Balancing truth and positivity is a fundamental aspect of my personal philosophy. It underpins many of my morals, goals, feelings, thoughts and actions. And while it's certainly not a religion, it is my religion or at least an important component thereof. To the extent that every person, organization or group, be it formal or informal, has religion, as in a unique set of guiding principles, from my vantage point, it appears far more common to greater emphasize positivity than to emphasize truth. An inconvenient truth is aptly named for this reason, but global climate change is not the only topic appropriate for that title. Maybe I'd go on to talk about the *socioeconomic struggle* of middle class Europeans, Japanese and Americans in the face of globalization, or overpopulation, or peak oil, or the *potential obsolescence of human labor* and the plethora of *out of work* or unemployed individuals. But what we really need to talk about is how we got to this place of inconvenient truths and how we might yet walk away with scars that fade instead of amputated limbs and *traumatic memory loss* or PTSD (motivated forgetting on Wikipedia).
Our positivity today exists in the context of our past and our conception thereof. Modern cultural understanding comes from a long history of American success over the past 100 years. Perception of human history, dating back centuries and millennia, further reinforces modern attitudes. Schooling, entertainment and almost every other exposure to history focuses on the impressive, the eventful, the progressive and the majestic. Since these times are long gone, we package most historical events together in our minds. We lose perspective on the immense amount of time it took to arrive at our present condition. In reality, civilizations rose and fell across the planet over the course of several thousand years. There were periods of progress and periods of stagnation and periods of regression. Societal and economic growth only happen sometimes. We seem to have forgotten this recently.
Or, rather than, forget the normalcy of economic stagnation and stability, perhaps we lack the education. Living in times of growth and prosperity for generations, we learned to expect it. America has been a global superpower for about 150 years now. The industrial revolution ratcheted a territorial expansion (robbery of natives’ land) and population growth into previously unfathomable demographic transformation. Cities became the size of empires and with more people and more technological experimentation, the acceleration of breakthrough after breakthrough begun over a century ago continues today. Again we lose context; we focus on globalization’s novelty, rather than the typicality of temporary expansion followed by long, steady lulls.
Globalization has brought amazing magnitude and interconnectedness to our growth. At the same time, we’ve moved at different rates, leaving many groups stratified and siloed. Importantly, the groups with greatest influence and power have retained their positivity with their fame, money and success. As an investment banker, programmer, doctor, CEO or any one of so many profitable roles in society, the positivity comes as expected, token, unsurprising. We in the United States miss the mobility required to balance the past’s optimism with the troubling realities of the present. The diversity of opinion reflective of the true state of affairs percolates slowly into the minds of society’s rich leaders and isolated academics.
These societal organization issues thrive also because of our individual biases. In its difficulty, fighting the innate drive of our nature parallels knowing what we have yet to learn. Even after the truth presents itself to our face, *we want to reject it*. Sometimes, personal motives make the desire to deny the truth even worse. As a widely accepted example, take the tobacco industry’s denial of cigarette’s link to cancer. At first, I’m sure the business leaders simply wanted to refuse the results because human nature drove them to favor hope over truth. After tests confirmed the results, however, the fault shifts to their conscious decision making process. What started in their biology was reinforced by their desire to make money, and rejection of fact cemented in their brains. In the worst case, the untruth is a neurological parasite that spreads to infect other hosts. If they too are predisposed to lie because of their incentives, similar complications continue to cause verbal vomit and allow the parasite to continue its lifecycle. Even when the issue is less contagious, hidden only by human nature, it threatens to grow on it’s own. Unfortunately, we as a society make these dangerous subjects commonplace by allowing positivity to outweigh truth.
Any number of inconvenient subjects important to our future avoid meaningful discussion. The most challenging ones endanger our very existence.
Bringing balance back to our positivity is a challenge we can and must pass. Thankfully, we posses several tools suited to this undertaking. We can focus on evidence-based policy. We can run more frequent experiments to test policy initiatives. We can give experts more authority when our external environment challenges us. We can recommit to inclusive politics, where all voices are heard and valued. A combination of all these strategies will give the best chance of balancing truth and positivity in America and throughout the world.
It’s true that humans have optimistic goals. We have policy for the sake of reaching these goals. For example, when we wanted to go to the moon, we created a space program. When we want to reduce homelessness, we alter zoning and economic policies to spur development and job growth. Yet, the goals rarely exist in the written policy itself. By pursuing goal oriented legislation, we hold ourselves more accountable to our history of goal achievement. Goal oriented legislation prevents us from hiding or forgetting failures to meet goals and deadlines. It creates a framework for evidence based policy and experimentation, and it makes the truth more plain.
Experimenting with policy implementation and using the results as evidence for altering our policies and platforms will help us find the downsides we miss in our organic social organization. While ideas for goals, metrics, prioritization and experiments should come from the people, evidence and experimental results should inform the policies based on those ideas. While higher levels of government sometimes use lower levels to experiment with various social policy implementations, cities could be leveraged far more as proving grounds. In this way, even if the state or federal government is divided, experiments can be designed to test a proposed policy from either side. Suburban or rural communities could similarly be used as test subjects for new policies. In this way, social ills and internal challenges can be addressed systematically over time.
Challenges to society arise from our external environment in addition to our internal structure. To prevent external threats from blindsiding us, we must remain ever watchful of changes in our surroundings. One way to institutionalize this observation and to incorporate it into policy is by giving communities of experts earned influence in the legislative process. Typically, this is unnecessary because leaders see the obvious external threats without expert influence. For example, if scientists informed the government about an imminent asteroid impact, policy makers would move to fund programs to address the danger. However, as discussed earlier, there are times when biases and misaligned incentives cause individuals or even groups of leaders to turn a blind I to such threats. In this case, we need to change the system so that expert consensus is capable of counteracting lobbying biases.
Finally, we must make an inherent commitment to overcome a social bias. While perhaps less of a threat, a bias to exclude those different from us hurts our strength as an inclusive nation. It prohibits us from reaching bipartisan consensus and from effectively discussing controversial topics. Therefore, we must recommit to our founding principle that all people are created equal. We all have a vote. We all have a voice. And we all have a need to be heard by the systems that organize us. And beyond that, we all have human needs that an effective government empowers us to address - basic needs, but also the need to create, and the need to love, and the need be accepted and be loved. Only with a commitment to inclusion can we truly use the rest of the tools to solve the difficult problems of a global society.
These tools to converge on a healthy balance of truth and positivity are all things we can do today. The sooner we enact changes to discover and address threats unseen by our leaders today, the safer we will be in the future. Together, let us build a better future.
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