Unintended Consequences

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When I lay awake this morning around five, trying to go back to sleep, thinking about what I was going to write this week, I had a great idea about how we humans create our own problems, mostly because we choose what’s worst for us instead of what’s best.

I fell back asleep again, woke around seven, and lost the polished essay I was going to write here today. Coleridge, likewise in a dream created Kubla Khan, the poem that begins:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

I don’t have his opium problem, thank goodness, and this is close to what I meant to write:

We too often forget the best in ourselves and make decisions based on the moment and what feels immediately good instead of what will be best for us in the long run.

I do this every day when I vow to go to the gym tomorrow. Tomorrow of course, seldom comes.

I was struck by an article in this week’s Economist ("Lexington," June 16, 2007, p. 42) that says politicians are the worst at making bad decisions because the electorate is ill informed and will turn on them any moment. The article says, for example, that productivity is better for the economy than jobs, but the electorate doesn't believe it. Politicians don't want to be defeated so they go along. The article gives the example of the Chinese building a dam under Mao. Hundreds of workers dig with shovels. An economist asks, “‘Why don’t they use a mechanical digger?’ ‘That would put people out of work,’ replies the foreman. ‘Oh,” says the economist, ‘I thought you were making a dam. If it’s jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.’” Our politicians do the same thing, bowing to popular support and ill-informed citizens who dine on a diet of Paris Hilton and her ilk, rather than thinking deeply about the world they live in. I hasten to add that the media all too often feeds the public a mindless diet rather than challenge them to think.

When electronic technology didn’t exist and people got their news from print media, however, they were probably no more thoughtful.

The upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere is littered with detritus left for the last half century by various nations’ space programs. Will this eventually cause problems? Most likely.

Hundreds of people each day divorce because they married the person who was closest, the most willing, the easiest, the most convenient at the time. The grief for the partners, let alone their children, is tragic.

Thousands of people are killed each year in automobile accidents. Many of those who cause the deaths have been drinking. Others are too old to be competent behind the wheel, but no one is willing to remove their car keys from them. It's not expedient.

Our nation too often feeds children fast food (high in corn syrup and salt and grease and sugar) rather than take the few minutes more to wash fresh fruit or vegetables. Or be a “bad guy.” School lunch programs count ketchup as a vegetable per federal guidelines. An in-law’s niece has refused all her life to eat anything but hot dogs or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she's now ten. No juice, no fruit, and certainly nothing green. The parents, rather than being in charge, take have created a monster. They also home-school, so at least the little girl is seldom inflicted on society at large. The path of least resistance, once again.


I don’t have a solution for our nation or our planet. But I do have a solution for me, which is to live mindfully, of course, and try to be constantly aware of the law of unintended consequences.

And if I can accomplish this just ten percent of the time, I’ll be doing better than I have in the past.

By the way, I'll be out of town next week, so check out my blog in two weeks.