I See Nothing… I Smell Nothing…
By Pat Racimora on June 9, 2009 at 9:20 AM in Banks, Congress (House & Senate), Economy
While issuing a parking ticket, you’d think that New York’s Finest would notice a dead man in the back seat. Or the by the second ticket…or third…or fourth. Yet it was a month later when a disintegrated body was discovered in a minivan covered with parking tickets and dust.
How could this happen? And what might this say about us in the larger picture?
I doubt it was what one wag suggested, namely that this was simply a fortuitous happenstance to make the quota for parking tickets. Rather, it may have been an extreme example of sensory neglect so characteristic of us humans.
We tend not to perceive what we don’t want to see, especially if the actual facts are unpleasant or negative. And if stimuli are weak or ambiguous, we may take no notice of what we don’t expect to see.
And that’s exactly what I see going on in our country today. We tend to cling to the hope that our American values are being widely practiced. Instead we should probably be in the streets with our signs expressing outrage raised high, showing our teeth, and screaming.
The lack of promised transparency keeps issues that affect us all fuzzy and ambiguous. Investigative journalism is on life-support, so we don’t learn much. Even the National Enquirer can scoop the New York Times.
Basic rights have eroded so slowly that we simply adapt. We have an inexperienced President we don’t know much about, and we know even less about who is pulling the strings. One more broken promise? A few more billion of our tax dollars going out here and there? Ho hum. We mostly still just go along. (“Hope,” doncha know.) Corruption, be it perpetrated by members of Congress or greedy financial and corporate giants–all of whom owe us a fiduciary duty–occurs with such regularity that we have become numbed to it. It’s as if America is cannibalizing itself, but–just like the dead man in the back seat–we just can’t quite see it.
Perhaps much of our plight can be explained as a boiled frog syndrome, meaning figuratively speaking, that if an ultimate catastrophe emerges in small incremental changes, we won’t see it coming.
Empirical data, in a yet to be published study by Professors Gino and Bazerman at Harvard Business School, strongly support the existence the boiled frog syndrome when it comes to perceiving the unethical behavior of others. If dishonest acts escalate in small steps over time, we are more likely to simply discount them.
The bottom line is that unless we break out of our perceptual malaise and commit to making ourselves alert to the gradual onset of abominations and figure out the direction they are taking us, we will be unable to see the resulting catastrophe until it hits in full force. The trick is to take constructive action early on. Any ideas?
Finally, back to that poor dead guy. There is one sense we cannot easily override. So, you’d think that after a few days somebody would have gotten blown off their feet by the stench emanating from that minivan.
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