The simple answer: current human cognition is still deeply moored to our ancient neurological past. Our ability to consciously defy primal instincts has not surpassed our mind's unconscious romance with "fight or flight" thinking.
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Through hundreds of thousands of years, our evolutionary development has made us inexorably tethered to reactive cognition. Endocrine disruptors -- which first acted as both helpers for hunting big game and defending against neighboring tribes -- are now deterrents for long-term rationality.
So does this mean we're still a bunch of Geico cavemen? Well, sort of.
Today, in the 21st century, we are trying to overcome these bulwarks to planning. We're in a period of transition but it's not a quick process. Because Homo sapiens have changed their surroundings so rapidly in the past thousand years, shedding the old habits that kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years requires the passing of many more evolutionary cycles to alter our brain structures.
This makes complete sense, too. It took us so much time to master and perform our species basic functions with ease. Once we had procreation and survival mostly taken care of, our surroundings changed to make things easier.
Man has waded through four periods in modern day history -- the agricultural, industrial, technological, and information ages -- that have drastically changed his environment. These developments took place under the auspices of old thinking and thus we have yet to throw away any of the vestiges of our insinctual tendencies. All it takes to see this is in action is turning on the TV. You are constantly bombarded by alerts that illustrate just how hard-wired we've become. Many more years of genetic cross-pollination that have favored short-term, instinctual cognition have made humans more adept at reacting to beehives of short-term stimuli and hurt our dexterity for handling long-term problems.
With this in mind, it's no surprise that we oftentimes get ourselves into awful predicaments that could have been avoided. People say hindsight is 20/20, but I call bullshit. The current economic crisis and climate change (that is, if you believe it to be anthropogenically induced) are great examples of our thirst for short-term gain and long-term ignorance. They are odes to the cognitive patterns bred repeatedly during our evolution.
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Chasing myopia might have worked back in the Stone / Ice Age, but it doesn't now. We're no longer surviving on a day-to-day basis. Today we have to look at the road ahead if we want to stay in the driver's seat (recall Volkswagen's old slogan?). If we ever hope for our species to be around for a long geological time, it's time to put precedence toward smarter thinking as a collective. Sure, we've got to pay the bills. But just look where externalizing social costs of our food industry has gotten us: diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Just look at where profiteering has gotten us with regards to marring Earth's landscape. Just look where smokers end up.
Now I'm just as guilty as the next guy. I act immediately when acute pressure pressure is applied. I love to wait until the last minute. I need that "oh shit" moment to get kicked into action. I can't remember how many times I've seen my parents wagging their fingers at me asking, "Now when did we get this assignment?"
The truth is, we don't operate on such a long-term scale yet. We haven't had to until now. Evolution takes practice. Each generation weeds out the inefficacies to make the next ones stronger. But our vision of natural selection and ourselves as a species has to change. We've got to stop thinking about change in such reactive terms. If the only way we change our behavior is when we are confronted with the threat of punishment or visible and tangible repercussions, we will never change our behavior.
Although there exists a peppering of scientific objection to these assertions, there's little debate that we're collectively more frightened by the immediate and unrealistic than the not-so-immediate and realistic. People are afraid of getting hit by lightning more than they are of the possibility of getting cancer. We're skittish in the dark because, hey, there might be someone out to get us or trying to rob our house. But these psychological conclusions are irrational, unfounded, and hurtful in preparing us for the very worst.
So, the moral of the story is: stop charging obscene amounts on your credit card. Save for a rainy day. Otherwise you'll find yourself with at least 30% of your life's income gone (sound familiar?). Ellen Degeneres said it best when she joked, "Procrastinate now, don't put it off."
The concept of irrational cognition is both fascinating, funny, and disturbingly alarming. It explains our ironies, for one, and the small pleasures of life like impulse buying at the checkout counter. But at the same time, don't you think if we jettisoned our idiot brains for a moment, we might devote the majority of our tax expenditures to flexing our educational muscles versus flushing military dollars down the toilet?
We might have to put our minds to it.
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