[Monday 7:03 AM]
It's all about reappraisal! The Crisis Management Event was interesting; vague but interesting. Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. Jared Diamond discussed details of how general people cope with crisis and why it is so important to reappraise your lifestyle and re-evaluate things which "aren't working". He discussed the American ways of consumption, isolationism and individual rights. It was an informative lecture about change and mostly about why is it so important to change, more like survival of the fittest theory.
Having said that, I'm not a skeptic and even though I'd call myself a man of science, I certainly don't believe that my ancestors lived on trees. What he didn't discuss was the sheer reasoning behind resistance, is survival everything? What if this is a conscious choice to extinct and not to alter? Are some values really worth it and hence species decide collectively that living without those core values is worse than extinction and hence identity vs. survival. This would distinguish human beings from other species and probably would answer the question of intelligence i.e. why don't we see a monkey driving a car, dolphin building a spaceship or a parrot writing a sonnet?
[Sunday 1:29 PM] I'm leaving to attend the following session at Caltech. Will blog details soon.
From Skeptic website
Crisis Management by People and Nations
How Individuals and Societies in Crisis
Do (or Don’t) Reappraise Core Values
Dr. Jared Diamond
Sunday, January 22nd, 2006, 2:00pm
Beckman Auditorium
How do we as individuals respond when precipitated into a crisis by the break-up of a relationship, a job loss or setback, or just growing dissatisfaction with ourselves? Experience shows that we can tolerate putting our failed old ways up for grabs for about six weeks, within which time we either work out new coping skills or else revert to our old ways. Similar issues arise on a slower time scale for societies or groups responding to a crisis. Meiji Japan, the modern Navajo, and post-World-War-2 western Europe did set about to recast themselves, while the Greenland Norse didn’t, and it remains to be seen if the U.S. of today will. What can we learn from individuals and societies that did embrace new values?