“I Call the Left Hemisphere the Berlusconi of the Brain”
Sunday, February 12th, 2012The RSA video below is very, very good. It gave me several insights:
First, that two of our more negative trends in American society – the tendency to politicize all aspects of life, no matter how trivial and then, after bitterly polarizing them, subject activities to litigation that were never meant to be regulated in a free society – is a result of a Left hemisphere -dominant cultural “ratchet”.
The cognitive capacity to isolate, compartmentalize and analyze free of context is a biological-psychological driver behind the “cultural imperialism” of the domains of politics and law to subsume and dominate all other human activities; this is quite apart from the content of specific ideologies held by the advocates, which could easily aggravate or inhibit these tendencies. It would also help if the most ideological of our politicians and lobbyist-activists were not also themselves lawyers with a professional training in crafting tunnel-visioned micromanaging language.
Secondly, the thesis in this RSA video might help explain the mystery of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies– the stubborn rationalization of piling on ever greater degrees of complexity, despite empirical evidence of harm or decline mustered by advocates of social control that goes beyond protecting rice bowls or the horse-trading/bargaining. Much of the vast TSA security theater promoted by DHS, for example, represents a huge economic waste in terms of expense, spillover costs and opportunity costs while doing very little to increase security from terrorist attacks.
It becomes very difficult to secure agreement to reduce higher complexity levels to simpler structures or forms, once they are established. Instead, more complexity is usually added to route around the problem. In terms of the above example, the Obama administration is belatedly trying to undo years of post-9/11 nonsensical regs that deters legitimate business and scientific travelers from visiting the United States with various new tourism-friendly initiatives, but is avoiding the obvious solution of reducing the size and scope of DHS/TSA authority that has made air travel here a nightmare in the first place. In fact, there are moves by the administration to expand TSA authority into all public spaces to habituate Americans to a greater degree of (admittedly less sinister) scrutiny than East Germans once had from Stasi.
Check it out:
