We Have Outsmarted Ourselves

Cat and mouse. Spy versus spy. Check and Mate.

We humans have a way of challenging ourselves. We adapt and change with the circumstances. Throw us a Rubik’s cube and we’ll throw back a puzzle solved. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it spurs humanity to greater and greater knowledge of the world around us.

But our knowledge has often outpaced our wisdom. We have outsmarted ourselves at virtually every turn:

•In the Eighties, the government created new corporate tax laws, so GE filled an entire floor of its headquarters with better lawyers than the government had. They worked out loopholes before the act even became law;

•Congress passed McCain/Feingold to rein in election spending, but the Citizens United Supreme Court decision crippled it, and our elections are now awash in cash, much of it of the “dark” or unaccountable kind, contributed anonymously by people and PACs.

•After lobbying by Rush Limbaugh and the ABC Radio Networks, President Reagan’s FCC killed the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 rule that made broadcasters provide a platform for balanced discussion. Unencumbered by the Fairness Doctrine, unopposed and unanswered right-wing talk radio came to dominate the AM band.

•Beginning in 1990, the FCC failed to enforce its own rules when it granted Sinclair Broadcasting, which is, according to many, the most influential media company you’ve never heard of, effective control of many more television stations than the law explicitly allows, through unscrupulous actions like having relatives and friends buy TV stations, then hand their programming and management over to Sinclair.

•In an effort to appear fair, most journalistic outlets continue to allow liars and cheaters an equal voice in the papers, over the air, and online. It’s called "false equivalence," and it remains rampant, even though every journalistic decisionmaker knows better.

•Special interests hold the keys to Congress and outsmart regulators at every turn: Bump stocks and assault rifles? Legal; McDonalds, Amazon and a host of other corporations that pay little or no tax? Legal; Insider-trading based on knowledge gained in closed Congressional hearings? Illegal, but unenforced.

It’s not just the government, either. We live in the age of consolidation, where private equity firms—financial engineering companies that don’t actually make anything except deals—are rewriting society’s owner’s manual.

And the pace of technological change is staggering. The tech industry has introduced advancements whose unintended consequences have caught us flatfooted. The most obvious example is how social media has become an undisputed societal gamechanger before anyone has come to understand the rules of the new game. A more subtle example of how we have outkicked our coverage is the way automation is killing jobs faster than we can replace them.

In the natural world, we have hunted, farmed and fished with such efficiency that we are creating a “mass extinction event” whereby unprecedented numbers of species are disappearing from the earth, sea and skies.

The naturalist, Margaret Renkl, has observed “The earth is paying the price for our convenience.” In the face of rising temperatures and extreme storms, we’ve abandoned the Paris Climate Accords, and are presiding over the killing of the Great Barrier Reef. Our oceans struggle with an unsustainable amount of plastic waste.

Futurist John Nesbitt suggested balance in his 80’s book, Megatrends. For all our high-tech ambitions, he said we needed the balance of “high-touch,” but we weren’t listening. Remember the human voice? It’s a thing of the past where customer service is concerned. “The Simpsons,” as usual, hit the nail on the head in an episode years ago that had Marge waiting interminably on the phone for help when a disembodied voice came on to say, “To better assist you, customer service has been discontinued.”

That’s where we are today.

My brother cancelled his office’s AT&T landlines at the start of the pandemic, but they continue to bill him, and are now threatening legal action if he doesn’t pay up. This of course, is all happening in the ether, and after sending them their own documentation, and after hours on hold, the problem remains unresolved.

More personally still, there is the doctor’s office. In this period that has followed the consolidation of the medical arts industry where hospitals have bought every doctors’ practice in sight, they’ve cut costs by eliminating personal patient interaction in favor of digital platforms like MyChart. Its technology brings you closer while simultaneously holding you at arm’s length. Good luck getting through to a human being.

Don’t get me wrong; you’ll find no bigger fan of progress. I like the comforts of modern living. I like my electric car, big-screen TV, smartphone, laptop, and my high-speed Internet connection. What I’m saying is that behind innovation comes a lagging social adjustment. We need to consider this as we continue to outsmart ourselves.