Sunny guy

To chart our journey ahead, I think it’s useful to realize where we came from, physically and psychologically. When you want to visualize that, spirals are apparently the way to go.

On the physical level I’ve found this beautiful visualization of Evolution, credited to the Enclyclopedia Universalis (HT visual think map):

From wikipedia comes this three dimensional spiral:

Both try to make clear how things are speeding up at an incredible rate.

New for me was the fact that people have also used the spiral to visualize our mental evolution. Steve McIntosch does a nice job:

Where “integral consiousness” seems to have many somewhat incoherent believers, there is a rather practical approach behind this called spiral dynamics that I might have to look into in the near future. This summary in particular caught my eye:

Spiral Dynamics describes what Dr. Graves termed biopsychosocial systems along a continuum that forms an expanding spiral. The term, bio-psycho-social, reflects Graves’s insistence on the importance of a multidisciplinary, multidimensional approach to understanding human nature:

• “Bio” for the neurology and chemical energy of life and the organismic part of us
• “Psycho” for the variables of personality and life experiences, our temperaments and sense of self and relationships to other
• “Social” for the collective energy in group dynamics and culture as the interpersonal domain influences human behavior in collective settings ranging from small groups and families to corporations and entire societies
• “System” for the interdependence and action/reaction of these three upon one another in a coherent whole according to principles laid out in General Systems theory and other approaches to how things work and interact.

Sounds extremely interesting!

Let’s close with another visual, that gives a little bit more specifics on spriral dynamics:

In all cases you can click on the small images to go to a bigger one.

There’s terrorists that have it in for us and each night you can watch countless crime-series.
But how many people realy die a violent death?

As you can see, in Holland it’s unusual to die of a physical cause. Only 30 people out of 900 (3%) die that way. The main causes are falling, suicide and traffic accidents.

But to die because you where attacked by another person is really a rare feat. It happens to only 1 (one!) person out of every  100.000 each year. That’s a 0,001% chance!

So are you afraid to die? Stop worrying about violence! It’s bad for your blood pressure and that’s the biggest personally avoidable cause of death on the planet.
Want to take it a step further? Don’t smoke and lose the extra pounds!

So why are we obsessed with physical deaths?I think it’s a holdover from our hunter-gatherer past. In those day’s, being attacked was a very real possibility:

As you can see, the relative number of casualties of WW I and II pales in comparison to the violence endemic in current day hunter-gatherer tribes. And in the past it was probably even worse. Keeley calculates that in the past, 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year. So far for our idylic picture of the noble savage: our much lamented civilization is definitely doing something right!

Why not treat yourself to this talk by Steven Pinker on the decline of violence?