Truth is boring. If the business model is driven primarily by profit, lies have a six times higher click rate. Over the last ten years social media has slanted the floor, so if you want to find the truth, you can, but you have to work harder, it’s like going uphill. (The Social Dilemma, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Social scientists in the 1970’s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature:
- People are generally rational and their thinking is normally sound.
- Emotions such as fear, affection and hatred, explain most occasions when we depart from rationality.
It turns out that without the use of our feelings, we are actually poor decision makers. Emotions might be considered the biological experience itself. This occurs whether we notice the sensation, are able to interrupt our body response or remain unconscious of these happenings.
The use of feelings would require putting words to our emotional response and consciously thinking about that experience. That is harder work.
In 1984, Kahneman and Tversky published a paper in THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, of their research that the systematic errors in thinking of normal people were tied to learned cognitive patterns rather than a corruption by emotions. This was so revolutionary that the Nobel Prize committee decided to award a prize for this groundbreaking work. However, the physical scientists were not used to the idea of awarding a prize to a Social Scientist, so an award in Economics was given instead. Thus, the field of Behavioral Economics was born. This work became the basis for the more recent book by Kahneman, THINKING FAST AND SLOW.
So, the “thinking fast” are rapid, old, often unconscious learned patterns and solutions. This system works well for linear, non complex issues. The “thinking slow” part is needed for new and more complex situations, and requires time and using current, accurate, information.
Corruption of our thinking has become easier and easier when truth has less financial value, and lies travel six times faster than truth. Consciousness has always been harder work, but a way to light up the self. Now we need even brighter lights.
The Navy Seals have adopted an expression:
SLOW IS SMOOTH
AND SMOOTH IS FAST
The nature of their work is to be in highly charged, evolving situations that require action plans. This mantra reminds them to not fall into old thinking, old solutions to novel situations, and inevitable bias. They know they have to be as present as possible and engage the truth of the situations at hand.
When I look at the featured painting, Bowl of Cherries by Brian Burke, I imagine the following conversation between the woman and another person out of the frame:
I thought democracy was about working on solutions to real problems rather than kicking the can down the road.
Oh honey, that sounds so quaint! Now we just take that shred left from the truth, grind it up, and use it as face paint in our battles against others.
APPLE IN WATER
I was swimming
with the taste of apple
in my mouth
a shred of appleskin
between my teeth I guess
It doesn’t get any better than this
said the water
These are troubled times
said the shred
and the apple, the apple
wasn’t really there,
only a lingering taste of it,
as if it were the last apple,
or an earlier one that had lasted
either way it was silent
and I swam with the silence
in my mouth, listening to the pretty crimson dot
— Mary Ruefle,
Be well,
Marlene
*Featured image, BOWL OF CHERRIES, by Brian Burke
Brian Burke was one of Canada’s foremost figurative painters. His paintings often consider basic questions of contemporary society, sometimes by poking fun. One commentator, sculptor and friend, John Greer, says that Burke’s paintings are a result of looking into “What does it mean to be human? They are about how to face – or not to face – the who and why we are, what we are, and why we respond to the world in the way we do”.
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