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Deviation From the Mean, Part Three

The focus of this blog is to examine, ideas, events, and personal development issues that are outside of our normal everyday experience. Or at least that should be outside of our daily experience given a logical rational world. Thus the title of the blog, Deviation From the Mean. I am most interested in events and ideas that are extraordinary deviations from normal and how they develop, not everyday happenings.

We can begin to appreciate as we grow older and occasionally wiser that given certain conditions, events and ideas that should be extraordinary, rare, and rejected by the general population can become the norm and not considered a deviation at all. I am especially interested in events and ideas that have somehow become common place and accepted by the public that in my opinion should be way off somewhere at the end of the bell curve, at least several deviations removed from normalcy.

How does this shift in the norm happen?

Why can intelligent humans be made to believe in almost anything if the idea is promoted by a person in authority who has the bully pulpit and access to news media? An example of this is President Bush’s use of the President’s good office to promote a war that was a bad idea from the get go and that has now indeed gone from bad to worse.

Any close inspection of the reasons to go to war with Iraq on an expedited basis ( “our security is at risk” and we face a “clear and present danger” ) will find them lacking in clarity if not downright absurd. I won’t go into details here, that has already been done all too often on the Internet. But the war in Iraq is an example of ideas and assumptions that were widely accepted and supported at the time that should have been immediately rejected.

So ideas that are truly at the end of the bell curve, somewhere in the long tail, became accepted as normal. The American public’s opinion made a huge shift after 9/11 and accepted far right neo con concepts and their vision as to how best to use American might to remake the world as being normal and mainstream.

Now I find this interesting. The majority of an entire large population of 300,000,000, many of them reasonably educated people, accepted fringe thinking enmass when they became frightened enough. In the interest of imagined safety a scared public meekly gave up a considerable amount of personal freedoms and, at least for awhile, thinking far outside of the normal for law abiding fair minded Americans.

The herd instinct is all too common in the financial world as well. Well educated investors at times become so obsessed with chasing after fast money that irrational exuberance becomes a considerable understatement. During such times they know no fear. Then at other times investors become so frightened that sound value based investments are discarded and ignored as if they had no value.

As this blog develops I will spend a lot of time writing about such phenomena. Fear seems to be an underlying cause for many such events. Any effort to develop as an enlightened rational human being should concentrate on controlling ones fears.

Another issue that we shall examine in this blog is the ability of mass media to shape public opinion. Ideas that should remain at the far end of the bell curve can, with enough clever campaigning by powerful mass media groups, be moved to somewhere near the center and considered as normal.

This is a dangerous concentration of power. The use of fear tactics are currently commonly used to manipulate public thought and opinion. We will exam fear as an emotion and hopefully learn how to control fear as we move forward. In the 21st century we must always be on the lookout for manipulative forces.

There is an exciting journey of exploration and of becoming more aware in front of us. I hope that you will join in and participate.

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