The Mechanics of Perception:
Dr. Daniel Goleman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence, has another good book called Vital Lies, Simple Truths. It’s a good book, not very long, very insightful, and easy to read. Hell, if you survived reading my last book, that one should be no trouble at all.
In his book, Dr. Goleman talks about how perception is affected by situations. That is, how evolutionary mechanisms alter people’s perceptions to help them preserve the survival of their DNA.
I know that sounds kind of strange. Basically, in some situations there are some courses of action that help preserve the survival of the individual’s DNA better than others. These evolutionary mechanisms focus the person’s attention on the courses of action that lend themselves best to the preservation of the individual’s DNA, and shut out courses of action that don’t lend themselves well to the preservation of the individual’s DNA. But there’s no guarantee that the evolutionary equipment is going to direct people toward courses of action that are going to lend themselves best to the preservation of their DNA under our living conditions.
Suppose you’re walking through the jungle and you get attacked by a tiger. The tiger slashes you with his claws. Ordinarily, getting slashed open would hurt—but not when you’re being attacked by a tiger! The pain of the injury makes you aware of a threat to your survival, so under ordinary conditions, reacting to the pain would be the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, because in order to make the pain go away, you have to rest and heal your wound. However, when you’re being attacked by a tiger, you don’t have time to rest and heal your wound. If you tried, the tiger would eat you. So your brain subconsciously kicks you in the direction of saving yourself from the tiger by blocking out the pain for the time being. That keeps the pain from distracting you from dealing with the most immediate threat to the survival of your DNA. Or in another sense, a bleeding injury and a tiger attacking you are both threats to your DNA, but by shutting out the pain, your subconscious saves you the trouble of deciding which one you’re going to deal with first.
Now fast-forward 50,000 years, to recent history. Dr. Goleman begins the book by asking: Why didn’t the Cold War drive everyone insane? For 50 years, everyone in the world faced a gigantic threat to their survival, but somehow, people all over the world were able to carry on with their lives as though the threat didn’t exist. Instead of a tiger and a bleeding injury, now people were dealing with working for a living, putting food on their tables, and sending their kids to college on the one hand, and on the other, powerful men who lived far away, some of whom certain people voted for, others of whom nobody voted for, and some of whom lived on the other side of the world, who were building gigantic weapons that could annihilate all life on Earth.
How are individual people supposed to protect themselves from a threat like that? Worrying about it accomplished nothing, so a lot of people subconsciously shut that threat out of their minds so they could focus their attentions on things they could deal with.
People had lots of different ways of shutting the threat of global nuclear holocaust out of their minds. But essentially, they were faced with the same problem as the ancient proto-humans who wondered what happened to their dead friend. Physical mortality was an inescapable threat to the people’s survival, and so was the threat of global thermonuclear warfare. So in both cases, people found ways to alter their perceptions of the situation to shut out threats they didn’t know how to escape.
So to answer the question “Why didn’t the Cold War drive everyone insane?”, considering that everyone in the world was faced with a gigantic threat to their survival, a few people tried to do something about it, and most people just shut the threat out of their minds and pursued courses of action that benefited their immediate survival but did nothing to help them escape the gigantic threat to their survival, well, maybe the Cold War did drive everyone insane. Or at least, most people, anyway.
…Either that, or it’s yet another example of a global graveyard spiral, in which people get themselves into a situation that their mental equipment isn’t very well adapted to handle, and acting on what they feel to be true just gets them into more and more trouble.