![]() The worst shots in the galaxy.ĭo you remember, dear reader, the Imperial Storm Troopers from the Star Wars movies, lurching around in their white plastic armor? When Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original movie said that no one else was as precise as Imperial Storm Troopers, he was clearly making a joke that Luke Skywalker was too wet behind the ears to catch. The one I want to talk about today is a bad habit I call Stormtrooper Syndrome. There are a fair number of these wellsprings of total failure. Worse still, those same habits keep them from learning from their mistakes, and guarantee that the only thing they can think of when one of their gambits fails is to make the same mistake over again on an even larger scale. ![]() In particular, they suffer from habits of thought that make them pursue policies that are doomed to fail. Yet I’d like to suggest that it makes even more sense to suggest that “the world’s smartest people” aren’t as smart as they like to think they are. It certainly makes more sense than the claims being pushed by government and corporate media, which basically amount to saying that the world’s smartest people are making our lives steadily better, and the mere fact that our lives are getting steadily worse doesn’t matter. No, it’s got to be a sinister conspiracy! It’s easy to understand why that sort of thinking has become popular. Quite a few people have become convinced that our government and corporate elites can’t possibly be as stupid as they seem. I know that this is a controversial claim these days. No, the problem is that the people in question are stuck in habits of thought that make it impossible for them to do anything useful in a crisis. It’s not that they lack resources-for example, the money and energy that go into those climate conferences each year, put to some productive use, could have contributed considerably to mitigating the effects of climate change. It’s not that the people in question aren’t educated-they have the best education you can get in a modern Western society. These days, if a government bureaucracy or one of those dreary panels of multibillionaires get together to try to solve some problem, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll either do nothing or make the problem worse. ![]() It’s really quite remarkable, when you think of it. Another overpriced round of vacuous drivel laced with bad policies. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do this that makes the crisis of our time so overwhelming. Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many of those could be solved-or at least faced in a more constructive way-if our government and business elites could think clearly about them. Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest. For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |