Today is the 9th day of Holly Days. The other two values of this trinity are fairly abstract and universal, while courage is mundane and embodied. I’ve often wondered if another more numinous value, like Beauty, would be a more resonant member of this trio. We do have some powerful hunger for beauty, and we can often use it as an indicator of value. But it actually doesn’t seem like a more spiritual value to me, it seems a more behavioral one. It feels more like a cognitive construct our subconscious uses to assign value, and as such it is very reliant on our shifting archetypes and fashion. We do not need to strive for beauty; like hunger, it has its own vectors. Courage on the other hand, like Truth and Love, has powerful counter drives built into our cognition.
In fact, a trending concept, highlighted by Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is the power of intuition. Sadly, in pop culture, his thesis about identifying and separating when each system (Intuition or Reason) might be best applied has been collapsed, and many folks seem to be assigning some more metaphysical clairvoyant power to intuition, interpreting it as The Universe warning them about future danger in the form of vague intuitive fears. Our awareness is much too crowded to include the unconscious mind’s vast and complex machinations. Our attention needs to be focused on specific imminent input lest it be distracted by the myriad memories and connections each sensation evokes. It needs to be just whispers in our mind’s ear, allowing us to focus on dodging the falling boulder or charging lion. But it also needs to be overly cautious because the dangers of underreaction, especially in the realm of things like charging lions or murderous rivals, are so much more grave than overreactions, one which leaves us dead, while the other just wastes our energy and leaves us stressed.
But how many charging lions do we actually face in our modern and incredibly safe world? Availability bias, has run amok with billions of cameras in cellphones and doorbells, not to mention the millions of folks betting on fear and outrage to earn windfalls from social-media virality. This makes the world seem vastly more precarious and chaotic than it actually is. This is just the sort of bias that primes our wary intuitions to poke us with doses of utterly vestigial cortisol. I think that so much of the chaos we perceive in the world is actually a result of this overactive cognitive immune system, causing people to not only retreat from engagement with each other and the world, but also to overestimate the danger they are in, and consequently overreact, ironically becoming dangerous themselves and creating the very chaos they are trying to avoid.
I find traffic an excellent metaphor for the array of social interactions we find ourselves in. We all have been able to understand our rubbernecking bias in our inability to drive past an accident site without looking, the grislier the more compelling. Traffic reveals all the tragic features of our varied human interactions played out on our roadways, road rage, selfishness, and thoughtlessness. But what we can also see, and too often ignore, is the astonishing cooperativeness and generosity with which we all live together. Sure the occasional violation of norms is alarming and dangerous, but mostly we see millions of cars, all driven by we fragile and fallible apes for millions of miles, all orderly, mile after mile, lane change after lane change, day in day out, year after year. with only the rare, if attention-grabbing failure or abuse. Cars are incredibly dangerous and on the road we are always inches away from horrible catastrophe, and yet even as the most common cause of accidental death, you have only a 0.000001% chance of dying each time you drive a mile, which is about 1 in 74,626,866. We live in world, especially here in urban america, that is demonstrably the safest humans have ever know. Not only safe but incredibly bountiful and orderly.
Rather than listening to my heart or those cautiously primitive little whispers alerting me to potential danger and apocalypse in every direction, I chose courage. It’s actually pretty easy to muster up some rational gratitude, remembering for a moment how the enlightenment and modernity have defeated the Hobbesian inevitability of nasty, brutish, and short lives.
Happy Holly Days!
HOLLY DAYS 