred Model as the funnel for emotionalism have
no way out. The ability to have the best of both worlds has collapsed.
Governments, however, haven’t stopped pretending that they can go back to the
past when such a distinction existed and officials had control over what could
and could not be done.
What is destroying the
legitimacy of governments is the absence of creating problem-solving processes.
Most countries share similar problems. Most countries invest in research and
development not only in identifying problems but in the development of
cooperative processes where experts and large data can fine-tune the methods and
process where new solutions can be found to old problems, and new problems can
be unearthed that lead to more fine-tuning to the methods and processes. In
other words, it is a constant, endless re-examination and critical questioning
of how to improve the process of decision-making. Given the accelerated rate of
technological change, methods and processes are soon outdated. Audit, evaluate,
modify, replace, and adapt, replace a fixed, certain, stable Sacred Authority
model where time on the grandfather clock no longer reflects the reality of how
time is measured in the modern world.
All of this change pushes
emotional alarm buttons. Elites, with a vested interested in the grandfather
clock model, experience fear, anger, and hatred as to the new order sees them
not as partners but obstacles to the world where questioning, criticism, debate,
curiosity, and uncertainty are considered normal.
What the Enlightenment
brought was the possibility that people might disagree on an idea, theory or
principle. That debated wasn’t settled by blood, or by war and hatred against
someone with a different idea. A space has opened up for those who disagreed to
take a step back from their emotional reaction, examine their biases, and ask
for evidence to support an argument. The future is for those who invite evidence
that contradicts their theory; it doesn’t belong to those who only seek
confirmation, and seek to stifle those with evidence to the contrary.
Will Kahneman’s
Thinking Fast and Slow continue to be number one in Thailand for
another year? It is possible. Such a radical book has attracted a Thai audience
is worthy of note. It may be some evidence that many Thais, especially those
exposed to social media, are seeking to better understand how their emotional
lives are connected to their thinking process. Understanding what goes on inside
the brain and how our emotions and thoughts are processed is something no one
has figured out.
We are left with a vague
glimpse of what might be possible. But for now, it is enough to hope that the
how we think when self-reflection and doubt are incorporated into the process
will make us more aware of how emotions guide our perceptions, stories, and
sense of self. , We can’t avoid our cognitive biases but we can recognize the
limitations they impose. It takes a lifetime of work where we slow down our
thinking and calculate more finely the options beyond what we instinctively feel
at the moment. Even then, we will continue to ambush ourselves with all of kinds
of great stories as to why we were angry with Jack, and hate Helen and honestly
believe that no one in their right mind could do anything but agree and support
us. Because we are human. We are feeling machines, retrofitted with a lever
called logic. You will find it on your own console; if like mine, it is the one
with cobwebs on it.
Posted: 10/2/2015 4:28:22 AM |
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