What’s been happening in your life while you were making other plans? World events in recent weeks have basically captured attention I had intended to “spend” elsewhere. First, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdowns in Japan…. As someone with friends and semi-relatives (my daughter-in-law is Japanese, and her parents live in Osaka), I have been following the events there with some concern. Second, recent events in the Mideast have been difficult to ignore. Compared with what’s currently going on in Libya, the “revolution” in Egypt was fun to watch.
In an article titled, “Washington vs. the Merciless,” Thomas L. Friedman, an Op-Ed Columnist for the NY Times, said the following:
At a time when Japan is suffering a nuclear catastrophe that is likely to make the world even more dependent on oil and gas, at a time when the world’s top oil and gas producers are entering what will be, at best, an unstable, and, at worst, a viciously violent transition from autocracy to, one hopes, democracy, and at a time when the combination of the two could slow down global growth while we’re still trying to climb out of recession, America has no energy policy, no climate policy and no long-term plan to deal with its unsustainable deficit.
We’re basically saying to the market and Mother Nature: “Bring it on. We’re going to be dumb as we wanna be and put off all these big decisions, possibly until 2013, after the next presidential election, because our two political parties would rather focus on winning the next election and blaming the other guy than making hard choices.” [19 March 2011]
My guess is that what is true here in the States—no energy policy, no climate policy, and essentially no long-term monetary policy—is also true wherever you happen to be on Planet Earth. In spite of everything humans have accomplished (we are, after all, the “Crown of Creation”), we haven’t done very well in many respects. It seems to me that most of our problems result from what used to be called “crisis management.” We work on solving current problems while failing to consider the long-term, logical consequences of the solutions. While getting around this on a national or international level is beyond the scope of my imagination, it seems to me that the process of thinking “long-term” has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is with individuals—individuals like you and me.
I’m not suggesting that we develop a supersense of precognition, but rather that we take advantage of looking at the past to see what the consequences of previous actions have been and then taking that information into account when we consider how current actions are likely to influence the future. In other words, I’m suggesting that we would do well to learn from our mistakes. One of the stories I usually tell in the NLP workshops Debra and I teach (see a brief video for an example) is about one of my former students from my college professor days. She told me that she had married three men who were “just like” her father and that she had hated her father. At the time she told me this, she was dating a guy who was the of same basic type. It is one thing when people repeat the “sins” of the past on an individual basis; on a cultural scale, however, it becomes something else.
We have a lot of history, for example, with coal, oil, and natural gas. We know the hazards and environmental consequences of procuring them and using them to produce our energy needs. Although it is the “new kid” on the energy block, we also know a lot about nuclear energy and its associated risks. I suspect that all these forms of producing energy could be done safely and in ways that would protect the environment if we were willing to make the financial and intellectual investment that would be required to do so.
I suspect that the same is true for monetary policy. In the States, we have long history of taxation, changing monetary policies, and regulations (and the lack thereof), and the results of those policies on our (collective) financial well-being is well-known. We may think we know how tax rates influence job growth and economic well-being, but “thinking” (assuming) isn’t the same as looking at the historical data to see actual results. To paraphrase Byron Katie, when you argue with Reality, you lose—but only every time (Loving What Is). What leads people (and you and I in particular) to believe that this—coal mine, oil well, gas fracking site, tax policy, war, husband/wife) will be different from the last one?
It seems to me that whatever the new thing is, it will not be different unless we have learned from the past by noting what went wrong and what possible actions need to be taken to prevent the problems from the last time. In general, our personal, national, and international problems are not caused by lack of knowledge, but by our failure to apply what we already know from previous experience.
I, for one, am going to start paying closer attention to what I already know and to use that knowledge when I make decisions—especially those that will have long-term consequences for my future. Care to join me?
