Underpaid Genius

What’s Your Dangerous Idea?

This year’s World Question from the Edge:

[from THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006]

The Edge Annual Question — 2006 WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

The question was suggested by Steven Pinker, and led to 119 essays, by folks like Brian Greene (The Multiverse), John Horgan (We Have No Souls), Jared Diamond (The evidence that tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war), and Freeman Dyson (Biotechnology will be thoroughly domesticated in the next fifty years). An interesting collection of folks, but the ideas are not really that dangerous.

Flemming Funch and Dave Pollard have in-depth analysis and better, more dangerous ideas:

[from Blinded By Science: What’s Your Dangerous Idea? by Dave Pollard]

I’m not usually one to criticize without offering some alternatives, so here are ten really dangerous ideas, none of them mine:

• Our civilization is in its final century [John Gray]. No civilization lasts forever, and there is no political, economic, social, educational, religious or other ‘solution’ that will make the members of any civilization suddenly and radically change their behaviour. We do what we must do, and nature will do what she must to compensate for our excesses, and, since…
• Nature always bats last [Kenny Ausubel], the world will go on just fine after we are gone.
• The crowd is always wiser than the experts [James Surowieki]. No elite, no godlike president or junta, no priest or CEO, no crack team of managers or consultants or global thought leaders can make better decisions, or predict the future better, than all of us together in our collective wisdom. Leadership of all kinds is a dysfunctional vestige of an era in which that collective wisdom could not readily be tapped.
• The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred [George Bernard Shaw]. If you really think that anybody really understands what another person has said, do an experiment after the next presentation you attend and ask attendees one-on-one immediately afterwards what they got out of it. You’ll be astonished.
• You never change things by fighting the existing reality [Bucky Fuller]. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
• Show, don’t tell [Derrick Jensen]. This is a key answer to the malaise of our education system, and to the ineffectiveness of ‘knowledge management’. We learn much more from observing than from listening or reading, and we learn even more by trying it ourselves, hands on.
• Human beings will be happier only when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again [Kurt Vonnegut]. The way we live today isn’t the way human beings were meant to live, and deep inside we know it. That doesn’t mean throwing away technology, it means interacting with those in your community (human and non-human) in deep, authentic, synaesthetic ways we have forgotten.
• People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before [Daniel Quinn]. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.
• No one is in control. This is two dangerous ideas in one, though I’m not sure if anyone has realized this explicitly. The first idea is that because no one is in control, the appearance of control that governments and corporations and their handmaidens in the media try to convey is all illusion: This world is far too complex for even the most powerful and complicitous elite to be able to steer or direct. That is the liberating idea: Don’t worry about fighting the ‘bad guys’, because they’re just caught up in the flow like all the rest of us. The second idea is that because no one is in control, everything is out of control. That is the terrifying, personal responsibility-burdening idea: No one can stop global warming, biochemical warfare, [your worst nightmare scenario here]. So now what do you do?

Why are these ten ideas ‘dangerous’? Because they threaten deeply-entrenched ideas and strongly-held, widely-held beliefs. Because those who they threaten will do almost anything to prevent them becoming widely accepted. And because they’re actionable. Take them as your own and they will change what you think, believe and do.

What’s your dangerous idea?

Here’s one: National democratic institutions are becoming inadequate mechanism for governing at the national level, given globalization; so world government is increasingly necessary. However, there is no way to imagine such a thing occuring peacefully, so we are doomed to famine, war, plague, and death… yes, those are the four horsemen of the apocalypse.