Looking is not seeing

The pace of events is fast in our times. Tsunamis, wars, revolutions, the bursting of financial bubbles, far right terrorism and riots surprise us one after another. Nations are in debt, economies are in difficulties and nature is stretched to its limits. Economists can't forecast the financial front, and sociologists can't predict the turmoil of crowds. Even the accuracy of weather forecasts is down. Leaders are begging for predictability. What has changed? Why now? Why can't we predict our own human reactions in this age of information when we have more knowledge about everything than ever before?

Barack Obama criticised the inability of his country's intelligence agency to predict and analyse the recent unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, misjudging how quickly the unrest would lead to the downfall of these country's governments, and how rapidly the unrest would spread to other nations. Failure of information and intelligence was seen as the main reason for the inability to foresee.

"We should have connected the dots!" several officials and experts announced. Interestingly, the same sentence has been uttered before in relation to the financial crisis, Iraq war, September 11 attacks and even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Connecting the dots would give us an outline, but then do we really see? If we do see, would we understand? In all these cases, I think there was a failure of understanding, not of information.

Looking is not seeing, and knowing is not understanding.

In an experiment designed by scientists at Harvard University, a group of people were asked to watch a video of a basketball team training and count how many times the members of the yellow team pass a ball to each other. A few seconds into the footage, a man dressed in a gorilla suit enters the frame, stops in the middle, performs a King Kong-style silent howl, and leaves the screen on the other side. Amazingly, most of the participants of the experiment did not notice him at all. What they were looking for was something else.

We are often too busy looking the other way. If we look, we often see what we want to see. If we see, we don't necessarily understand. Cause and effect is one of the fundamental rules of the universe we live in. Everything has a reason; we just don't comprehend it. We could put tsunami warning poles in the oceans to inform us when one is coming, or measure seismological action to know when an earthquake is being unleashed, but we don't understand the forces and sequence of events behind them enough to predict them before they happen. There are simply too many dots to connect.

As human civilisation gets older and our effect on our societies and environment multiplies, our ability to predict outcomes decreases. Human actions and decisions are often simply too emotional, ignorant and, at best, short-sighted. We freely set snowballs rolling off into different directions. They all will come back to us at some point in time when we least expect it.

The financial field is a prime example of the type of mess we can create, as the system is totally man-made. Terminology used for describing the behaviour of the stock market refers more to psychology than economics. The "markets" are not happy or upset, markets are nervous, or in panic. Markets react to speeches, decisions, news and events by jumping up and down. Terms and expressions are as if describing the emotional turbulence of a 2-year-old child who cannot yet speak. "Markets have turned into a monster," observed Swedish investor Christer Gardell. Don't we all say that, when our kids are out of our control?

One study even found out that "the stock market's behaviour leading up to the 2008 financial crisis resembled the human brain during an epileptic seizure".

If the financial market resembles the psyche of an abnormally behaving 2-year-old, the politics and foreign policy of our major countries are probably in the developmental stage of a primary school kid. Governments and leaders regularly join into like-minded gangs who share similar interests, with a major power as the head bully that others follow. "You are either with us or against us!" Leaders of hostile gangs don't talk to each other and threaten each other with aggression. Reliance on violence as one of the primary means of coping with problems and conflicts is astonishingly common.

If we could think and see clearly, violence has never been a successful strategy, but we refuse to learn from the past. In fact, often we are hostages of our historical misbehaviours. Our heroes are those who have killed the most. Our history is merely uninteresting pastimes conducted between wars.

Our leading power, The United States, has spent $1.26 trillion on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars without reaching any objectives. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. In the meantime the United States' support for dictators is the biggest obstacle in the way of freedom for most Arab countries. Egypt and Tunisia would have been free democracies decades ago, if the US would have let their governments fall. Harsh on Libya and Syria, for their being in the "other gang", The United States supports the dictators of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other obedient regimes.

If the money spent on hostilities, troops and bombs dropped on Afghanistan and Iraq was used to win the hearts and minds of those nations, by now Iraqis and Afghans would be waving American flags on their roofs.

Most of the refugees that are the topic of hot discussion in Europe today come from those countries where the USA gang has meddled with recently, that is Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Interestingly, the majority of the world's refugees live in developing countries and are helped by neighbouring nations who themselves have considerable problems. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that 80 per cent of the world's refugees live in developing countries, with Pakistan, Iran and Syria hosting the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.07 million and 1.005 million respectively.

Despite what the Norwegian terrorist, Breivik, and his anti-Islam inspirers claim, Islam is not a threat to Europe - extremism and ignorance is! Most of the global conflicts of our time and throughout history are conflicts between extremists, with the rest of us caught in between.

Now our leading superpower, the United States, while the country is rolling headlong towards bankruptcy, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the development of a supersonic bomber, which could strike anywhere in the globe within an hour! What a ludicrous investment for a country in such financial mess! What a vision for the future from a leading nation!

The same ignorance also burdens our treatment of the environment. A recent study claims that humanity will need 27 Planet Earths by 2050 unless environmental issues and our consumption problems are dealt with. There is no doubt that we are cutting off the branch we are sitting on, and doing it fast.

Undoubtedly, information, data and intelligence are of no use if we can't make sense of, or are unwilling to see, the big picture. This current age of information must be followed by age of understanding for us to survive and live in harmony with the universe we inhabit.