Humanity at the Crossroads | Sheldon Solomon | TEDxSkidmoreCollege

hey thanks man hey good evening everybody okay nobody here okay I can't see you all that well yeah all right anyway thank you all for coming this evening I feel like a bit of an anomaly and I asked to go last for two reasons one is that I knew everybody else would be incredibly prepared and really uplifting and that I wouldn't be prepared but the the real reason is that you know when I heard about the theme of the event visions for the future it kind of made me a little nervous because truth be told given the work that I do as an experimental social psychologist I'm not sure the future is all that auspicious but with that in mind let me give it a try anyway the British novelist Thomas Hardy wrote if a way to the better their be it lies in taking a full look at the worst and with that in mind and not to bring you down after what was really a spectacular ly fine evening I believe that the future for Humanity is frankly very bleak in light of a historically unprecedented confluence of four major problems that I think currently confront us first and maybe foremost is war although we're not directly affected by it I would argue that even the most benevolent glance at human history reveals an ongoing succession of genocidal atrocities punctuated by the brutal subjugation of designated in-house inferiors and the development of increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction in the 20th century make it entirely possible that humans will be the first species to prune our own branch from the proverbial tree of life I'm already miserable second vodka environmental degradation only the willfully ignorant or intellectually dormant can deny that human induced climate change has altered the Earth's environment to the point where it may no longer be fit for human habitation although it will be a panacea for mosquitoes jellyfish and snakes third and no that wasn't a joke I'll tell you what I'm trying I'll tell you all what I'm trying to be funny you know that wasn't that was serious all right third and contributing to environmental degradation is our relentless and mindless pursuit of money and stuff more people in the United States go shopping in the days after Thanksgiving than who vote in presidential elections greasing the wheels of commerce on the Internet are staggering off the couch or after seeing who could drink the most yak urine on Survivor to incinerate the atmosphere driving their gas-guzzling cars over to Walmart to save a dime on a lemon and a chainsaw finally and fourth America is a petri dish of psychopathology according to the National Institute of Mental Health that 12% of the population of the United States is currently depressed one-third of the adults in the United States will be depressed at some point in their lives another 10 to 20 percent of the population is addicted to drugs and alcohol too many of us I would submit are both comfortably or uncomfortably numb all of these superficially disparate problems war environmental degradation mindless consumption psychological disease I would argue based on my work result in part from malignant manifestations of some very uniquely human existential concerns let's see how and why this is the case although humans share with all forms of life a biological predisposition towards self-preservation in the service of both survival and reproduction we are quite unique our capacity for sophisticated abstract and symbolic thought in fact this enables us to do some spectacular things particularly to imagine things that do not yet exist and to have the audacity to transform our dreams into reality when Leonardo da Vinci was scribbling pictures of airplanes and helicopters in his notebooks in the 15th century people thought that he was crazy and yet today it's remarkable that we are routinely transported by what was originally dismissed as the dueling's of a madman and this sublime ability to transform the world in accordance with our desires clearly makes us the only truly creative species and and it's also I believe surely one of the primary reasons why we've been so fantastically successful as a species well so what these sophisticated cognitive capacities in turn render human beings aware of the fact that we exist what psychologists these days call consciousness or self-awareness and the point is actually quite simple a rosebush exists but doesn't necessarily know that it exists and a turtle exists but doesn't necessarily know that it exists I'm not going to get into a protracted debate with you today about whether or not your dog knows that it exists I would just argue that only human beings exist and know that we exist and the point that existential philosophers make is that consciousness or self-awareness to be alive and to know that we're alive engenders two uniquely human emotions that are usually referred to as are and dread respectively all right the good news first before things take a decided turn south it is literally awesome to be alive and to know it and I know I can't see you but either some head shakes or some hand Wiggles who's ever gotten up one day and just felt that it's great to be alive anybody ever have that I grew up in New Jersey so it's been far and few between but but I vaguely remember that but the point is and I think it's an important one is that some of our finest moments come from the sheer joy of luxuriating and the spontaneous exuberance of life itself alright but unless you're a child or an idiot if you're alive and you know it then you are shackled with the unwelcome realization that like all living things you are a finite duration and therefore you will someday die moreover unless you're a child or an idiot this realization it is joined with the concurrent recognition that your death can occur at any time for reasons that you could never anticipate or control and that from a purely biological point of view you're a breathing piece of defecating meat that's no more enduring or significant than a lizard or potato again not being funny so if you were perpetually aware I submit of the realities of the human condition I'm going to die I could be disemboweled by a hungry lion or smote by a basketball-sized malignant tumor a breathing piece of defecating meat I'm a coal cut with an attitude I'm a talking sausage I'm spam with a plan but I've got no kin all of these realizations would conspire some say to render our ancestors totally demoralized and paralyzed by overwhelming dread had they not rather ingeniously managed the terror of death through the construction and maintenance of what anthropologists today call culture I humanely constructed beliefs about reality that we share with people in groups to minimize anxiety by giving us a sense that were persons of value in a world of meaning and to accomplish this what cultures do for us is they every culture provides us with an account of the origin of the universe and every culture has prescriptions of appropriate conduct and all cultures offers some hope of immortality either literally in the form of heavens after lives and reincarnations of the world's great religions or symbolically through having children amassing great fortunes producing great art or scientific discoveries such that while we may not be here forever we are comforted by the possibility that a tangible manifestation of our existence will persist over time nonetheless when we embrace cultural worldviews and glean self-esteem from perceiving that we're meeting or exceeding the standards of value associated with them this keeps mortal terror at bay and if we have more time I would argue that some of our finest most noble and enduring accomplishments are a result of this uniquely human yearning for immortality on the other hand however it has also produced some unforeseen unsavory and potentially lethal complications one difficulty arises when we run into people that do not share our beliefs about the nature of reality and the problem here is to the extent that our own beliefs about reality serve a death-denying function the mere existence of people with different beliefs is fundamentally threatening because if we admit of the legitimacy of an alternative conception of reality we necessarily undermine the confidence with which we subscribe to our own views and when we do that we expose ourselves to the very anxiety that those beliefs were erected to mitigate in the first place I'd so for example if I believed that God created the earth and six days before taking a very well-deserved break and then I run into somebody from the Borneo in the South Pacific who believed that the earth was created from a giant coconut that came out of the side of a palm tree well if they're right then I must be wrong and so the first line of psychological defense when we run into people who are different is to denigrate or disparage them and so sure the Borneo believed that the earth was created from a coconut but then again these are ignorant savages that wear grass skirts and live in tents and worship piles of sticks and mud they don't have pants and neither do i for that matter but they don't have pants or cell phones or Netflix and if they did they would surely see things our way and at the same time that we disparage and belittle people who are different but we also try to convince them to dispose of their ideas and to adopt ours instead I think Christian missionaries are probably the best example but by no means the only example trundling into indigenous communities that have been thriving for thousands of years waving the sign of the Cross and proclaiming you're all Catholic now let's play bingo and so when we run into people that are different we belittle them we try to convert them to our way of life or we just kill those inferior aliens and demonstrate the superior or the superiority of our beliefs my god is better than your God we will kick your ass to prove it whomp indeed studies show that when people are reminded of their mortality for example by completing a death anxiety questionnaire or being interviewed in front of a funeral parlor or even exposed to the word death that's flashed so rapidly on a computer screen 28 milliseconds that you don't know that you've even seen anything when people are reminded of their own death Christians for example become more derogatory towards Jews and Jews become more a hostile towards Muslims Germans sit further away from Turkish people Americans reminded of death become more physically aggressive to other Americans that don't share their political beliefs Iranians reminded of death are more supportive of suicide bombing and they're more willing to consider becoming martyrs themselves Americans reminded of their mortality become more enthusiastic about pre-emptive nuclear chemical and biological attacks against countries who pose no direct threat to us so man's inhumanity to man our hostility and disdain towards people who are different results then I would argue at least in part from our inability to tolerate others who do not share the beliefs that we rely on in order to shield ourselves from mortal terror and summarizing this state of affairs one of my favorite playwright George Bernard Shaw observed that when the Angel of Death sounds his trumpet the pretenses of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats and a gust of wind well the uniquely human of death the uniquely human fear of death rather also contributes to environmental problems by fostering discomfort with nature after all everything in nature is of finite duration and will eventually decay and die ashes to ashes dust to dust as they say that's why our ancestors just said no to reality by constructing the supernatural universe where humans are immune to the vagaries of time and space remember I'm sure you do in the story of Genesis how God created the heavens and earth and all of the plants and animals before creating Adam and Eve in His image and giving them dominion over the planet and all its inhabitants but this arrogantly homo centric view of ourselves has had catastrophic effects on the natural environment which we have plundered like giant inebriated gluttons gorging ourselves at an all-you-can-eat buffet and pissing on the table on the way out for good measure that was kind of a joke well how do we know that this is true well again laboratory studies confirm that intimations of mortality increase our contempt for and disregard of nature after thinking about their death people deny that humans are animals after thinking about their death people have more negative attitudes towards animals and consider it more appropriate to kill animals for reasons other than food and medical research death reminders also make people more uncomfortable in natural settings as opposed to cultivated surroundings and more willing to exploit natural resources such as forests for personal gain and this same disinclination to die that fuels hatred of people who are different and Stokes Cavalier disregard for nature has also transformed us into mindless consumers with insatiable desires for money and stuff traditional economists assume that money was originally created and still serves only to facilitate the exchange of goods and services and that consumer choices are driven solely by rational calculations however this uber rational conception of money and consumption does not tell the whole story because we know that since antiquity money and stuff has served as psychological fetishes to ward off death anxiety first of all there's a strong positive correlation between death anxiety and materialism that is people with high death anxiety tend to be much more materialistic secondly following death reminders people have higher fiscal aspirations and say they intend to spend more on clothing and entertainment reminders also make people yearn for high status luxury goods like Lexus's and Rolexes and after thinking about their own death people asked to draw pictures of coins and dollar bills actually draw bigger images money literally looms larger went death is on our minds and really interestingly after just handing people some money and having them count it people's death anxiety is reduced I like how the playwright Tennessee Williams put it in one of my favorite place Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where he says the human animal is a beast that dies and if he has money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason that he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting well I think this help explains or helps rather explain why many people in the United States or more people in the u.s. shop and the days after Thanksgiving then in presidential or rather than vote in presidential elections right but what about epidemic levels of depression and other forms of psychopathology including drug and alcohol abuse that currently exists in our culture I'm convinced by psychologists who say that whenever people are pervasively unhappy in any given time in place that we need to consider if the prevailing standards of value are attainable for the average individual in that culture and so for example in the United States today self-esteem for men is predicated on having an obscene amount of power and wealth and we are taught from a very early age that if we work hard we can be as wealthy and as powerful as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg when in fact as some of you all know social mobility in the u.s. today is very very limited you are much more likely to get out of poverty in Bangladesh but then you are in the United States and so when many of us grow up wearing polyester suits selling three pound burritos at the Taco Bell drive-thru making minimum wage we tend to blame ourselves accordingly and self-esteem for women in the u.s. today and in fact in all of the Western world is predicated on being thinner than a piece of linguine bosoms except that of course and perpetually young if I can't floss my teeth with you ladies you too fat and if you're older than 25 or 30 years old you are a time ridden hag and the point that I would make is that teaching our children to strive for unattainable standards of meaning and value as a recipe for psychological despair and research is quite clear it demonstrates that low self-esteem is associated with a host of psychological complications and self-destructive behaviors I don't feel too good all right anyway so I have presented what I believe is not a particularly flattering conception of our species but I would argue that it's not unrealistic and I advanced this argument this evening because I sincerely believe with Thomas Hardy that if a way to the better there be it lies in taking a full look at the worst malignant manifestations of death anxiety bring out the worst in us depressed demoralized disillusioned hateful war mongers who have transformed the planet into a toxic waste dump in our insatiable quest for dollars in draws in a perpetual drug alcohol television and Facebook induced stupor well in this sense humanity I would profess is at a crossroads and I think a case could be made that our future depends more than ever on what we do now if we do nothing we might have the ignominious distinction of being the first form of life to be directly responsible for our extinction however and I think this is the important point that hopefully renders me wrong about everything else that I have said so far this evening we humans have a very good track record at solving the seemingly intractable difficulties once we understand their underline basis for example infectious diseases exterminated millions of people until we figured out that illness was caused by germs rather than evil spirits this led to the discovery of antibiotics and the practice of modern medicine perhaps once we fully recognize the central role that mortal terror plays in human affairs we can deploy our remarkable ingenuity to find ways of counteracting the destructive potential Orpheus can and often do unleash Albert Camus one of my favorite authors wrote come to terms with death thereafter anything is possible I sincerely hope that he was right thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 44,063

Rating: 4.9443221 out of 5

Keywords: ted x, Community, English, tedx talk, Psychology, United States, tedx talks, ted talk, Hardship, ted, Failure, TEDxTalks, Fear, Big problems, tedx, Humor, Aging, Social Science, Ideas, Death, Life, Pain, ted talks, Future, Hope

Id: wuJhD5TkX-0

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Pormal_Nerson]

Love this!!!