CreativeCommons by ozgurmulazimoglu

5 Dangerous Ideas That Are Killing the Planet and How to Stop Them

5 Dangerous Ideas That Are Killing the Planet and How to Stop Them

Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last 45 years. He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to men, women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. If you enjoy my articles, please subscribe. I write to everyone who joins my Scribd team.

“People don’t seem to realize it that it is not like we’re on the

Titanic and we have to avoid the iceberg,” says Rob Watson, CEO

and Chief Scientist of The EcoTech International Group, who

Pulitizer-Prize winning author Tom Friedman calls one of the best

environmental minds in America. “We’ve already hit the iceberg.

The water is rushing in down below. But some people just don’t want

to leave the dance floor; others don’t want to give up on the buffet.

But if we don’t make the hard choices, nature will make them for us.”

Why do we keep on dancing and eating up our resources while

the signs of destruction mount up all around us? Rebecca D. Costa

has the answer and what she share may just save your life and the

lives of those you care most about. In her new book, The

Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, she says,

“Today, the issues that threaten human existence are clear: A global

recession, powerful pandemic viruses, terrorism, rising crime, climate

change, rapid depletion of the earth’s resources, nuclear proliferation,

and failing education.”

She goes on to say, “Though at first glance this list appears

daunting, it is also true that we have never been in a better position to

circumvent a repetitive pattern of decline.”

I’ve been looking for ways to save ourselves and save the planet

since 1995. The Watchman’s Rattle gives is the first book that gets

at the core of why we are stuck and more importantly how we can

use the time we have left to turn things around.

Human Extinction: What To Do To Avoid It NOW

Why are we in danger of going the way of the dinosaurs? What has caused progress to slow and governments, leaders and experts to suddenly become gridlocked, unable to solve our most dangerous problems?

The answer is complexity.

There's no denying it. Even the most brilliant among us is trapped in the same biological spacesuit -- a spacesuit that requires millions of years to develop new features. So what happens when the

complexity of the problems we have to solve simply exceeds the capabilities we humans have evolved to this point?

The answer is that we come to an impasse. We reach a "cognitive threshold" beyond which we cannot progress. Another way to say this is that humans, and human societies, can go no further than their inherited biology will allow them to. It's an evolutionary reality that's haunted us since the beginning of time.

The Early Signs of Collapse?

1. Gridlock

As social complexity exceeds the brains ability to cope, the system gets overwhelmed and locks up.

2. Beliefs are substituted for knowledge and facts.

Our brains become overloaded with facts to sort out. To simplify our options, we increasingly choose irrational beliefs.

Memes and Supermemes Organize Our Thoughts and Actions

Meme: A meme is any widely accepted information, thought, feeling, or behavior.

Supermeme: A supermeme is any belief, thought, or behavior that becomes so pervasive, so stubbornly embedded, that it contaminates or suppresses all other beliefs and behaviors in a society.

The 5 Supermemes That Keep Us From Preventing Collapse

We adopt memes and supermemes in an attempt (usually out of our conscious awareness) to feel more secure and less overwhelmed. However, supermemes can keep us from doing what we need to do to effectively solve our problems.

1. Irrational Opposition

When it becomes much easier to describe the things we oppose rather than the things we advocate, this indicates that opposition has grown from a meme to a supermeme.

Irrational opposition occurs when the act of rejecting, criticizing, suppressing, ignoring, misrepresenting, marginalizing, and resisting rational solutions becomes the accepted norm.

2. The Personalization of Blame

When problems occur and we feel overwhelmed and afraid, there is a tendency to look for someone to blame rather than seeking to understand the complex nature of the problem. We look for a scapegoat.

Throughout history civilizations have had a clear pattern of foisting the responsibility for complex problems onto the shoulders of individuals whenever complex problems persist.

3. Counterfeit Correlation

Counterfeit correlation occurs as a result of three convenient practices.

Accepting correlation as a substitute for causation. Using reverse-engineering to manipulate evidence, and

Relying on consensus to determine basic facts.

When we can’t separate facts from fiction, we become highly susceptible to misdiagnosing our problems. This leads to one unsuccessful mitigation and remedy after another, all

because we based our solutions on what appeared to be science, but wasn’t.

4. Silo Thinking

There is a natural tendency in the human brain to try to reduce complexity into discrete, manageable components. As we are forced to deal with more and more information we tend to isolate ourselves and focus only on the areas within our comfort zones.

Silo thinking results as we compartmentalize our ideas and behaviors. The result is we prohibit collaboration needed to address highly complex problems.

Rather than potential partners with a different way of looking at the world, we reduce the world to “us” and “them,” the good guys and the bad guys.

5. Extreme Economics

The economics supermeme occurs when simple principles in business, such as risk/reward and profit/loss, become the litmus test for determining the value of people and priorities, initiatives and institutions.

When we social relationship complexity overwhelms us, we lose our ability to see what is truly valuable in our lives. Making money becomes a simple way to measure success. More and more aspects of our culture become “monetized” and the divide between the rich and the rest of us continues to widen.

When the problems we face are systemic, rifle shots don’t work. But Gatling guns do.

Sam Keen offers a very succinct answer to our problem:

“The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

1. The new human vocation is to heal the earth.2. We can only heal what we love.

3. We can only love what we know.

4. We can only know what we touch.”

So how do we know what we must do to save the earth and how do we get in touch with solutions to complex problems that overwhelm our ability to “get our heads around them?”

We must use the Gatling gun approach and try everything we think will work. Those things that bring positive results can be replicated and spread.

Rebecca D. Costa Offers Three Powerful Antidotes to Gridlock

By studying the human brain at work under a variety of conditions, neuroscientists today have already uncovered three powerful antidotes to reaching our cognitive limit and creating psychic gridlock:

1. Brain Fitness Technology.2. The Power of the Unconscious Mind.

3. The Evolution of Insight.

Brain Fitness

On a foggy morning in 2007, the first gymnasium aimed at brain-training opened on Sacramento Street in San Francisco, California. vibrantBrains was the inspiration of Jan Zivic and Lisa

Schoonerman, two entrepreneurs determined to make available to the general public what neuroscientists now understand about how to improve the brain’s natural abilities.

Clients join vibrantBrains the same way they become a member of a gym: Sixty dollars a month buys an annual membership that allows clients access to a facility where they use a series of computer-generated exercises for the brain called the Neurobics Circuit.

A 2007 study conducted by three major universities and the Mayo Clinic said, “The rest showed that the memories of those in the Brain Fitness Group improved, on average, about a decade’s worth compared with those in control group.”

The Power of the Unconscious Mind

Jerry Lauch is one of the early pioneers responsible for developing commercial sleep disturbance clinics that diagnose and correct abnormal sleep patterns. Lauch offers his assessment on the power of the subconscious mind and the value of a good night’s sleep:

“The important thing we are doing when we sleep is organizing and making sense out of information we already have or recently experienced,” says Lauch.

“Our unconsious mind is a lot more powerful than our conscious one. When you think about it, that’s how human beings manage high levels of complexity deep in the recesses of our unconscious. No wonder we can’t explain exactly where our epiphanies came from. No wonder we can’t decide to have an insight whenever we want to.”

I’ve found that one of the most powerful tools for dealing with complexity is to develop and trust my intuition. When we don’t have time to sort through all the various aspects of a problem, we need to learn to go deep within and find the solution that is waiting inside.

Often this occurs when we are dozing off or just waking up. It can also be enhanced through meditation, being out in nature, and learning to love deeply and well. “In time, as we learn more about the unconscious mind and the human brain,” says Costa, “it’s likely we will also achieve a better understanding about the inner workings of insight.”

Injecting Insight

Brain fitness may help us use our brain’s more effectively, but Costa feels that “insight” is the key to dealing with the mental gridlock that leads to our inability to solve the major problems the world faces today.

According to Drs. Kalina Christoff, Alan Gordon, and Rachelle Smith, authors of a recent study titled, The role of spontaneous thought in human cognition, “The process of deliberately thinking things out may be a part of the decision process, but it is the more spontaneous, defocused thinking mode…that may be necessary for important decisions to be successfully made.”

According to Karuna Subramaniam of the University of California, San Francisco, “Analytic processing involves deliberate application of strategies and operations to gradually approach a solution. Insight, which is considered a type of creative cognition, is the process through which people suddenly and unexpectedly achieve a solution through processes that are not consciously reportable.”

Neuroscientists are not only learning how to help us use our brain more effectively, but also how to inject greater insight into the decision-making process. As Costa concludes, “Insight is the human brain’s special weapon against complexity.”

Costa goes on to say, “Insight can be viewed as nature’s gift: a brilliantly efficient way to cut through thousands of variables, multiple wrong solutions, and produce a correct and elegant answer. Whereas traditional left- and right-brain problem solving methods become overwhelmed by complexity, insight sours right through chaos—much like a hyper-efficient editor who instantly

isolates knowledge that is essential to a solution from facts that are not.”

About Rebecca Costa

Author of The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction

Rebecca Costa is a sociobiologist whose unique expertise is to spot and explain emerging trends in relationship to human evolution, global markets, and new technologies.  A thought-leader and provocative new voice in the mold of Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell, Costa is part biologist, psychologist and entrepreneur, whose insights result from examining the “big picture.” Her successful career identifying global trends, combined with her keen ability to perceive the unifying concept within diverse and interrelated fields, uniquely qualify her to present a multi-disciplinarian approach to complex, systemic issues affecting our world today. 

Retiring at the zenith of her acclaimed career, Costa spent five years researching and writing The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction.  In her new book, she explains how the principles governing evolution cause, and provide the solution for, global gridlock. When asked why the book has special significance in today’s turbulent marketplace, Costa said, “Every person I know, rich or poor, educated or not, wants to know why our government gets more in debt, our air and water more polluted, our jails more crowded, our security more tenuous, our children more violent.  The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction gives equal weight to the big and small picture and prescribes a way out of the mess.”  

A former CEO and founder of Silicon Valley start-up, Dazai Advertising, Inc. (sold to J. Walter Thompson in 1997), Costa has a proven track record of introducing new technologies for over three decades.  Her clients have included industry giants such as Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Corporation, Borland, 3M, Amdahl, Seibel Systems and General Electric Corporation.

Raised in Tokyo, Japan, Costa lived during the Vietnam conflict in Vientiane, Laos, where her father worked in covert CIA operations. She attributes her natural ability to spot global patterns to a cross-cultural education and upbringing.   She graduated from The University of California, Santa Barbara with a BA in Social Sciences.

Rebecca Costa lives on the central coast of California. The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction is her first book. For more information, please visit www.rebeccacosta.com.