Economic and Personal Failure is not an option; it is a biological necessity.

Our brains are continually overwhelmed with new information and available memories. They have the endless task of discerning critical data buried in a vastly greater quantity of useful data, less useful data, useless data and noise. They must correctly select and process a miniscule percentage of the sensory data that floods in and mingle it with only a tiny fraction of available memories. They must somehow ignore all else in order to function at all.

This triaging task is equivalent to that facing a hospital staff (the conscious mind) with the capacity to help 10 patients a day, but swamped with 10,000. The triaging itself takes resources, and must be done in a way that leaves the most important resources for the most important issues. To do this, our brains apply evolutionary filters and learned filters: biological filters, unconscious filters, subconscious filters and a handful of conscious filters. The conscious filters are the last steps in the triaging process and all the filters are ultimately biological infrastructures as real as the physical infrastructures of civilization.

Our mental infrastructures operate so as to get acceptable results most of the time, to use as little energy as possible and to reserve the conscious mind for the most important or most novel situations. Thus, the conscious mind is designed to operate on a “management by exception” basis. It only deals with issues that make it through the triaging process.

Things that involve the conscious mind include:

Learning something new requires conscious effort in the pre-frontal area (top management) to construct new memories, new filters and new cues.

Changing personal beliefs or skills requires conscious effort to learn something new, to deconstruct something old and to integrate the new with the remaining old.

Changing cultural, economic, or political beliefs commonly held by friends, family, church or community usually risks having to change our relationships to these people in addition to what is required to change personal beliefs.  This change is the most risky and takes the most energy.

Learning something new or changing beliefs and skills takes so much energy that, biologically, we are biased to avoid the effort until existing belief systems utterly fail us. Even then we sometimes maintain those beliefs. We triage out information that conflicts with our established patterns so as to avoid wasting energy.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described, in her book On Death and Dying, a universal process followed by people who were told by their doctors that they were dying of cancer. The process has often been referred to as a grieving process, but I’m convinced that what she described is actually the last five steps of every human brain’s triaging process.

1. Denial and ridicule:  The doctor is a quack, there is no Global Warming, Evolution is only a theory. Result: I don’t need to change my beliefs, I can stay in control of my old reality.

2. Anger and Blame: Cigarette companies are responsible for my cancer, they must fix it. Result: They must change and I don’t have to change

3. Bargaining: Let me make simple adjustments, find a miracle or go through some religious rituals and then let me go back to life as usual. Result: I don’t need to change anything basic.

4. Depression:  There are two distinct sub phases here: first depression at letting go of the old beliefs, coping skills and relationships and next depression at constructing and using the new ones. Result: I realize I need to change, but I don’t believe I have the energy or skills to do it.

5. Acceptance: I will accept my new reality and adapt so as to make the most of it, step by step, one day at a time.

People go through this five step process in different ways. A few go from Denial to Acceptance in days or weeks. They spend their last days adapted to the new reality and making the best of it. Most people get stuck in one of the first four steps and die, still in denial, anger and blame, bargaining or depression. We’re now watching members of Congress who are stuck in anger and blame about the economic crisis or seeking simplistic ways (bargaining) to avoid facing their own culpabilities and their own needs to make basic changes in how they operate.

But these reactions are universal. Simply look at people’s reactions to catastrophes such as the devastation of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina. Within days some evacuees had accepted that their old lives were gone for good, and that they had to find new jobs and new homes. Others stayed behind and insisted on rebuilding New Orleans the way it was so that they could get back to their old lives. Others, many of those who could have prepared for the emergency but didn’t, sat and waited for help and blamed government for not preventing the disaster or for not acting faster. Evacuees and other supporters of government officials were stuck in denial about the obvious failures of their leaders; even though those leaders made repeated failures of enormous magnitude and import.

Actually, we need look no further than to our own reactions to failures that challenge our fundamental beliefs. Have we fully accepted our own responsibilities and need to make changes or have we gotten stuck in one of those triaging steps? For example: Are we energy wasters complaining about the price of gasoline and blaming government or oil companies? Are we smokers suing tobacco companies and yet still smoking? Are we drinking alcoholics or injecting drug addicts who blame others for our predicament while we wallow in our self-indulgences?

In 2004 I wrote an essay “Why I won’t vote for George Bush.” It was originally intended for a few friends (mostly conservative Republicans) to explain to them why I would not vote for a Republican president for the first time in my life. Later I posted it on my web page. That essay received two kinds of responses, both from friends and from strangers: One response, from Bush supporters, was a total denial of any need to consider my thesis. They of course had “good” reasons such as his moral convictions, his dedication to fighting terrorism, or the reader’s assumptions about my motives. One long time friend suggested that I’d been corrupted by Liberals in Boston where I’d recently spent a year of study. Friends thought it was well written, but clearly said that it didn’t alter their own convictions. The other response, from Bush antagonists, was an enthusiastic acceptance of my thesis. However, not one reaction from either group suggested that my articulate reasoning had altered any of their strongly held convictions. My ego was salvaged when I later read that, according to Plato’s Dialogues, that Socrates never managed to change anyone’s belief systems either, even though he rationally demolished the specific beliefs of dozens of people.