Assess risk

There is a signature line from the Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford movie, “Devils Own”.  In the movie Harrison Ford has a very American “mom, pa and apple pie view of things”. Brad Pitt is from a different world. At a key point Brad Pitt cements the acknowledgment of the difference as the bubble of Harrison Ford’s view of things burst. Brad Pitt tells him, “…this in not an American story, it is an Irish one”.

American stories most often have happy or satisfactory endings. It is a cultural thing of good over evil or just reward. Alfred Hitchcock movies epitomized this American philosophical perspective.  But is life really like the American movies? In the movies man triumphs no matter how awesome the situation. Examples are the movies “2012” and “Knowing”. They have American cultural endings. They beat unbelievable odds, even if it required deus ex machine, as in the movie “Knowing”.

Our cultural perspective of always ultimately triumphing is cognitive desistance [intellectual denial]. It causes us to take unacceptable risks. We believe we are uniquely special, have a divine destiny and are protected.  It comes as an extreme shock when a risk becomes a reality. The financial crisis was an example. Yet how quickly we forget and go back to our cognitive haze. The same is true of the philosophy of our elected officials. We forget it was the Republican perspective that created so much chaos in the last decade and bought them back in office. A couple of euphemisms come to mind in terms our our approaches, “the tail wagging the dog” and “throwing the baby out with the bath water”.

This kind of cognitive desistance is small potatoes.  We live in a world that has no preference for mankind. A solar flare, virus or meteor could wipe us from the face of the earth at anytime.  Our own activities could destroy civilization and plunge us back to a few scattered tribes in a stone age.  How do you assess risk? To what extent should we be cautious?  I think the Hippocratic oath is the best answer to our activities, “…first do no harm”.