Journal #7

On “Social Animal”, an article by David Brooks, he discusses in broad terms – how science can help us make sense of our own lives – from falling in love, to being happy, to finding connections with others, etc. I think this article is fine. It’s not bad. The problem with this article, is that it’s all been discussed before. None of the ideas presented here are brand new amazing insights on life, but the writing is good. The thing is, (myself included) people love reading about themselves. So if it’s an article on the science behind how we came to be, how we become successful, how we find mates – and make the relationship work, how we become happy human beings, etc – we will read it. I suppose this isn’t problematic really, as reading is a leisurely activity – but for some reason I would love to read more about real science, politics, environmental problems and well less about myself and more on long-lasting solutions to the world’s main problems.

For instance, how and fucking when are we going to solve climate change? Will we ever have more than 2 main political parties?  When will we get money out of politics and not have most politicians being swayed by big businesses? And of course, will Congress get their shit together and maybe – oh maybe – restore the government before this Thursday?

The main problem with these crises’ (perhaps Brooks could write an article about this?) is that you have 2 distinct groups of people – what their labels are doesn’t matter,  (liberals/conservatives, democrats/republicans, science-oriented/Christians, etc, urban/rural),  that tend to follow patterns which do not allow them to sit down and calmly work out solutions. Call it pride, stubbornness, ignorance, whatever – these two people will talk through each other, and will be hesitant to budge on their opinions of what they feel is best (now, whether this aforementioned solution is really best for themselves and the corporation that allows them to stay in office, or really best for Americans…that is left up in the air). Jonah Lehrer briefly touches on this with his article “Groupthink”. When he talks about working/creative groups and what makes a good group, good – you could apply this here. When we have a small group of Democrats and Republicans for instance – what would make this group work well together, consistently? They are often in close proximity when working on ideas and legislation. This should help. They’re also most of the time broken down into small teams to work on individual tasks and problems (though usually not intermixed here, unfortunately). Clearly even Lehrer can’t solve the political problem – though I find that his solutions would come close – if either team were willing to budge…on anything.