Well today I again walked away from class with a head full
of thoughts and no one to really sit down face to face with and talk about it. I
am looking at pop culture and I see fully that pop culture in the American society
is not really pop culture that pop culture is really a trend. I am fighting for
words on how I want to explain myself. I was recently reading a book called “How
We Decide”. It’s a book that has thrown a lot of ideas out there but hasn’t really
given me any answers.
Just in that statement
I just made tells everything that is wrong in our culture today. We won’t make
any decisions in our culture without evidence. In social science we search for empirical
evidence. We search for answers to hard questions but in searching we tend to
get stuck. What formed our country? Was it not a handful of men seeking for something
better and even though if we looked at empirical evidence in today’s culture we
would have said they were mad? But they made a decision. If we look at change
in our world change was made through decisions. You make a decision follow through
with it and if it worked out for the best we did it if it didn’t we would just
not do that again and try something else.
As a child you can
tell him or her a thousand times not to touch or it will burn. That child will
never learn what burn is until it actually happens. In this book he uses the
example of football players and how they have to make snap decisions and he
rolls out a bunch of theoretical evidence and tries to explain how a football
player might make his decision. I see it as every quarterback that throws a
football is in reality just making a decision. It’s as simple as that and
nothing else. You really only hear about the really good decision or the really
bad ones. Not that every decision is just them saying here it goes nothing. There
is no factual evidence that it was a going to be a good or bad throw not until the
ball was already thrown.
He uses the decision
that Wagner Dodge made as an example and again points to theoretical evidence that
sways you this way or that way. As to how he came up with that snap decision to
start his own fire to save his life. With so many variables to a forest fire
and nature no man can make a snap judgment that he new was going to be right. He
just did it. We only contemplate his decision
making skills because he survived he himself said he was lifted off the ground
from the fire he could have died even though he did what he did. No one looks
at did he distract from the other jumpers from getting to the top by stopping
them for those ever few seconds they had. Remember some actually did make it to
the top. I don’t want to take from what he did. Because of his snap decision
hundreds maybe thousands of firefighter’s lives have and will be saved.
Our culture in itself
has stopped people from making just that “life saving decisions” because of the
chance that our decision may just fail. We criticize our president in the media
everyday about how he has made bad decisions in his life and that in turn makes
him second guess his decisions and tries to search for evidence good or bad to
help his decision. And then before you know it time is up. Time that is crucial
to a whole society is up before he can follow through with the idea. Same with
doctors, scientists, dentists, engineers etc...
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