Profiteering From Prehistoric Paranoia

Enroute to work this morning, I caught a bit of an interview on Jazz 91.1 FM, for those wondering what radio station I was listening to...there was a first time newly published author, speaking about his brand spanking new book:

RISK: The Science and Politics of Fear By: Dan Gardner.

And here's me, a first time, brand newly unnerved listener, catching this interview about irrational fears and the psychological hard-wiring that exists in our minds, left over from the pre-press, cro-magnon days of survival. A perfect audience.

How anyone survived those early Neanderthal pre-promotional, pre-press days, without books, music, art, architecture and vast sea travel is beyond my imaginative speculation, let alone comprehension.

But, evidently by being hard-wired by fear, humans persisted.

Regardless of logic, our "irrational" fears are what have served us, and enabled far more of us to survive. It has been our irrational over-precaution, our ah-ah-ah-ing from generation to generation - compounded ~ that has taught off-spring the very real likelihood of pain, thereby circumnavigating actual, and potential, fatal causes and consequences.

Our self-inflicted limiting, of our own lives, have paradoxically served to extend our lives.

Isn't life interesting? ...in an uninteresting-kind-of-un-lived way.

So have we, in essence, lived this long by not living.

We've come to "know things" by NOT experiencing.

We have however, insisted in persisting and surviving thus far by recounting the worst of the worst 'bedtime stories' night after night to generation after generation.

The author mentioned we are - at our very core - a species that loves telling stories, and loves to be told a story.

Fact or fiction - regardless - the point is to take us away somewhere, show us things, teach us things, have us imagine, visualize, learn, conceptualize, comprehend if not condone, other things, new things, things we wouldn't have thought to imagine on our own.

Damn Dan, for capitalizing on some of our basic hard-wiring to sell his book, and catapult his career in conjecture.

But he is onto something.

...cause I inherently responded to hearing what we all intrinsically know for reasons prehistorical, and hard-wired, unknown.....we like to be told things - entertained - taught - informed - educated.

Whatever it takes to increase our predictive comprehension....if not collective comprehension

and decrease our premature fatality. Why - who knows?

Clearly, irrationality is about quantity, NOT about quality.

So, here's to another day enjoyed by all.

Thank your paranoid prehistoric people for all our existing highly lucrative fears.

Many have made a lot of money from people hard-wired as us.

But, now we can induct you Dan, to that growing list of prehistoric-paranoia-profiteers.