Hard To Believe, Yet True

Despite the recent economic problems demonstrating that those in charge are not sufficiently competent and that our information is largely false, nevertheless it is likely that people will react to the statements in my blog with "this is hard to believe". Here is why they react that way:

Human beings start out in life with the impression that people in authority are competent.

This is because almost any parent knows more about the world and life than their children, at least until high school age (and usually beyond that). Just having gone through most life experiences before, gives a parent an overwhelming advantage in knowledge of the best course of action. And at home and in school, parents and teachers go to lengths to establish that authorities know best for everyone - because such an attitude is necessary for them to be able to effectively do their jobs.

So, human beings are all conditioned early in life, to believe that authority figures know best, and are competent at what they do.

And, for simlar reasons as the above, authority figures want to preserve this impression in the adult population, and go to lengths to give an impression of competence - using sales techniques and communication media to do so. This is why the lack of competence of most of our authorities and managers is not known to most people, and is rarely taken into account in any planning or overall philosophy.

Furthermore, the one thing that most hides the general incompetence of human beings in current human society, is their general competence in past eras that focused on the physical world.

In other words, it seems hard to believe that modern human society contains vast amounts of false information, because humans continue to survive, reproduce and flourish. However, that is because their methods of survival were developed over several millions of years, and are not dependent on any of the aspects of modern human society.

Consumable products are produced using the same basic methods, now instinctual, developed for hunting and gathering over millenia.

And, whenever an individual's or a group's survival is challenged, they stop their normal social interactions and activities, and focus on using their excellent human survival skills to correct the situation. Then, they go back to modern human activities.

Even in modern society, a human's basic requirements are food and shelter/clothing, the creation of which now occupies a small portion of the time of human beings. Thus, all the rest of their activities can be failures, and all their information be false, and as long as they have 3 meals a day, and can sleep in shelter, then the rest of their live can be represented as whatever the most successful propagandists of society say it is.