Emotions - Part 2 - Negativity
Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Khaneman
This is true for organisms living in the natural world. But we are not merely organisms, and we no longer live in a natural world. In discussing threats, vulnerabilities, and firestorms, we must always remind ourselves that change is the source of all opportunities.
The reason that most people are so bad at strategy is that our brains evolved to fear change. Agriculture is only 12,000 years old. The industrial revolution that gave rise to our current environment has only been around for two hundred years. Neither of these time spans is long enough to change how our brains work. The fact that we can navigate this new world with our stone-age minds is something of a miracle.
Because staying alive in nature demands constant vigilance, we are evolved to prioritize bad news. This fact explains everything we need to know about our news media today. We say that we are interested in good news, but every experiment shows that we are more strongly drawn to the dark side. Because of this psychological tendency, every solution, every advance, and every form of progress is inevitably characterized by the fear that it will lead to our destruction. Our challenge today is separating the real dangers from those changes that create opportunities.
How Our Brains Work
The human mind is the most valuable resource in the world (see this article). Like all resources, however, our brain power is limited. On a biological level, survival is more important than other considerations so threats can easily crowd out other aspects of change. The wonder of life is that we can still experience the wonder of life including optimism, inspiration, hope, trust, and gratitude, despite our biological need for fear.
Most information going into our brains is prioritized in the deepest and oldest part of the brain that creates emotions. Emotions motivate us to act. Some reactions, such as pulling away from pain, are not even conscious because the emotion takes control of our bodies. Without emotions driving us to act, we conserve our energy. Our most basic emotions are desire and fear. Desire comes from the dopamine circuits of the reward system via the midbrain, hypothalamus, and ventral striatum. Strangely enough, uncertainty and risk can actually stimulate this dopamine reward circuitry. This is why people enjoy strategy, gambling, sports, business, exploration, and other competitions in life.
However, as uncertainty continues without a reward, it creates stress. Stress triggers the amygdala with the hippocampus and hypothalamus, to release cortisol. Fear and anger are the results. This triggers our “flight” or “fight” response, the enemy of all good strategy. “Fear is the mind-killer,” to quote a favorite novel from my youth.
The End is Always Near
One of the biggest changes that I have seen in my life is the rise of apocalyptic thinking. The idea that the sky-is-falling goes far back in human history. Henny-Penny is part of our childhood lore, but it was a cautionary tale, warning us against overreaction. Now, overreaction is not only the norm but something of a religion. If you don’t think the sky is falling, you are tagged as a “denier.”
Starting in the seventies, book after popular book predicted the end of the world. Their popularity arises because bad news is promoted by our media. An early example was Paul Erlich’s Population Bomb. It predicted mass famine by the 1980s. The list of all the different forms of predicted destruction in the news is a long one: growing poverty, expanding deserts, imminent plagues from mad cow disease to ebola, peak oil, global cooling, thinning ozone, acid rain, computer bugs, murder hornets, AI, and the long-running hit, global warming.
Global cooling and global warming are particularly funny. Throughout the seventies, scientists predicted a new ice age that would soon destroy civilization. Then scientists found that global warming was a more rewarding area for forecasting the end of the world. This apocalyptic view has even affected our entertainment. The sci-fi of my youth was optimistic, looking forward to rocket ships, flying cars, and winning wars against aliens. Now sci-fi is all doom and gloom. Every comfort of civilization and every scientific advance is predicted to destroy the world unless aliens find us and do it first.
While such doom is being promoted, life on the planet has gotten better for almost everyone, especially the poorest among us, at a fantastic rate. Not from government actions to prevent armageddon for the common good, but by individuals working to improve their personal positions. Paul Erlich famously lost his bet with Julian Simmons about overpopulation driving up prices. Population growth has slowed, not because of government programs, but because, as people grow wealthier, they have fewer children. For a while, the US led the world in carbon reduction, not because of draconian laws, but because fracking increased the production of low-carbon natural gas. Of course, this fracking itself is a new source of alarmism.
What has hurt civilization the most has been our overreaction to each new scare. Fear of the population bomb created China’s disastrous one-child program that had government officials drowning newborn babies in buckets of water. The result is China’s manpower shortage today and an aging population. One Hollywood movie caused the world to close down the cleanest energy there is: nuclear power. Such decisions have left people to die today from both the cold of winter and the heat of summer in places like “green” Europe. Of course, these deaths are blamed on carbon and global warming when nuclear power was and is our best source of carbon-free power..
The True Picture
Though we must be wary about local conditions that can create a crisis, we must remember that the main effect of change is to create opportunities for individuals. Our minds are geared to recognize threats and react to them. However, we cannot respond to every worldwide threat that is imagined by the media. All strategy is local. This is why your personal contacts and the information they provide are always more valuable than what you get through the news. Media is designed to stimulate cortisol and fear, which paralyzes us. What we want are the opportunities and challenges that create dopamine.
Despite all the predictions of doom, the last two hundred years have proven one thing: there is only one limiting resource in the world: the reasoning power of the human mind. The wealth of the world has grown directly in proportion to the increase of the world’s population, stimulated by useful training and more personal freedom. Other resources come and go as our minds find less expensive alternatives for solving our problems. In our individual lives, our only limiting factor is the hours we have. How well we employ those hours depends on how we choose to view the world: as a threat or an opportunity.
The secret to a feeling of satisfaction is stimulating dopamine by taking risks that offer the possibility of reward. Drug addicts seek to create this satisfaction artificially and, by doing so, destroy their lives and their pleasure circuits. However, if we seek this satisfaction by making creative moves to improve our own positions in the world, we improve not only our own lives, but the lives of everyone around us.
Conclusions
We should not seek to escape our emotions. Without emotions, we cannot act. In real live, Startrek’s Spock would have been a study in non-action. We can satisfy our desire for action by playing video games or taking drugs, but such choices make our real lives barren. Our only true, long-term satisfaction comes from seeking action, risks, and its rewards.