Adaptive organisms are in an even different world. Every living organism has some ability to read and adapt to its environment, and the way they adapt is often novel and completely unpredictable. This is the human element that so effectively and continually frustrates our efforts at analysis and predictability in all of the social sciences as well as in medicine. These are different orders of complexity and they need different tools to work with them.
Living organisms adapt in any variety of ways, but two seem to stand out. We can see them in the world around us in survival, and in the diversity of life. Rather than analyzing an organism, as doctors routinely attempt with their patients, if we look at how they adapt we may be able to promote health both individually and on a larger scale, much as was done with the Harambee. Survival adaptations don't get us there.
Karl Rove was a master at promoting the survival instinct; find something that people are afraid of and focus on the threat. Threats bypass and turn off the cognitive parts of our brains. A perfect example was Colin Powell's address to the United Nations before the war with Iraq; we were too afraid to see the false assumptions. Our bodies work much the same way; survival instincts are fundamental to the primitive parts of our brains that we share with early reptiles. Adaptations to threats are defensive; we group with others sharing the same fears. Essentially we inbreed, combining with others like us and feeding on the same information sources--made much easier by
Google and other search engines that seem to know what we want before we ask--until we are inbred to the point of being stuck, like the inbred bulldog whose shoulders are too large for the birth canal. Inbred weakness profoundly limit growth.
Diversity, on the other hand, is the sine qua non of a healthy system. So our efforts ought to be finding how people adapt in this way. This matter is discussed fully elsewhere, both by us and
others, but the key to obtaining diversity is cooperation among the agents adapting. Again the Harambee and Antonovsky's elements of salutogenesis come to mind. Replacing our current analytical and linearly oriented taproot with one that recognizes and honors human adaptability will go a long way to make our system more effective and less costly, as well as more humane.
Markets do work if they are transparent. Making them so is not an easy task because profits are easier to make when markets are opaque. So assuring transparency is something best done, not by the market, but by government. Without practicing medicine local health centers, like the Harambee, could provide the information and support that Antonovsky saw as so important--that's the transparency. The information could then be used by the patient to make wise decisions regarding their purchase of health care. Putting the invisible hand of the marketplace to work in this fashion can still save American health care and lead us into a better and less costly future. The invisible hand is no longer invisible; it's the choices we make as informed consumers that lead the marketplace to continued progress. So the first thing we must do is to see and honor this tool for what it in fact is.
Living organisms adapt in any variety of ways, but two seem to stand out. We can see them in the world around us in survival, and in the diversity of life. Rather than analyzing an organism, as doctors routinely attempt with their patients, if we look at how they adapt we may be able to promote health both individually and on a larger scale, much as was done with the Harambee. Survival adaptations don't get us there.
Karl Rove was a master at promoting the survival instinct; find something that people are afraid of and focus on the threat. Threats bypass and turn off the cognitive parts of our brains. A perfect example was Colin Powell's address to the United Nations before the war with Iraq; we were too afraid to see the false assumptions. Our bodies work much the same way; survival instincts are fundamental to the primitive parts of our brains that we share with early reptiles. Adaptations to threats are defensive; we group with others sharing the same fears. Essentially we inbreed, combining with others like us and feeding on the same information sources--made much easier by
Google and other search engines that seem to know what we want before we ask--until we are inbred to the point of being stuck, like the inbred bulldog whose shoulders are too large for the birth canal. Inbred weakness profoundly limit growth.
Diversity, on the other hand, is the sine qua non of a healthy system. So our efforts ought to be finding how people adapt in this way. This matter is discussed fully elsewhere, both by us and
others, but the key to obtaining diversity is cooperation among the agents adapting. Again the Harambee and Antonovsky's elements of salutogenesis come to mind. Replacing our current analytical and linearly oriented taproot with one that recognizes and honors human adaptability will go a long way to make our system more effective and less costly, as well as more humane.
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