What plagues human advance? First, there’s “Radical Inertia.” This is a deep resistance to change, encountered whenever a way of doing or seeing things is deeply ingrained in us or our systems. Radical Inertia fuels our continuing dependence on limited oil reserves, and you’d soon feel it if you tried to abolish tax or televisions. Next is the “meme” (coined by Richard Dawkins): a splinter of culture that replicates itself, often across generations. Examples of memes include a famous folk melody, a TV catchphrase, or a neat and memorable political idea. Memes oversimplify how cultures really work, and aren’t necessarily bad; but destructive memes are too prominent to avoid as my second plague. Finally, there’s the “Framed Question”: a question posed so that only preconceived answers are possible, where the questioner’s assumptions or agenda become invisible to us. A politician asking what level of economic growth is desirable is assuming (as most of us do) that ever-increasing economic growth must be a good thing. These three plagues, among various others, are implicated in old plagues such as poverty and war. They might seem ineradicable, but we can try at least to see them clearly, to name them. That’s the first step towards a vaccine.
© Mario Petrucci, 2012
