Develop through perverse means

I have this idea that we develop through perverse means.

The idea popped into my head as I was contemplating the contradictory nature of society. By contradictory I mean we seem to espouse one thing and do another. For instance, we espouse Democracy but simultaneously we encourage undemocratic institutions like Capitalism to exist. Basically what I am saying is like a reverse psychology, that we behave in an opposite manner to what we believe in order to achieve what we believe.

The Buddha is the only one I know who commented on this type of behavior. He didn’t couch the idea in the same way but said something similar. What he said is something like this, symbolically of course: One generally has to leave one’s house by the front door and reenter by the back to appreciate what’s inside. What he meant by that is that we generally learn things indirectly, like going from A to B via C and D instead of taking the direct route. Another way of explaining it is that we have to lose something before we can appreciate it. One theory I have as to why its like this is because we learn more convincingly through perverse, backward means than through, normal, straight forward means.

Learning from mistakes and mishaps is perverse. One analogy I’ve used to support this idea is about a child who burns itself on a stove element after being told not to touch it. Ironically the child learns more from that experience of burning itself than the from the sensible parent telling it not to do so.

This is also perverse: “The world needs problems because they make us better”. Essentially what that statement is saying is that we inadvertently improve ourselves through negative means. For example, we have made ourselves better because of wars, community strife, environmental pollution and economic upheavals. Problems test and challenge us. That statement reinforces what I believe, that we learn more convincingly about how we ought to conduct ourselves from negative events than we do from positive events. Things like Aids, SARS and terrorism really get our attention, more so than things that don’t give us strife. Problems provoke and compel us to rethink things, seek solutions and understanding. In the process, because we are pushed and motivated, we become more intelligent and sophisticated.

That statement was made by an economist, Julian Simon. In respected to problems, he was thinking in terms of resources. At the time he said it the world was having problems with shortages and rising prices of commodities like oil and copper. Those problems triggered a search for alternatives and stepped-up conservation. Society was jarred by those problems and forced to think anew and act differently. He realized that in going through the procedure of finding alternatives and implementing conservation, society as a whole was improving itself because it was gaining knowledge and new techniques. These gains manifested themselves into other areas of society, also sharpening our skills in how we organize and govern ourselves. Though its hard to measure, problem solving has had an incremental effect on us.

Kant said that humans are inherently lazy. I know that from my own experience. Isn’t it perverse that we need problems to challenge us so not to be lazy? The great economist Adam Smith showed that our own self-interest must come first if we are to take care of the interests of others. Now, that’s perverse.