As most of my readers and clients know (some say I point it out too much) – I went back to school to get my Masters in Psychology. Ultimately I wanted to figure out why people have such a difficult time making changes when the current way they live and see the world isn’t working out; isn’t working out at all. This doesn’t just happen with individuals, but with entire societies.
I’ve written endless articles and pulled 100s of quotes. Here are some thoughts to consider:
BOILING WATER IN A PERUVIAN VILLAGE
You might ask, with nothing else working, why haven’t we made any radical changes?
In a village in Peru, the people get their water from polluted irrigation ditches. As a result death from infection is extremely high Therefore, International Public Health Services stepped in to do a 2-year water boiling campaign using Doctors and other housewives that had already begun boiling their water to help educate the people.
The results of the campaign were that they were only able to convince 5% of the housewives to boil water. The basic reason was that in their culture, boiling water simply wasn’t done so they looked at the educators as quacks and felt that anyone who would actually boil water was foolish and had been tricked.
CONTROLLING SCURVY IN THE BRITISH NAVY
In 1497 Vasco de Gama’s crew of 160 men sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. 100 died on that trip from scurvy. In 1601 they determined that drinking lemon juice (citrus) would stop scurvy. The results were so clear that one would expect the British Navy to adopt citrus juice for scurvy prevention on its ships. However, it was not until 1747 (150 years later) that the Navy recommended lemons and oranges part of their diet and it was not until 1865 that this method was fully adopted.
The reason it took 268 years to finally adopt a practice that would so obviously save thousands of lives was purely out of personal and political gain. The doctors that discovered the cure were not prominent figures in the field of Naval medicine. For “top” doctors and the establishment to adopt their findings would have cost money, bruised egos, and disrupted the status quo of the controlling parties. Instead, they continued to focus on accepted norms at the expense of 1000s of lives of their sons and fathers.
“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things.
Whenever his enemies have the ability to attack the innovator they do so with passion while the others defend him sluggishly. This makes the innovator and his party alike vulnerable.”-Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
This doesn’t mean we should quit or pull back; it means if failure is not an option we must expect great resistance and never surrender.
Save the world
Dr. Ben
