The stubborn reality

If you have followed me even a little bit (and I hope you have, otherwise please do) you probably know by now that one of my most solid contentions is that we would be better off if people thought more often, longer and deeper. And please bear in mind that I do not mean to blame anyone: in the end, thinking is both effortful and time consuming, and it is not even guaranteed to provide any useful results for all the hard work. To some extent, it is like exercising, something that we all know we should do more of, but never find a way to do. Still, I believe that thinking is much more important than exercising by the way it reflects in society.

From my point of view, the first indication that someone is just not thinking enough is the propagation of "canned" ideas: mottos and soundbites with a catchy flavour that they have picked up somewhere else and that they regurgitate without much processing, second-hand thoughts that they did not figure out on their own.

Photo: janwillemsen

That is why it has become a favorite hobby of mine to introduce, whenever I have a chance, thought-provoking statements; it is not so much that I want to change anyone's opinion (most of the time I am not even sure of the correctness of my own) as to make them own the opinions they have. If you arrive to a conclusion by your own train of thought I will just have to learn to deal with it, but if you take someone else's conclusion because you are not in the position to construct one of your own, that is where you can  become the object of someone else's manipulation.

One of the trickiest aspects of any doctrine is that it usually lacks granularity. The lofty ideas they are composed of are generally very far from any useful application in real life situations. Beautiful statements such as "all persons have the right to speak their mind freely and without fear of retaliation" are in practice, just too idealistic: it would be great if we could allow that kind of liberty to anyone, but knowing that some people are quite easy to manipulate it becomes a social necessity to ban just the most extreme edges of free speech. Appeals to genocide, for instance, although they could be allowed from a theoretical point of view (among responsible and committed citizens) they can be just too dangerous in the real world, and the risk that someone might take them at face value and hurt someone else is something that we are simply not ready to accept.

Surprisingly, this kind of caveats do not apply only to high ideas like the one above. Much more mundane assumptions such as "someone of your intelligence should not fall for such simple phishing tricks" is theoretically true and, possibly, even statistically true, but does not prevent anyone from occasionally clicking the wrong link in an email. The way I see it, there are two complementary approaches to this problem. The first one is, indeed, awareness, so that the people involve behave as they should (i.e. do not click on a dubious link); but this approach is demonstrably not enough, because there are soing to be situations where the reality is going to deviate from what it should be. And just insisting that things should be one way is most certainly not enough to make it happen.

This "imperfection" makes the second approach indispensable: being ready to prevent or mitigate the situations that happen to deviate from the expectations: if someone is not delivering a piece of work they should, it is necessary to look into the matter to prevent it from re-occurring, but in the meantime it is probably very important that the work gets done, even if it is done by someone else. And these two problems are generally difficult to solve and require a lot of thought.

That is the reason why I hate social commentary in the guise of "things should be y instead of X", or even worse "things should not be X". First of all, it things are X, they are so for a reason, even if it is a purely historical reason that does not apply anymore. Wishing that they were otherwise is just not enough; someone has to enact the change and, as the adage goes, "if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem". Furthermore, it is very easy to underestimate both the cost and the consequences of a change. In fact, it is not uncommon that the same change we are proposing was already attempted in the past without success.

Great ideas are essential to inspire change, but unless we are ready to put in the rest of the work to connect them with the reality we are trying to improve, they can become a source of endless frustration and even social confrontation, because all ideas are equally true until you confront them with the stubborn reality. Have a nice weekend.