I’ve got a bit behind with my articles, it’s the chestnut harvest season here, one of our main crops, so a bit busy gathering them and then spending time using tweezers to remove the spines from my fingers :-)
"We used machine learning to find the words in local news media that best indicate the level of peace in a country. In less peaceful countries, news media focus on government and social control, while in more peaceful countries, its focus is on personal preferences and the activities of everyday life. We also found that high-peace countries evidenced a much higher level of diversity of terms than low-peace countries." Link to study
While the world sinks deeper into a pit of avoidable crises, as the truth is knocking at the door when the lies are already inside making a coffee we continue to hope that someone, somewhere is going to sort it out.
The above study shows to what extent people in many countries still believe in ‘government saviours’. This despite all the evidence that show how incompetent they are and have been in the past. Forty plus years of climate warnings and the message that climatic forcing is a symptom of our socio-economic systems and that they must change have been heard and for the most part ignored by successive governments. When action has been decided upon industrial lobbies have made sure that said action has been watered down, diluted, trampled upon and delayed.
Dead cats, smoke and mirrors, wargames of all sorts are used to divert our attention elsewhere. Our elected leaders are simply not fit for purpose and this message is reinforced each day by their actions, non-actions and by their fatuous comments. Today thousands of people are being killed in wars, hundreds of thousands are being killed by pollution, by climate change, by malnourishment (either too much bad stuff or too little of anything). The way to hell may be paved with good intentions but the way to hell on earth is asphalted with the the Dunning–Kruger effect (people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities).
We each get up in the morning and face the world with our heads full of cognitive biases which tend to turn us away from rational analysis and judgements. Perhaps, faced with another news report of a disaster elsewhere our normalcy bias kicks in, “it’s never happened here so it never will.” Or maybe the article will provoke an ostrich effect which doesn’t need explaining or could it be that the news provokes a just world fallacy? The world is Just which leads someone to assume that "(other) people get what they deserve". Many politicians seem to suffer from a conservatism bias, they won’t change their view even when confronted with new evidence which shows their view to be flawed. Or even worse they suffer from the Semmelweis effect where new evidence or new knowledge is ignored simply because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms. It would seem that many politicians have a pro-innovation bias and are sure that technological innovations are always good and at some point we’ll invent the ‘miraculous global crises solution’ which seem unlikely.
Perhaps a social inertia to making the changes we need is down to hyperbolic discounting, take the car today even if it means my child dying from pollution tomorrow? Or perhaps the inertia is simply down to the bandwagon effect? Waiting for someone or the group to get on and do something before acting ones’ self. But then again we have the authority bias and we give more credence to the drivel of an authority figure because we think it’s more accurate and so we continue to listen to the torrent of nonsense that floods both mainstream and alt-media.
One of the worst ideas is to think that, faced with such a toxic cocktail of global crises, any action on my part is futile. The opposite is actually the case because there are ripple effects, butterfly effects, leverage points and positive cascade effects. Sheep are led and goats are driven, we humans are neither one nor the other, each one of us can can be the snowball which provokes an avalanche cascade that brings about social change. Each of us can decide that from today onwards everything I do will have a positive impact on those around me and on my environment. I wrote more about this here :
I could have encouraged readers of this article to perceive it as being even more truthful by using the rhyme or reason cognitive bias. Rhyming statements are seen as being more truthful even if said rhyme is a pathetic hollow alliteration like “build back better.” But I didn’t do this because I don’t appreciate that type of manipulation nor any other to be honest.