Goat Sacrificing in the 21St Century: How to Save the Planet from Its Biggest Waste: Good Intentions Gone Bad

By Roger Bourke White Jr.

Too often, people respond to a serious concern with a ritual that allows them to maintain the comfort of the status quo.

Thats what Roger Bourke White Jr. calls a goat sacrifice its a tradeoff that doesnt do what it is intended to do: solve the problem. These sacrifices make people and communities feel less guilty and fearful, but do nothing to end the serious problems.
Examples of modern goat sacrificing include searching all air passengers so well feel safe, striving to protect our children so much they cant play outside, and criminalizing large segments of the population for drug-related activities so we feel like were fighting drug abuse.
These solutions cost huge amounts of money and attention, but they do nothing to solve problems. Even worse, they include unseen costs beyond the obvious goat that distracts us from finding true, lasting solutions.

Its important to study why goat sacrifices occur, how to identify when were wasting money, so we can instead spend those dollars well. We can do all of those things by getting smart about good intentions and recognizing Goat Sacrificing in the 21st Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496945600

Roger Bourke White Jr.

Roger White is a careful observer of life and people, and hes done so from many interesting perspectives. He was a soldier in Vietnam in the 60s, an engineering student at MIT in the 70s, a computer networking pioneer in the 80s, and a teacher in Korea in the 90s.

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© 2014 Roger Bourke White Jr.. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4561-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4560-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

What This Is About

The Wonder of Living in Modern Times

How We Think

Making Strange Sacrifices

Origin of the Term Goat Sacrificing

Goat Sacrificing Today

Goat Sacrificing and Good Intentions

Goat Sacrificing and Blind-Spots

Let’s Save the World… and Ourselves

Some Root Problems

Introduction

The Root of the Problem: Bad Definitions

Getting the Context Wrong

Heart Thinking Without Head Thinking

Panic and Blunder

Conclusion

Definitions

Book One—Us Versus Them

Fear of Strangers

Introduction

Rogues Gallery

Chosen People

Introduction

The Bright Side: Powering Enthusiasm

The Dark Sides: Delusion and Exclusion

Contemporary Goat Sacrificing

Conclusion

Deep Belief Religion

Introduction

Searching for Answers

The Ultimate Answer

The Goat Sacrificing

Conclusion

From Practical to Pillar of Faith

Introduction

Examples of Odd Choices

The Practical Roots

What is the Survival Value?

The Obvious/Direct Sacrificing Costs

The Secondary/Indirect Costs

Pillars Outside of Religion

Conclusion

Unions and Professional Guilds

Introduction

Unions

Guilds

Conclusion

Living in Hobbiton

Introduction

Background

Cooperation = Progress, Suspicion = Status Quo

Why Is This a Problem?

Who’s the Barbarian?

Conclusion

Book Two—Prescription

Tolerance Versus Prescription

Introduction

Bright Side/Dark Side

The Roots

When Tolerance Works Better Than Prescription

The Expense

The Solution

Conclusion

VPS Gone Wild

Introduction

What is VPS?

Recycling Reality

The Blind-Spot to the Virtue of Increasing Productivity

Tolerance and Circumstance

Conclusion

Further Reading

Political Correctness

Introduction

Tolerance

Political Correctness

PC Versus Free Speech

The Smart Phone Revolution: Helping Free Speech

Conclusion

Paying Workers for Endurance and Risk: A Progressive Thinking Blind-Spot

Introduction

Paying for Endurance and Risk

The Obvious/Direct Sacrificing Costs

The Secondary/Indirect Costs

A Suggested Solution

Gaming the System

Introduction

Rules and Regulations

Good Intentions and Vigilance

Reducing System Gaming: Building Enfranchisement

System Gaming as a Social Pacifier

Regulations, Taxes, and Entitlements

How to Help With the Changing Circumstances

How to Help With the Vigilance

Conclusion

Book Three—Strange New Ways

Fear of Technology

Introduction

Classic Fears

Conclusion

Alien Concept: Growing the Resource Pie

Introduction

Growing the Pie

Fairness Versus Growth

The Obvious/Direct Sacrificing Costs

The Secondary/Indirect Costs

A Suggested Solution

Conclusion

The Fight Between Entrepreneurship and Instinct

Introduction

Commerce the Old Fashioned Way

Laissez-Faire Versus Legislation

Social Justice and Commerce

The Obvious/Direct Sacrificing Costs

Finance and Commerce: Always Something New

Conclusion

Further Reading

Immigration

Introduction

The Bright Side

The Dark Side

The Goat Sacrificing

Conclusion

The Midwest Disease: The Mystery of the Rise and Fall of Boom Communities

Introduction

If Life Were Different

Theories of Declines and Falls

Roger’s Observations

Conclusion

Time is Money

Introduction

Pay More or Wait More?

Brain Hardwiring

Paying Versus Standing-in-Line Situations

Conclusion

Book Four—Guilt

Guilt and Good Intentions

Introduction

Where Heart-Thinking Comes From

Enter Guilt

Enter Good Intentions: A Way to Feel Better About Failure

Conclusion

Social Justice and Rights

Introduction

Social Justice

The Bright Side

The Dark Side

Conclusion

Surprising Symbiotes: Social Justice Promotes Corporate Greed

Introduction

What it Takes to Run a Business

What it Takes to be a High-Profile CEO

The Balancing Act

A Suggested Solution

Conclusion

Further Reading

Helping the Poor

Introduction

The Bright Side

Gaming the System

Lost Opportunity

Conclusion

Begging In Its Various Incarnations

Introduction

The Roots

Enter Prosperity

The Entertainment Connection

Conclusion

Atoning for Ancestors’ Mistakes

Introduction

Your Circumstance is My Circumstance

When Does Atonement Make Sense?

Conclusion

Book Five—Save the Children

Save the Children

Introduction

Instinctive Parent Thinking

Offering Good Advice… With Teeth Behind It

The Child is a Learning Machine

Adding Analytic Thinking

Catastrophe Phobia

Introduction

Children Learn and Children Heal

Car Seats and Skateboards

Thinking About Risk

Conclusion

Over-Protecting and Adding Demons

Introduction

The Dark Side

Getting Over It

Conclusion

Helicopter Parenting

Introduction

The Roots

Meanwhile…

Working Well

Learning to Deal With Surprises

Conclusion

Book Six—Food Worries

Food Worries

Introduction

Adaptability and Worry

When Does Worry Become Goat Sacrificing?

Conclusion

Bad Food and Not Enough Food

Introduction

Eating Basics

Adding Civilization to the Mix

Conclusion

Breeding and GM Foods

Introduction

Breeding

Genetic Modification

Food + Farm + IP Trolling + Big, Bad Corporations

Conclusion

National Food Policies

Introduction

Instinctive Roots

Bright Side/Dark Side

Some Examples

Conclusion

Book Seven—Other Instincts

Good Intentions Without Good Oversight

Introduction

Good Intentions and Vigilance

Good Intentions and Prescription

Conclusion

Supporting Out of the Box

Introduction

The Opportunities of Many Environments

Variety Within a Single Environment

The Colonial Experience

Intercultural Marriage

Conclusion

The Cost of Confidence

Introduction

Confidence and Competence

Background

The Obvious/Direct Sacrificing Costs

The Secondary/Indirect Costs

Research Instead of Confidence

Conclusion

Jails and Courtrooms

Introduction

Go to Jail

Courtroom Drama

Conclusion

Terrorism

Introduction

Pop Quiz

What to Protect Ourselves From

The Roots of Empowering this Craziness

Advertising or Just Plain Evil?

The Obvious/Direct Sacrificing Costs

The Secondary/Indirect Costs

The Best Response: Business as Usual

Conclusion

Mind-Altering

Introduction

Why People Like to Change How They Think

Worrying About Other People’s Mind-Altering

The Bright Side/Dark Side of Controlling Mind-Altering

The High Cost of Enforcing Judgments: The War on Drugs

The Higher Cost of Enforcing Judgments: Disenfranchisement

The Cost of Hypocrisy and Corruption

A Suggested Solution

Book Eight—The End is Coming

The End is Coming

Introduction

Property and the Semi-Nomadic Lifestyle

Protect or Party?

Hunkering Down

Party Time

Risky Investing

Conclusion

Mania and Markets: How End of the World Thinking Affects Markets

Introduction

What is a Mania

End of the World Celebrations

End of the World Mania and Markets

Mania Evolution: Noisy Doom and Gloom, Quiet Investing

When the Bubble Bursts, You Can’t Go Back

Lessons Learned

Real World Examples

Mania in Progress Today, August 2014

Further Reading

Hand-to-Mouth Living

Introduction

Mainstream Semi-Nomad Thinking

Climate Change

Introduction

Some Climate Change Basics

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

What to do Instead?

Conclusion

Book Nine—Conclusion

Conclusion

About the Author

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to all those people in the world who are striving to make it a better place - and are making the important sacrifice of learning how to do this effectively, not just letting their hearts be their guide.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to thank my editor, Christine Larson, for the time and dedication she put into this book. Her insights helped make what I have written here a lot more understandable.

Second, I would like to acknowledge the inspiration of the Blogathon. This was a comment page of MIT alumni on Linked-In that ran to over 20,000 comments during its two-year lifespan. A lot of subjects were covered and covered insightfully. This is where the goat sacrificing concept first came to life in my mind.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge that this book would not have come into being without the help of a lot of good teachers, books and magazines about science and history. These instilled in me a love of and wonder at good, unbiased science and history. It was this background that allowed the concept of Instinctive and Analytic human thinking styles to emerge and flourish.

INTRODUCTION

What This Is About

Millions of people want to Save the Planet from human-caused catastrophe.

Millions of people want to Save the World from poverty and poor health.

Billions of people have millions of other noble aspirations.

When these aspirations succeed the world is a better place. And, thanks to humankind’s astounding material prosperity in the 21st century, many of these do in fact make the world a better place in which to live.

But many don’t, which is sad. What is even sadder is when an aspiration that doesn’t work, a failure, is not given up on. When instead, time, money and attention keep flowing into the failure for years or decades. This is waste, and it is waste that isn’t saving the planet or people from misery. The iconic examples of this for me are the Wars on Drugs and Terror.

The first question I will address in this book is: Why? Why are some people and communities ready and willing to spend these dollars and time on waste?

The second question I will address is: how can we identify this kind of wasteful spending when it is happening? Clearly the waste is hard for supporters of these causes to see.

A big challenge of life in the 21st Century is coming up with ways to make these kinds of waste visible enough that supporters and non-supporters will see them and agree that other solutions are called for.

That’s what this book is about.

The Wonder of Living in Modern Times

Modern civilized society is filled with wonders. At the very basic levels we have reliable food, shelter and transportation. Compared to living in the Neolithic Village environment - the Stone Age - this reliability is truly amazing. The Neolithic Village environment has full doses of capriciousness and catastrophe. (This view of Neolithic Village as a capricious and catastrophic environment is contrary to many romantic notions held today. Also, keep in mind that we still have Neolithic Village environments today in remote places such as the Amazon basin and the Indonesian archipelago. So I do not refer to the Neolithic environment as ancient history. It is ancient, but it is also with us today.)

Yes, civilized living is a wonder. It has made tremendous advances in our understanding of how the world works - sciences and engineering - and in how our bodies work - biology and health care. Along with these advances, we have embraced some strange practices that at first glance don’t seem to improve our lives at all. Some are just strange, some are strange and deeply wasteful.

This book examines some of these strange practices and analyzes the human thinking that not only supports these practices but also believes they are very, very right.

The core of this book examines human thinking. When we understand why we are thinking in certain ways, and those ways are leading to deeply wasteful behavior, we can get directly to the root of fixing the problem. We fix the problem by identifying the thinking that is causing the problem. Then we work at fixing that thinking. Once the thinking is straightened out, finding a good solution becomes fast and easy: as in, Ah… Of course! Why didn’t I think of that before?

Let me explain how I am going to talk about thinking.

How We Think

Human thinking is a complex process. To simplify things enormously for this book, I’m going to break it into two styles: Instinctive Thinking and Analytic Thinking.

Instinctive thinking is the style that handles those thinking challenges that have faced humans for thousands of generations on a day-to-day basis. Humans have faced these challenges for so long that genetic selection has hard-wired the brain to deal with them. Balance and vision are extreme examples of instinctive thinking. By comparison, two-legged walking is something robots are just now mastering, and human vision is so high performance that computers still can’t match it. At higher levels of thinking we have the instincts to look for food when we get hungry and fall in love when that right person comes along. Instinctive thinking is easy to do and provides quick results. When it works to handle a situation we are facing, it is a wonder at producing fast, good results, and it feels really right. But the catch is - it can’t handle everything. Those situations it can’t handle are handled by analytic thinking.

Analytic thinking is learned thinking. It handles obvious learning challenges such as adding two plus two, and it handles more physical challenges such as learning to ride a bicycle and drive a car. Analytic thinking originally evolved to handle one-shots. In other words, those situations that don’t come up very often, but if the organism facing them can find the right solutions, it helps a lot, as in the organism survives. In most organisms analytic thinking is a tiny part of the thinking package. In humans it is much larger and much better developed.

In particular, we humans use a whole lot of analytic thinking in dealing with the civilized environment. When viewed from the evolutionary perspective, human civilization has happened in an eye blink. Our instinctive thinking is well adapted to living in the Neolithic Village environment. That has been going on for thousands of generations. Its first replacement, the Agricultural Age, began about five thousand years ago, which is just 250 generations ago. Two hundred fifty comes nowhere close to the thousands of generations needed to create the new hardwiring in the brain for new instinctive thinking. Now consider that the Industrial Age has been with us only fifteen generations. And we haven’t had a smart phone generation even reach adulthood yet! In other words, instinctive thinking hasn’t caught up with the demands of the civilized environment.

But instinctive thinking isn’t giving up! It wants to be used, and it is constantly looking for places where it can provide answers. Much of this book is about where instinctive thinking sneaks in (like someone with good intentions) and provides fast and comfortable answers, but sadly, they are wrong answers. They create waste, not good solutions.

For more reading about the concepts of Instinctive and Analytic thinking, check out my books:

Evolution and Thought¹

How Evolution Explains the Human Condition²

Making Strange Sacrifices

This book is about sacrificing… strange sacrificing.

Humans make sacrifices all the time. It’s part of life. Some sacrifices are clearly beneficial - sacrificing to give children a safe, well-provisioned home and a better education pays off on many levels.

All sacrifices are tradeoffs - something desirable must be given up to get something else desirable. So far, so good. But some forms of modern sacrifice are not so clearly beneficial on all levels. In fact, some sacrificing choices are most peculiar - at times, there seems to be a whole lot given up and almost nothing received in return.

Why are many people making such odd choices when they encounter such an unfavorable tradeoff? I find this curious because what is being given up seems quite valuable compared to what is being obtained. In this quote Benjamin Franklin is describing what he considers a strange sacrifice: They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

When soothing a dread with a ritual or turning away from progress to maintain the comfort of status quo is at the heart of what is being gained, I call this kind of tradeoff a goat sacrifice. It is about making sacrifices that don’t do what they are intended to do: They don’t make the world a better place. Instead their benefit is solely allowing the person or community doing the sacrifice to feel less guilty, or less fearful, or less something that disturbs their instinctive thinking.

Origin of the Term Goat Sacrificing

The term goat sacrificing was inspired by reading the history of Fabius Maximus - the Roman Consul who had to deal with Hannibal’s spectacular successes in the Second Punic War (218-201BC). Through much of the war, Hannibal defeated every Roman army that faced him in open battle; Fabius’s solution was to follow him, not face him. Fabius avoided conflict, and thwarted all the diplomatic efforts of Hannibal to unite the other tribes of Italy against Roman domination. The Romans won, but the war was not smooth sailing. There were a lot of people in Rome who vigorously disagreed with the Fabian Strategy. They mocked Fabius calling him Fabius Cunctator (the Delayer), a play on Fabius Dictator, his official title.

Fabius was competent. He did win. And he recognized the importance of public opinion - he dealt with it. Fabius gave assurance to the Romans when he was installed as Dictator (just after the announcement of another spectacular Hannibal victory). By calling for a city-wide sacrifice, he picked up on a classic theme - the Romans were suffering because the gods were angry, and as a first step to regaining their favor, everyone in Rome must sacrifice a goat (as well as other things). So, many goats lost their lives, many Romans slept better that night, and Rome ultimately won because it stayed unified and dedicated to the cause.

Did the goat sacrificing contribute to Rome’s winning?

Yes! …in the sense that it made the Romans feel better.

Was it an important and necessary contribution?

That is hotly debated to this day - some say yes, some say no. The important issue is to recognize when what is being done is, in fact, a goat sacrifice: something being done to soothe the soul, not directly fix the problem.

Goat Sacrificing Today

Fast forward to modern times. Do we make any sacrifices which have this same relation to our success? Are they:

• expensive

• activities that soothe souls…

• but don’t solve the problem

Umm… we may have a few of these.

The problem I have with goat sacrificing, and therefore the reason I’m writing this book, is three-fold.

1. Waste. We as a community routinely complain about running out of resources, but we happily indulge in this form of big resource waste.

2. It doesn’t solve the problem. Goat sacrificing can go on for decades, and instead of looking for a way of actually solving the problem we continue the sacrificing. It becomes a ritual. And because we aren’t looking hard for a real solution, apathy, hypocrisy, capriciousness, and corruption can easily get mixed in, and we waste even more!

3. Goat sacrificing is based on faith. Faith by my definition is belief in something even though it contradicts harsh reality. The phrase leap of faith describes well what is happening. When the person is leaping they move into trusting what some other person is telling them. This is instinctive thinking. The person does it because it feels good. Even worse, because faith feels good, there is a strong compulsion on the part of the new believer to think, "If I’m doing this sacrificing, all you other people should be doing it too! When this kind of thinking gets strong, it becomes a modern incarnation of intolerance in the form of We all need to make this sacrifice for this good cause."

Whoops! Ritual and Intolerance: Welcome to a style of thinking that works well in the Agricultural Age when what the ruler utters becomes the law of the land. These two costs - one physical and one social - are why it’s important to identify when we as a society are engaging in goat sacrificing. There is a third important cost as well. Because goat sacrificing is faith-based, not fact-based, it is easily twisted by conflicting interests. Harking to the Romans, it would not be too far-fetched to imagine a goat merchant lobby advising Fabius that he should pick goats to sacrifice, not sheep or vegetables or something else.

Keep in mind, goat sacrificing is very much an Eye of the Beholder issue. Those advocating and willingly doing the sacrificing don’t see the waste. They instead feel the serenity that comes with thinking, I’m doing the right thing. I call this blind-spot thinking.

That said, here are some examples I see of modern goat sacrificing:

• Intrusive and public searching of all passengers in order to feel that air travel will be safe.

• Striving to reduce atmospheric C02 in order to stop end-of-the-world-fear.

• Criminalizing large segments of the population for drug-related activities in order to believe we are stopping drug abuse and breaking the drug supply chain.

All of the above are good examples because they:

• invoke big, high-profile costs (public sacrificing).

• help some people sleep better at night - a big problem is being fought.

• are not solving the problem.

Finally, it is necessary to understand that there are huge unseen costs being paid beyond the obvious goat. These are the opportunity costs, which include intolerance/enfranchisement costs, social corruption costs, and attention costs - we are being distracted from thinking about real, solvable problems.

And… the root problem that is causing sacrificing is not being solved!

Goat Sacrificing and Good Intentions

This may not have worked out well, but I meant well.

Good intentions going sour is at the root of much modern day goat sacrificing. Thanks to modern prosperity, The Road to Hell is a well-paved super highway.³ We start lots of projects based on good intentions, but don’t follow through to see if those good intentions are actually realized. This is something we need to be aware of. This means we need to be vigilant, constantly vigilant, about both the results and the effectiveness of what our good intentions are suggesting we do. We need to be watching for the surprising and unintended consequences of what we support - there will always be some. If the surprises are big and unpleasant ones, we need to seriously rethink what we are supporting.

This requires that we train ourselves to be aware. When we give to a worthy cause, we need to expect good monitoring of program outcomes. Giving or supporting without watching the results is a grand invitation to hypocrisy, corruption, serious waste, and deep disenfranchisement. The deep disenfranchisement happens because those harmed or obstructed by good intentions get deeply frustrated by, Those idiots who can’t see the damage being done by this choice. Feelings of disenfranchisement are at the root of much crime.

Goat Sacrificing and Blind-Spots

Goat sacrificing is also closely linked to blind-spots (my term) in community thinking. When a community has a blind-spot, it sees a problem, but it can’t see the huge cost incurred by solving the problem the wrong way. This cost is incurred because the problem is defined poorly - using hot-blooded emotion, not cool-headed analysis - and the efforts at solving the problem miss the real issue entirely. The result is not a solution but a chronic, institutionalized expense - a ritual. The iconic example of this is the War on Drugs. This war goes on and on and on because the problem is defined by emotion. The waste caused by this poor definition is sustained for decades by the community’s blind-spot thinking and fear that surrounds the issue. The blind-spot is not recognizing that recreational drug use has a lot in common with recreational alcohol use, and both should be treated similarly.

Let’s Save the World… and Ourselves

This book is intended to provide you with a valuable tool: insight. If you can see when goat sacrificing is happening, if you can see when blind-spot-thinking has taken hold, if you can see when too much instinctive thinking is being used, then you