Scenarios
It's all in the mind. Mind it.
Mind the Gap
January 3, 2023. Issue Fourteen
I ended last year’s issue asking you to write out a scenario involving two men, a horse, a rope, and a tree. When I would ask that question as an exercise in a seminar, a scene from a Western would usually come up in the discussion. It’s part of the public imagination. The imagined stories tended to end badly for one of the men. Then I would offer this scenario.
They hitched the horse to the tree, walked into town, and had a good meal.
I would ask, as I do here, why does conflict pop up in our minds before the thought of cooperation?
As we mind the gap between one year and the next, why not ask the question, why isn’t there more of a gap in the collective imagination to allow for many scenarios?
There is growing consensus among those who investigate human behavior that cooperation is at least as influential in our development as competition. The scenarios that develop from the story starter demonstrate that while our default position may be to see potential conflict, we have the ability to imagine a different outcome. We may have a bias in our minds that the two men will fight, but that’s only one of many scenarios.
In 2016, Tom Wolfe published The Kingdom of Speech. It tackled the question of how humans developed the ability to communicate with one another. If you have notes from your biology class, you may recall the classification system known as taxonomy. It begins with the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. Humans belong to the animal kingdom.
Animalia, Chordota, Mammalia, Primates, Haplorhini, Simiiformes, Hominidae, Homininae, Hominini, Homo, Homo sapiens to be exact. Homo sapiens sapiens to be precise. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy)
Wolfe’s considers a third kingdom. We exist in the Kingdom of Speech. I would add another classification, speech making creatures who can also write. We are not just wise (sapiens), we’ve learned to keep written records.
As a Navy Supply Corps officer declared in his speech at his retirement ceremony, “The spoken word is in the air, the written word is always there.” Or as a novelty toilet paper holder puts it, “No job is finished until the paperwork is done.”
As the new year begins, there are many words in the air about the future. When we mind the gap between what was predicted and what actually happened, we notice that few if any of us got it right. What is in the air is more like play by play accounts of a game along with color commentary. When it comes to the future, what we really hear are possible scenarios. Here’s where we come in.
A scenario is a view of what could happen. It’s based on what has already happened. Contrary to warnings made by brokers, past behavior is a good predictor of future returns.
There will be conflict, there will be cooperation. Sometimes it is in conflict that we see the greatest cooperation. Here is a homespun example.
If it weren’t for World War Two, I would not exist because my parents would never have met.
If it weren’t for the millions if not billions of connections, human and technological, I could not write this and you could not read what I wrote. At the beginning of a new year, we may want to thank that anonymous person or persons who invented the alphabet and those who taught us how to speak, read, write, and listen, too.
It appears that civilization exists in the disequilibrium of conflict and cooperation. Understanding this, accepting it, and listening to all the cries of humanity from joy to sorrow, anger and fear, we may learn to be wise and pick the scenarios with better outcomes.
By the way, Happy 70th birthday to our 49th State, Alaska! (January 3, 1953) Give a shout out to all those flag manufacturers who added a star to the US Flag, only to go back to work adding another star seven months later for Hawai’i! I wonder where I can find one of those 49 starred flags. On Ebay? Oh, right, I can “Bing It.”
https://www.bing.com/search?q=49+star+flag&PC=U316&FORM=CHROMN
Postscript: No one could have imagined the scenario of an NFL game being suspended in the first quarter. Our thoughts and prayers are with Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills, his family, teammates, and the medical staff at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
