« More Supreme Ignorance | Main | To Err is Human (Political, Clinical) »
August 04, 2007
Predictable Developments ("Neuroscience")
One of many ways anyone with a brain should be able to recognize that America’s war on drugs (a global policy actively promulgated by the UN) is a colossal failure was highlighted by a front page article in today’s Washington Post. Roig-Franzia’s account of the alarming increase in criminal violence accompanying the prosperity that NAFTA brought to the region is a story as old as the hills; it has also been repeated so often since the days of Al Capone it’s a wonder he and other writers are able to muster the phony outrage required to report it as expected by his editors, let alone that a “prestigious” news source like the Post would find room for it on a front page cluttered with accounts of more recent follies like the Iraq War and the catastrophic failure of an annually inspected, heavily traveled bridge in heart of an important American city.
What those stories all get back to is the same fatal flaw in human cognition: our manifest inability to be entirely rational in those cognitive areas that impinge on our strongly held existential beliefs. That same flaw seems to have finally given our species a degree of (uncontrollable) influence over our planetary environment that will assure us of survival short of whatever our full potential might have been.
In the final analysis, that may not matter; it may well be as Will Durant once suggested, that life is just “a planetary eczema that soon may be cured.”
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at August 4, 2007 07:35 PM