The Maddening Personality Trait
That Screws Up The World
It’s Not Arrogance Or Greed Or Any Of The Usual Suspects. It’s “The Ostrich Syndrome”
By David Grace
Greed, arrogance, narcissism, lust (for money, power or sex), or any of a dozen other personality traits can make someone a really unpleasant person. And, yes, one awful person can do a lot of damage, depending on how much power they have. But basically we’re talking about individual levels of damage, and unless he/she is the dictator somewhere there’s a limit on how much damage one jerk, even a colossal jerk, can do.
But I want to talk about a common personality trait that can cause pain and chaos on a societal level.
I asked myself: What trait, what personality attribute that’s present in a significant percentage of the population can screw up entire societies on a fundamental level?
I’m sure there are many but I’m going to nominate one that you probably never thought much about. In fact there isn’t even a shorthand name for it so I’ll have to resort to a narrative description:
“The insistence on making decisions as if the world worked the way you think it should work instead of the way it actually does work.”
It’s corollary is:
“Better that we all die pretending that things work the way we think they should than we live by dealing with the world as it really is.”
What should we call that? “Magical Thinking” — “Believing Hard Enough Will Make It True” — “My Way Is The Only Way” — “No Compromise With Sin”?
For want of a better name, how about “The Ostrich Syndrome”? — “If I act as if an unpleasant truth doesn’t exist then it won’t hurt me and it might even go away.”
Whatever you call it, IMHO this personality trait is toxic not only to individuals and groups but, sadly, to entire societies.
SOME EXAMPLES
Communism
The communists believe that wealth should be distributed on a per-capita basis rather than on a to-the-victor-belongs-the-spoils basis. For the communist system to function the vast majority of humans have to be altruistic philanthropists. Only a very small percentage of humans are, in fact, altruistic philanthropists. This fact of life means that the communist system can never, ever work.
Refusing to accept that reality about human beings, the communists forged ahead, trusting that somehow, some way, humans would act the way the communists thought they should act. Of course it didn’t work.
The political and economic systems the communists built were colossal disasters because they were based on a fantasy — that most people were altruists. Nevertheless, the communists didn’t give up. They clung to their failed systems and continued to pretend that humans would act the way the communists believed they ought to act because to do otherwise would be to compromise with what they thought of as an evil, survival-of-the-fittest, system.
How well did that work out for them?
The lesson I take from that is: Whenever, for any reason, you act as if lies were truth you are doomed to failure.
Prohibition
In the early 1900s the prohibition movement grew to the point that in 1920 the Volstead Act was enacted to make the manufacture or consumption of alcohol illegal. It was based on the idea that people should not drink alcohol and that therefore if they were told not to, they would not drink alcohol.
The proponents believed that if people should not do something that all you had to do was make it illegal and then they would stop doing it. The prohibitionists were surprised and frustrated when vast numbers of people continued to consume alcohol in spite of the law.
Eventually the country figured out that it didn’t matter what anyone thought people should not do. What mattered was what a material percentage of the populations did do. Alcohol became legal again.
Many think that people shouldn’t gamble but a large percentage of the population will gamble. That’s why we now have legal lotteries and casinos.
It’s widely believed that people shouldn’t use recreational drugs but a large percentage of the population does use recreational drugs. Pot is now legal in four states. I that because smoking dope is a good idea? No, because if enough people insist on doing something you have to deal with the reality of that conduct.
You can’t successfully ignore widespread human activities because you think people shouldn’t do them. You can’t wish them away. You can’t legislate them away. You have to deal intelligently with the reality of human behavior that actually exists or everything gets screwed up — communism, prohibition, the war on drugs, etc.
When the percentage of the population that acts in a certain way reaches a certain level (I don’t know what the numbers are) all the laws and all the “shoulds” and “should nots” in the world won’t change things.
When that happens you have to set up legal and societal structures that recognize and intelligently deal with how humans do act instead of how you think they should act.
Sex Education
A group of people strongly believe that sex outside of marriage is sinful and that people, especially young people, should not have sex. Of course, in spite of all their preaching, teaching, and believing, a substantial percentage of their teenage children still do have intercourse. They’re kids with hormones. It’s gonna happen. Period.
Pregnancies, forced early marriages, suicides, abortions and venereal disease regularly occurred in a material percentage of the teenage children in this group.
A school administrator proposed having nurses instruct the teenagers on the dangers of pregnancy, the sources of venereal disease, how to prevent them, and how and where to get condoms. The parents violently objected.
In spite of the certainty that a material percentage of their children were having sex and would have sex the parents took the position that since the kids shouldn’t have sex the classes must not be given. The classes would “send the wrong message.”
Translation: Giving the sex-ed classes would acknowledge that what shouldn’t be happening was and would happen. To these parents dealing with an inconvenient truth would make it true or “truer” while pretending that it wasn’t true would make it go away. Out of sight, out of mind.
What’s that you mumbled? The Catholic Church — pedophile priests? How well did sweeping that situation under the rug work out for the Catholic Church?
Global Warming
Global warming would be terrible. I don’t want it to be true. I will strongly oppose the idea of global warming. If enough people reject the idea of global warming hard enough it will not happen and everything will be fine.
Food Stamps I was talking with a friend recently about getting people off government subsidy programs and into jobs where they could earn a living wage. He thought that was a great idea. Then I said to do that we either needed to spend tens of billions of dollars training unskilled people for existing jobs that already paid a living wage or we had to raise the minimum wage to where unskilled people could earn enough to live on from a forty-hour-per-week minimum-wage job.
He hated that idea.
“No, no, no,” he said. “People don’t deserve to earn that much money for unskilled labor. They should not be overpaid.”
“Then,” I asked him, “how do we get them off welfare and into a place where they can earn enough money to support themselves?”
His answer was to tell me: “They should work two jobs, or three. I would.”
His view was that there wouldn’t be a problem if everyone were like him.
“But they aren’t like you,” I told him.
“But they should be,” was his reply.
This is exactly what the communists said when you pointed out that talented people weren’t willing to work hard just to see most of their compensation given to less talented people.
“Well, they should,” the communists insisted.
My friend’s idea was to end all welfare programs and then people would have to work two or three minimum-wage jobs or starve.
Make alcohol illegal and people will have to stop drinking.
Don’t give your kids condoms and they won’t have sex.
Was his idea realistic? Approximately seventeen percent of the U.S. population is currently receiving food stamps. Is it politically possible to let seventeen percent of the population starve? No. Would seventeen percent of the population be content to simply crawl into a corner someplace and quietly starve without making any trouble? Of course not. I wouldn’t and neither would you.
Whether you think it is right or wrong, most people are not going to work forty or sixty or eighty hours a week at crap jobs just so they can just barely scrape by on canned beans and macaroni. It doesn’t matter if you think they should. They won’t. They will get subsidies, commit petty crimes, deal drugs, beg, etc.
It doesn’t matter if you think people shouldn’t deal drugs, steal, etc. They will. They will end up getting medical care in emergency rooms. What alternative will they have? They will have kids who will end up in “the system” which perpetuates and magnifies the problem.
All of that costs huge amounts of tax money, crime and general grief. (I am deliberately skipping any discussion of the personal tragedies that this would and does entail or what it would say about our society. Also I am deliberately not advancing any personal moral judgments I might or might not hold about people who have a “You losers deserve to starve” philosophy of life.)
My point is, my friend didn’t care about any of the consequences of his position.
Dealing With “Bad” Things Is Condoning “Bad” Things
Victims of the Ostrich Syndrome believe that if they deal with the world as it really is then they are ratifying and approving the conduct they don’t like, but if they pretend hard enough that the world actually does work the way they think it should work then the bad stuff will somehow just go away.
Their logic goes like this: People should drive responsibly. Putting seat belts and air bags in cars vastly reduces the injuries, the consequences, of bad driving. If we deliberately reduce the consequences of bad driving then we are encouraging reckless driving. Therefore, we should not have seat belts or air bags in cars and if we ban them then people will have to drive more responsibly and the ones who don’t will deserve what they get.
Crazy, right?
Kids shouldn’t have sex. Making condoms available reduces the consequences of kids having sex. If we make condoms available to kids we are encouraging young people to have sex. Therefore we should prevent kids from having access to condoms and then kids won’t have sex and if they do they will deserve what they get.
IMHO this is equally crazy.
When actions are based on true believers’ fictions/fantasies/lies about how humans will act instead of how they really do act everything gets screwed up.
It’s All About “Right” and “Wrong” Instead Of Success Or Failure
The reality about how people who can’t earn a living wage will act didn’t matter to my friend. In his mind the world had to be organized and run as if people would act the way he thought they should act, not how they (wrongfully in his view) did act.
All my friend cared about was that these (in his mind) unskilled, not very smart, not very determined, not very hard-working people (in his view “bad” people) should work for peanuts and not cause any trouble because under his moral code that’s all they deserved.
In his view unskilled people of average intelligence and a moderate level of determination should work two or more jobs, shouldn’t commit petty crimes, shouldn’t take or sell drugs, shouldn’t have children they can’t afford, should parent the children they do have, etc. In his mind society and its laws should be organized as if things worked the way he thought they should work. For him public policy needed to enforce his idea of right and wrong rather than build a society that dealt with how people did act and functioned efficiently.
And if these (in his view) lazy, stupid, “bad” people didn’t act the way he thought they should then it was their own fault. If society was organized in a way that efficiently dealt with how humans actually acted that would encourage those “bad” actions, it would be promoting “wrong actions” instead of standing up for “right actions.”
The fact that the unskilled people’s “wrongful” conduct was going to cost him tax money and was going to materially reduce the quality of life for everyone in the society didn’t matter to him.
As far as he was concerned “Let them starve” was the moral way to run things and he would rather do the “right” thing that didn’t work than the “wrong” thing that did work and to hell with the consequences.
Like the true-believer communist he would rather that we all suffered the consequences of a failed system and blame it on the people who didn’t act the way he thought they should rather than accept that people aren’t going to act the way he thinks they should and build a social and legal structure that took their conduct into account and worked. He was convinced that the moral thing to do was to blame the darkness rather than to light a candle.
Summary
My point is that it doesn’t matter what you or I think is right or wrong.
It doesn’t matter how you or I think people should act.
It doesn’t matter what you or I think people should do.
The only thing that matters is how humans really do act in the real world.
Insisting on running a family, a company, an economy or a society in accordance with your theoretical ideas about how people ought to act instead of how people really act, taking actions based on a wished-for fantasy instead of reality, is absolutely guaranteed to generate disastrous results. Just ask the communists.
But people with this delusional personality trait, those afflicted with the Ostrich Syndrome, don’t care about the real-world consequences of their fantasy-is-reality actions and, IMHO that attitude screws up everything.
David Grace at DavidGraceAuthor.com
