21st century problems and 20th century thinking

When traditional thinking and ideas fail where do you go from there?

The biggest problem I see coming is that the way societies are set up is still very 20th century. Traditional institutions, old religions, old schools of thought, old ideas, old debates, old conflicts. But the challenges a person is expected to solve (both personally and professionally) are 21st century problems. In America the society that people had in the 1980s is so different from how society is now that the thinking patterns which may have been successful in the 1980s could lead to disaster in 2018. The thinking of the 1960s could lead to disaster if applied to the 2000s. It may reach a point where last years thinking could lead to disaster the very next year.

There is a way out of this problem but it's counterintuitive and I do not expect most people to try to apply it. But first to clarify the source of what the problem could be? If we have what could be described as "mental software" or "mental operating systems" running in our "minds" then the problems we are seeing today seem to be due to the fact that for most people they do not frequently update this "mental software" or "mental operating systems" because previous generations rarely had to ever do that.

If a person asks me if I have a permanent self then if I want to be honest about who I am I can only tell them that I do not. There is no core personality or permanent self. Recognizing that I have no permanent self means that whoever I am in 2018 is a different person from whomever I was 5 years ago. To be psychologically resilient requires constantly updating the mental software. Because I'm constantly updating, constantly trying to improve, constantly learning from mistakes, I'm evolving mentally at the fastest pace I know how.

What does it mean to be in a constant state of mental and psychological evolution? First it means I have accepted that I cannot have fixed opinions. Any opinions I have in 2018 could be the opposite in 2019 depending on what I learn in 2019. What about my values? My values aren't set in stone either. People might value a certain kind of music a whole lot and then a few years later they don't value that music as much as some other music. So values too are based on how much a person has learned, what they know, and values evolve over time.

I'm currently under the impression based on knowledge I have, that a personality is something which merely evolves in response to environmental conditions or life circumstances. We do not control these life circumstances or our environmental conditions which shape our personality. It is my current understanding that a personality forms to protect the person from whatever is in the environment. A personality simply is an amalgamation of what has worked for them until that point. My personality in 2018 was evolved based on what worked for me until this point and there is no way to know if my 2018 personality will be successful in 2019.

To be resilient is to be capable of making changes when necessary. To make these changes it requires a person to accept that most of the time in life they will be wrong. It's a numbers thing, probabilities, most of the time the solutions we come up with will be wrong. What matters is the ability to identify when we are wrong and change ourselves to avoid being that kind of wrong again. This ability to change ourselves is the capacity for resilience, to be adaptable to changes in society over time.

Society is changing faster at what seems to be an exponential pace. The problem is while society increases in complexity (expontentially) and changes faster each year, the people living in society seek the exact opposite. People do not like to have to change something they were taught to believe for many years. People don't like to accept new knowledge if it conflicts with their existing understanding. People make emotional investments in their current opinions and instead of seeking to always be updating their opinions they instead choose to defend their opinions from attack.

Do opinions have a value at all? Yes they do. The value of opinions is the feedback loop they can provide. People rely on the opinions of other people in order to learn what adjustments they need to make or to learn what other people think. Probably most people above all else want to know what other people think and particularly valuable is what other people think of them. The question then becomes how will the old operating systems or mental software which exists in most people be able to adapt to the required complexity, nuance, sophistication, which the current high tech environment is requiring from people who use these old operating systems or mental software?

To elaborate a bit, if we are to discuss the topic of "gender" then most people rely on some mental model. In this mental model (which is culturally determined in most cases), they have the concept of the girl and the concept of the boy. These concepts then are filled in with stereotypical attributes such as "girls wear dresses, boys wear pants and ties" and so on. People then form emotional attachments to these gender stereotypes and start to believe "a girl is supposed to act this way, a boy is supposed to act that way". The problem is that the concept of boy and girl is based on a narrow model of what "gender" could evolve into if gender is a concept society even chooses to keep.

Today gender exists as a spectrum rather than a binary A|B. The trend today is toward individualist identity rather than the collective identity. A person who defines themselves can define their gender as anywhere they choose on a spectrum. Now let me give an example of how to update the mental model a bit or at least change how we look at it?

What if the gender spectrum is a "market" and the demand for different genders on that spectrum is always changing? In a market if the customers have more choice then it is more likely that the customer will find the choice which makes them happy? So if a customer can choose gender from a menu rather than being assigned a gender at birth would this not be a completely different way of looking at identity? Identity rather than pre-assigned, is instead purchased. Just as a new nose, a new face, a new arm if the arm is lost, can be purchased.

But to understand that there could be a market for identity is to look at identity with different mental software. This would be applying the software from "economics" to the problem of "identity". There are of course other examples I could use but the problem with the current debates on topics like identity is we do not see new mental software, new ideas, new concepts, but we see instead people trying to defend the old ideas, old concepts, tradition, or religiously inspired concepts. The problem is that our technology isn't evolving at the same pace that people's minds are evolving and it appears to me that the minds of most people will not be able to keep up with the technology. This in fact seems to be true even among Futurists, Transhumanists, people who dedicate themselves to try to update how they think in alignment with technology.

Key points:

• A personality evolves from knowledge and life experiences (personality emerges from environmental influences).
• A mental model or mental software which may be effective for long periods of time in a slow changing society may not remain effective in a fast changing society.
• The ability to update the "self" means there isn't a permanent "self" as the fast changing environment means an increasingly fast changing "self" emerging from the environment.
• New mental models will have to be constantly tested and tried if the goal is maximum resilience and adaptability to a fast changing environment. This is because there will not be an ability to predict what will work for a long period of time unless of course the predictor can control the environment enough to make their predictions true.
• Emotional attachment to opinions creates opinion defending behavior rather than to evolve opinions toward whatever is perceived as closest to true at any point in time.
• Defending old mental models or having attachment to old ways of thinking due to the emotional investment, is a form of stubborn resistance to change. The problem is the technology is causing changes faster than the emotions can keep up.