Imagine that you’ve descended into Earth’s orbit from some distant planet where Spock-like reason was normal. Imagine, too, that you’re then forced to ponder those of us who are slightly less-than-rational on occasion. I’d guess, looking back on 2011, this alien among us would have a few questions about human behaviour.
Let’s start with one of the more recent news events: Attawapiskat. That northern Ontario reserve is regrettably symbolic for many others, where poor social conditions and poverty are rife. The cause of its many economic and social woes is not mysterious. Attawapiskat is severely isolated with little easy access to the outside world. It also has a governance structure that politicizes much of the transferred taxpayer money that does enter the reserve.
As with many isolated communities, an eventual improvement in the lives of those who live in Attawapiskat will occur as individuals leave the reserve to find educational and economic opportunity elsewhere. That’s one possible path. Another is if opportunities are created close enough to the reserve to materially affect and improve the lives of the residents.
Of the two, leaving the reserve is more likely to be the road to success. After all, even with a diamond mine near that reserve, trying to raise the living standards of an entire community with a one-trick pony is extremely problematic.
That’s because human beings are a diverse group. That, in turn, means the skills needed at that diamond mine near Attawapiskat might not necessarily match up with those available on the reserve. After all, that perennial mismatch between opportunities near to where one is born is why many people, at some point in their lives, move. It’s why there’s been a population shift over the last two centuries from rural to urban areas: because people can more easily find educational and work opportunities in centres that have a larger population base.
While some remote reserves could indeed flourish if given, say, individual property rights and a governance system where band councils are forced to pay for local services out of locally collected taxes, I predict governments will still attempt to bring the economic mountain to Mohammed (to the rural area) rather than asking Mohammed to come to the economic mountain (to larger towns and cities). And so a visitor from outer space might pose this question by paraphrasing the famous definition of insanity: Is it really sane to do the same thing over and over and expect different results?
Another perplexing mystery a space traveller might ponder is why human beings tend to be so ridiculously short-term in their thinking, sacrificing even their kids’ interests to immediate gratification.
No better example of that tendency exists than how Canadian, American and European governments have engaged in decades-long debt binges, the bill for which is now coming due. (The problem is more evident in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United States. But we shouldn’t get too smug in Canada; our federal government has run deficits in 37 of the last 50 years and has again been in the red since 2009.)
Thus, a Spock-like observer of those who stand on two legs on planet Earth might ask these rhetorical questions:
•What did you think would happen – beyond crunch-time payback – when governments and consumers borrowed without reason for decades?; and
•Why blame others, such as the Chinese, for your plight? After all, they saved their money. You (in North America and Europe) did not. That means they have the money and you don’t, a simple and logical outcome, as Spock might say.
Lastly, an alien from a consistently rational society might wonder at the recent events that have toppled tyrants in Egypt, Libya and Tunis and thankfully threaten authoritarians elsewhere. A consistently rational observer might wonder why people will risk their lives in pursuit of an ideal – freedom – that can, if things turn out badly, injure their security?
The answer to that is however much we like security, we are also, as the philosopher Nietzsche once observed, something more than just rational animals. Humans are also the “beast with red cheeks” – we can blush and show anger when we feel shame or slighted.
So the Spock-like alien would be well advised to remember that human beings are as much about passion as reason. Thus, looking ahead in 2012, for the alien and anyone who wants to try to understand how events and people combine, whether in politics, the stock market or in the brain of their 13-year-old, remember that most days, we’re influenced as much by passion as by reason. •
