The Road to Ruin is Paved with Good Intentions:
My take on presidential debate on June 27, 2024 was like nearly all of the democrats, that Biden wasn’t up to the task or running the country. But Trump didn’t function either. I did not find Trump answering any question put to him. Neither candidate could reliably present facts on any topic. With both alternatives unfit for the job, at first blush I worried over America’s vacuum of leadership. Something similar happened with dementia of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union just before its demise. How do we act swiftly in an an emergency, China invades Taiwan, a market panic with everybody selling stock, nuclear war etc?
Yet America does not lack experts, even genius, career specialists in the diplomatic corps, department of Defense and other specialties. What if experts were left to act, by consensus? Alternatively each expert panel might function with its leadership.
I’m reminded for the vast eons of time in the history of our most successful living planet it functioned and adapted beautifully with absolutely no evidence of decision making process or mindfulness. The mindful human brain appeared recently. A human-similar brain came to be around 7M years ago over a planetary history of 4.5B years. That is around .001555 of the history of our planet. That doesn’t take into account, the age of our universe, which by all non-religious reckoning was born and developed non-mindfully, without purpose or forethought. As human history goes, many scientists and philosophers maintain, with good reason, that consciousness and free will are illusions. But even engineers and neurologists who defend consciousness, admit for the most part, humans function as automatons and only act consciously and with purpose for a tiny fraction of time. Even while awake, behavior is habitual, mindless and automatic.
Humans have outsourced mindfulness to the brain as the organ of awareness. That leads directly to the false idea that our best decisions come to an executive, calculating and behaving mindfully. As Tolstoy in War and Peace famously suggested, history is not made by great men or minds but by circumstance. Can adaptation of human associations, like tribes or nations, be traced to the minds powerful leaders, Hitler and Genghis Khan? I think not. There’s a decent chance we are better off without them.
