Why some societies make disastrous decisions - Essay Example

In this article the provides an analysis of why human societies have ended up making destructive group decisions at various points of time in history. His students express incredulity at human folly causing self destruction in the past ages, especially in cases like the Easter Island which died out of deforestation, and this line is emphasized when he quotes Joseph Tainter who holds that complex societies are not logically likely to die out due to mismanagement of environmental resources, because they were geared towards addressing any lulls in productivity in their domain. To answer this puzzle Diamond relates it to individual foibles and issues of group dynamics, proposes various factors like failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it, failure to work towards solving it, or alternatively, not being able to resolve the problem despite knowing all about it. He also gives reasons that lead up to each of the factors. Starting on the causes of failure to anticipate a problem he notes that it could happen to a society because of no prior experience of similar problems, and he illustrates this with the example of introduction of foxes and rabbits to Australia , the investment in walrus-hunting by the Greenland Norse, or the deforestation in Mayan kingdoms; all of which look foolish in hindsight, but the decision makers in question had no way of knowing that. Some societies like the Anasazi who had no writing, had no records of droughts that had been survived earlier, but wiped them out a few centuries later, whereas the Mayans did not make any records of earlier droughts despite knowing how to write, so having no record of previous experiences of disaster may mean a failure to anticipate similar problems later. Sometimes, recorded knowledge is ignored, as Americans do today after the oil crisis of 1973, by continuing to drive high oil-consumption vehicles. Failure to anticipate problems may also result from drawing a false analogy with previous experiences such as the unfortunate decision made by the complacent French in the Second World War, who had won an earlier war with the Germans and expected the next one to be the same, only to be outwitted by the Germans who redefined their combat strategy. The next factor that Diamond hits upon is the failure to perceive a problem, for which he advances three reasons. Firstly, the origins of some problems cannot be easily perceived, like the loss of salt nutrients or salinization, which are undetectable to unaided human senses. Also, if the decision maker is unaware of ground realities, problems may go unnoticed. Some problems may be very slow in occurring and be hidden by up-and- down fluctuations, so that they may go undetected, for example, the problem of global warming in recent times. Diamond mentions the term "creeping normalcy"used by politicians to describe a very slow deterioration, or "landscape amnesia", coined by scientists, where people are so used to seeing a landscape change successively little by little each year that they do not grasp its total change, or remember what it was like originally. When combined, these two can lead to a large but very gradually worsening problem going unnoticed. In this he finds an answer to why the people of Easter Island could cut away all their palm trees, because the deforestation was not a sudden, remarkable change, it happened at a slow pace across generations. Diamond also puts forward various reasons for the next factor, the failure to work towards a solution, and the very first one is "rational behavior": logical, but maybe ethically unsound, where a few people reason that they can greatly further their own interests by harming that of others. Since this minority stands a lot to gain and each of the majority loses very little individually in the process, the majority do not protest much and the minority has its way. For example, a minority of subsidized professionals like fishermen or farmers benefit at the cost of majority of the taxpayers. At other times, it is pure selfishness that drives a bad decision, such as a few fishermen in Montana who prefer pike fishing, introducing them to a trout fishing area, not caring if the pike end up eating up all the trouts, harming the much more popular trout-fishing; or, Montana mining companies that make a mess of the environment and then leave declaring bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers to clean up after them. Disastrous decision making may also result from a clash of interests, where a group of people with common resource end up over-consuming it, in the race to be the first and most to consume, in the absence of any regulations against such behavior. This can be sorted out by an outside agency like a government, or the group can decide its own rules for sustainable consumption. Other examples are logging companies, who have no long term interest in the land they are de-foresting, and are only there for short term profits, the only long term losers being the citizens of the countries where the logging takes place. Also in cases where the interest of the elite and insulated decision makers clash with the interests of the common man, we see rational, but bad decisions taking place. In contrast, bad decisions can also happen due to "irrational" behavior, where people cling to long-held beliefs even when they are detrimental to survival, and Diamond proposes this on the basis of examples from religious as well as secular realms, like the cult beliefs of Easter Island that led to its deforestation to the belief in having a large family in Rwanda, which has now led to over-population because of falling mortality rates. The trick for survival is to retain some of the old values and adapt some new ones, but it is a gamble at best. The resistance to newer values comes from dislike for people who first report a problem, or shrugging off problems as not being one's own, or prioritizing short term problems over long term ones, with full knowledge that future livelihoods are being endangered. In times of stress, a group of people may want to keep everyone happy, which is called "group think" resulting in decisions that are crowd-pleasing rather than judicious, or a group can be roused to a rabid frenzy, like Hitler raised in Nazi Germany, both of which do not result in a pro-survival, long-term decisions. Other causes for not making the right decision is "psychological denial", where the only way of retaining sanity under the possibility of impending disaster is to deny it is ever going to happen. But sometimes problems are not solved because it is truly beyond our capacity to solve them, like making Greenland totally self-sufficient in adverse weather conditions, a feat that has not been managed from the time of the Inuits till today, or the eradication of introduced pests. Sometimes problems cannot be solved due to prohibitive costs, and at others it is a case of too little too late, as happened in the case of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow of Florida, which is facing extinction due to remedial measures decided on too late. There are a large number of reasons for bad decisions being made, but the survival of our civilization as a whole proves that a whole lot more good decisions were made than bad, because the sum of bad decisions fits in a book of limited size, and is not infinite. With more advanced methods of problem detection, civilization today stands a better chance of survival, and making decisions that will prevent disaster. Diamond's article is an eye-opener on how individual and collective human behavior can sometimes lead to catastrophic decisions that look totally avoidable and foolish in hindsight. But one needs to remember that sometimes the problem is previously unheard of, unrecorded, or analyzed wrongly due to false analogy, most of which has been seen historically. The problem could be imperceptibly slow in emerging, but with modern technology it should be easily discernible. The article also describes how human selfishness, dogma, psychological denial and lack of foresight has led to doom in the past, and can easily do so today. At the end of the day, Diamond makes us realize, that it is we human beings as individuals and as a group that need to make informed, selfless, far sighted decisions in order to ensure the survival and welfare of our race. Read More