“I Call the Left Hemisphere the Berlusconi of the Brain”
The 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:
February 12th, 2012 at 11:51 pm
Apologize for any minor editorial issues in this post – having a tech issue that is preventing editing and adding new links. Highly aggravating…….
February 13th, 2012 at 1:12 am
“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.”
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Does this mean that the “gift” is the ability to “fly”, or the ability to connect “overseas”?
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I mean, what you are talking about in this statement is the “left’s” cost of the program, and not the right’s differences between the culture here and oversea.
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Which do we need the resources go towards? The administration is using the right-side of the brain, while the left goes un-noticed.
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Perhaps, after looking at the video, this is the way it should be?
February 13th, 2012 at 1:16 am
Hi Zen –
Evidently what he says is true only of men with beards. (Check out the visuals.)
More seriously, I only came across a comment recently that says that nobody believes in that left-brain/right-brain stuff any more. And the video does acknowledge that, but then goes on to say that well, it’s true anyway. Whatever.
I take most of the stuff about what facility resides where in the brain with a grain of salt, so I wasn’t horrified by that recent comment. So I really, really wonder what the basis is for the claims that animals, in particular, use the different lobes of their brains for different functions. You can put a human in a brain scanner and come up with patterns of oxygen usage or whatever, but a bird pecking at food in gravel? Really?
It’s possible, but not easy, to use your brain to filter out the left-brain/right-brain stuff in the video and still come up with some good questions. But then it doesn’t make quite such a neat package. It could also be reframed in a Jungian way between animus and anima, which would give a different set of ways to approach the various questions. But, interestingly, I think that the animus-anima framing could come up with more useful ways to deal with these questions.
All the narrator of the video can do to deal with the questions is to say, implicitly, hey, use your right hemisphere more. You could do that with animus-anima too, but we actually have people walking around who have been socialized more into one than the other, so iif you got those people together, and maybe even gave the anima-types a bit more attention, maybe we could all work out some of those problems.
But it will be harder if only men with beards are included.
February 13th, 2012 at 5:37 am
Beware of men with beards
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Not sure about animal MRI studies. Have read many such studies with human subjects but not any with animals – not sure what kind of citation is used for RSA animate videos but their narrators usually have a book or books under their belt .
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Charles should comment on the Jungian part as that’s one of his areas of interest
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Larry, I think connecting might be the “gift”. Inconvenience is a “tax” on our willingness to endure the hassle to do it.