Short term - Long term
One of the most exciting things about adolescent boys and girls can be said to be their idealism. They have not yet settled down into disillusionment, and the corollary of this is that they are free to formulate ideal plans.
It is not for the adolescent to take a long-term view, which may come more naturally to those who have lived through many decades and begun to grow old.
[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, p. 165
These appeals are all but useless in the current cultural climate.
The more we swing toward a short-term pragmatist/materialist mentality the less we value long-term considerations. Thus, the voice that urges us to think in the long term - that warns of future dangers - is a weak one. 'The future' is little more than an abstraction; we do not care about 'the future' because it does not exist here, now.
We can see this on an individual level. Many of us may have an addiction that we know is harming us in the long term, and that may have catastrophic effects on us in the future. Yet, because we can continue to indulge in the present without any immediate ill effects - because judgement day has not yet arrived - concern for our future has little affect on our present actions. The short-term outweighs the long-term. This kind of thinking is encouraged and reinforced by the wider culture. It urges us to indulge. 'Fuck it'.
If we do not care about our own future as individuals, then what hope have we of caring about our future as a species?
Who is going to be willing to fight the enormous battle against their addictions - a battle waged in the palpable here-and-now - for an abstract concept like 'future generations'?
Appeals that attempt to make us change our immediate actions by gesturing towards future danger - "the icecaps will melt", "your liver will give up" - are more or less redundant. Calamity must strike - we must hit rock bottom - before we are willing to change anything. Faced with such calamity, many would choose to continue along their dysfunctional path (keep their addiction) rather than change. They would, in some cases, choose annihilation.
Sometimes in order to fight something we must take an indirect - and often counter-intuitive - route. Perhaps, then, to prevent the icecaps from melting, we must promote a long-term mentality. The pendulum must begin to swing in the opposite direction.
The most critical battlefield in this regard may be culture.
We must stop transmitting messages that urge us to think short-term. We need people of influence (celebrities) who endorse long-term thinking. The voice of wisdom - the voice of the elder - must return to guide us, rather than the voice of the reckless youth.
Not only is there respect for the aged, but authority is vested in the old people. This arrangement naturally lends itself to control of life by the aged.
Preservation of the religious ideals and mores is thereby ensured, and the younger people who are inclined to introduce change can be held in check.
A strong consciousness of kinship is peculiarly favourable to gerontocracy, or social control by the older members of society. This control is informal rather than formal, but is, nevertheless, "closer ti us than breathing, nearer than hands or feet."
The part that old people have "in drawing forth and molding the character and life-policy of every younger person in the kinship group makes the necessity for direct control much less frequent in an isolated culture than in more accessible communities."
The relatively integrated community is asscoaited with effective rules imposed by the aged, be they parents or church leaders. Thus deference to age pervades not only familial realtionships but also the religious leadership of the group.
Furthermore, the counsel of the older bishop or minister carries more authority than that of younger ones.
[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 16-8
In economics, hyperbolic discounting is a time-inconsistent model of delay discounting.
The standard experiment used to reveal a test subject's hyperbolic discounting curve is to compare short-term preferences with long-term preferences. For instance: "Would you prefer a dollar today or three dollars tomorrow?" or "Would you prefer a dollar in one year or three dollars in one year and one day?"
It has been claimed that a significant fraction of subjects will take the lesser amount today, but will gladly wait one extra day in a year in order to receive the higher amount instead. Individuals with such preferences are described as "present-biased".
The most important consequence of hyperbolic discounting is that it creates temporary preferences for small rewards that occur sooner over larger, later ones.
Individuals using hyperbolic discounting reveal a strong tendency to make choices that are inconsistent over time – they make choices today that their future self would prefer not to have made, despite knowing the same information. This dynamic inconsistency happens because hyperbolas distort the relative value of options with a fixed difference in delays in proportion to how far the choice-maker is from those options.
Hyperbolic discounting has also been found to relate to real-world examples of self-control. Indeed, a variety of studies have used measures of hyperbolic discounting to find that drug-dependent individuals discount delayed consequences more than matched nondependent controls, suggesting that extreme delay discounting is a fundamental behavioral process in drug dependence. Some evidence suggests pathological gamblers also discount delayed outcomes at higher rates than matched controls.
Whether high rates of hyperbolic discounting precede addictions or vice versa is currently unknown, although some studies have reported that high-rate discounters are more likely to consume alcohol and cocaine than lower-rate discounters. Likewise, some have suggested that high-rate hyperbolic discounting makes unpredictable (gambling) outcomes more satisfying.
'Hyperbolic discounting'
Wikipedia
Wal-Mart's lengthy struggle to open in New York City has hit fresh problems -- a controversial report that said America's biggest discounter does not just sell cheap, it makes neighborhoods poorer.
"The overwhelming weight of the independent research on the impact of Wal-Mart stores ... shows that Wal-Mart depresses area wages and labor benefits ... pushes out more retail jobs than it creates, and results in more retail vacancies," [...]
New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio calls a possible Wal-Mart store in New York "a Trojan horse."
"It looks appealing to a lot of families who are hurting but it turns into a big problem in the long term because of the net elimination of jobs," de Blasio said.
"Wal-Mart draws ire even in poor parts of Brooklyn"
If both positive and negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast.
But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with net cost to society.
Consider job-protection measures: you notice those whose jobs are made safe and ascribe social benefits to such protections. You do not notice the effect on those who cannot find a job as a result, since the measure will reduce job openings. In some cases […] the positive consequences of an action will immediately benefit the politicians and phony humanitarians, while the negative ones take a long time to appear - they may never become noticeable.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 129
[…] iatrogenics, being a cost-benefit situation, usually results from the treacherous condition in which the benefits are small, and visible - and the costs very large, delayed, and hidden.
And of course, the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 340
The future is an unknown country, and those who live in a present arrayed in hostility to the past must acquire indifference toward, and a simple faith in, a better if unknowable future.
Those whose view of time is guided by such belief implicitly understand that their "achievements” are destined for the dustbin of history, given that the future will regard us as backward and necessarily superseded.
Every generation must live for itself.
Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.74
Sorel believed that the bourgeoisie, having derived its moral ideas from eighteenth-century absolutism and from the decadent aristocracy fostered by absolutism, was now attempting to instill this ethic of irresponsibility into the workers, seducing them with the promise of endless leisure and abundance.
He argued, in effect, that the aristocracy of the old regime, with its cultivation of the "art of living,” had anticipated the modern cult of consumption. Aristocrats had traded their power for the brilliant, feverish delights of the Sun King's court. Without civic functions, they determined at least “to enjoy their wealth with relish"; they "no longer wanted to hear of the prudence long imposed on their fathers." The assumption that improvement had become automatic and irresistible relieved them of the need to provide for times to come. “Why worry about the fate of new generations, which are destined to have a fate that is automatically superior to ours?”
Aristocrats tried to avoid their obligations not only to the future but to the poor; this escape from responsibility, according to Sorel, was the dominant theme in eighteenth-century aristocratic culture.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.74
Sorel believed that the bourgeoisie, having derived its moral ideas from eighteenth-century absolutism and from the decadent aristocracy fostered by absolutism, was now attempting to instill this ethic of irresponsibility into the workers, seducing them with the promise of endless leisure and abundance.
He argued, in effect, that the aristocracy of the old regime, with its cultivation of the "art of living,” had anticipated the modern cult of consumption. Aristocrats had traded their power for the brilliant, feverish delights of the Sun King's court. Without civic functions, they determined at least “to enjoy their wealth with relish"; they "no longer wanted to hear of the prudence long imposed on their fathers." The assumption that improvement had become automatic and irresistible relieved them of the need to provide for times to come. “Why worry about the fate of new generations, which are destined to have a fate that is automatically superior to ours?”
Aristocrats tried to avoid their obligations not only to the future but to the poor; this escape from responsibility, according to Sorel, was the dominant theme in eighteenth-century aristocratic culture.
“At the dawn of modern times, anyone who held any authority aspired to liberate himself from the responsibilities that archaic conventions, customs, and Christian morality had, until then, imposed on the masters for the benefit of the weak.”
The idea of progress furnished the theoretical justification for the abrogation of reciprocal obligations, the foundation of aristocratic morality in its heroic phase, before enlightened aristocrats were corrupted by easy living.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.307
I believe that human beings and our cognitive capacities have become obsolete in the world in which we live.
If you think about the evolution of humans, we grew up in relatively simple circumstances. We were in small groups living in home ranges that weren't all that extensive, and lived and died within a few dozens of kilometers of each other. So there was no real pressures on the human mind to think beyond simple cause effect relationships.
The bottom line is that our cognitive capacities tend to be limited in most people to rather simplistic reductionist perspectives on reality.
Climate change is a perfect illustration, because there are hundreds of things happening but we fixate on climate change. The focus gets shifted a little bit when something like a pandemic comes along. But then, it's all about the pandemic we forget about climate change. Then there's the war in Ukraine, and we talk about that for a while, and now we're back to climate change.
And nobody bothers to connect all of those dots because human beings are not inherently intrinsically capable of thinking systemically. When's the last time you had a dinner conversation about lags and thresholds, chaotic behavior, collapse syndrome, systems theory and so on. It just doesn't happen.
Climate change is our fixation because there are obvious symptoms that many people can relate to, but it's only one. We could spend the whole day talking about plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, soil and land erosion, on and on and on. Every single so-called environmental problem is a symptom of the same issue, which is overshoot. Overshoot is the fundamental issue and is the cause of all of these other problems.
Overshoot means that human beings are using resources, the products of ecosystems, much faster than they can regenerate. And we're dumping wastes far in excess of the natural assimilative capacity of ecosystems of the ecosphere. We're drawing down all of our natural capital - fish stocks are collapsing, soils are eroding at 10 to 40 times the rate of restoration - and we're polluting far beyond the capacity of the systems to assimilate.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Related posts:-
The idea of progress furnished the theoretical justification for the abrogation of reciprocal obligations, the foundation of aristocratic morality in its heroic phase, before enlightened aristocrats were corrupted by easy living.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.307
I believe that human beings and our cognitive capacities have become obsolete in the world in which we live.
If you think about the evolution of humans, we grew up in relatively simple circumstances. We were in small groups living in home ranges that weren't all that extensive, and lived and died within a few dozens of kilometers of each other. So there was no real pressures on the human mind to think beyond simple cause effect relationships.
The bottom line is that our cognitive capacities tend to be limited in most people to rather simplistic reductionist perspectives on reality.
Climate change is a perfect illustration, because there are hundreds of things happening but we fixate on climate change. The focus gets shifted a little bit when something like a pandemic comes along. But then, it's all about the pandemic we forget about climate change. Then there's the war in Ukraine, and we talk about that for a while, and now we're back to climate change.
And nobody bothers to connect all of those dots because human beings are not inherently intrinsically capable of thinking systemically. When's the last time you had a dinner conversation about lags and thresholds, chaotic behavior, collapse syndrome, systems theory and so on. It just doesn't happen.
Climate change is our fixation because there are obvious symptoms that many people can relate to, but it's only one. We could spend the whole day talking about plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, soil and land erosion, on and on and on. Every single so-called environmental problem is a symptom of the same issue, which is overshoot. Overshoot is the fundamental issue and is the cause of all of these other problems.
Overshoot means that human beings are using resources, the products of ecosystems, much faster than they can regenerate. And we're dumping wastes far in excess of the natural assimilative capacity of ecosystems of the ecosphere. We're drawing down all of our natural capital - fish stocks are collapsing, soils are eroding at 10 to 40 times the rate of restoration - and we're polluting far beyond the capacity of the systems to assimilate.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Related posts:-
