Six days, for the six types of literacy that I will need in the world after COVID - part two

Today I continue the story of the types of literacy that I think we will need in the world especially KOVID - 19. Today I will introduce you to another type of literacy that is necessary in our daily lives.

Impulse literacy

The modern world can also be seen as a huge machine for stimulating various, often paradoxical, emotional impulses. Everything is ‘affected’, emotionalized: our news, our policies, our economy, our everyday relationships. If it doesn't stimulate emotions, especially fun, it's boring; and boredom doesn’t make money in Huxley’s world of dating to death. Rational discourse and attitude towards life is the most tragic victim of modern society. We are permanently, from birth to death, trained to be impulsive, to satisfy whatever we feel at that moment, immediately, to always put ourselves first, our opinion, our desires, our feelings. The world is made so that everything is at our fingertips, so that the impulse does not suffer, because then it suffers profit.

Impulsivity is a deep evolutionary human characteristic, it is how the animal in us breathes. That is why civilization is hard work, because its essence is putting impulses under at least some control. Hence the laws, and decency, and consumer protection rules, and training for non-conflict communication, teamwork, and other similar demanding categories. Hence the idea of ​​education, with the semi-realized hope that it is in itself sufficient to ‘civilize’ someone; in other words, to increase his impulse control, above all by a strange way of shoving as much information as possible into someone's head.

Unfortunately, traditional academic education only partially fulfills this mission, primarily because impulse behavior is a consequence of evolved cognitive tendencies, the way our mind processes reality, and a dozen cognitive ‘shortcuts’ (or distortions, depending on the point of view) that make up most of our daily functioning and feeling whether we are ‘right’ or not. We now know, without any doubt, that we are deeply irrational creatures who use their educated minds most often to post-rationalize decisions made on the basis of emotions and impulses.

Unfortunately, not in education. School curricula, globally, do not reflect these breakthroughs in the cognitive sciences. We do not yet teach children (nor adults) how to recognize common evolved cognitive ‘shortcuts’. The only ones who study them diligently are those who use them to influence us, in various ways: governments, marketing agencies, brands, sales, politicians. experts and interests focused on stimulating our impulses for various, mostly commercial, results, while on the other hand there is a whole fragmented planetary population unaware even of the concept of cognitive shortcuts, let alone what to do about it to reduce the automaticity of our decisions, poor individual and collective consequences.

In this lies one of the great paradoxes of our modern life, already full of various stimulated and consciously designed inconsistencies. There is a huge discrepancy, an abyss, in fact, between the officially proclaimed political-educational and everyday commercial sphere. The former, superficially and mostly falsely, requires us to behave like rational, responsible citizens, while the latter trains us to behave like irrational and irresponsible consumers. Let's be impulsive, because without that, the economy of consumption stops. This is a deep and fundamental problem, and requires a deep and fundamental approach to solve it. Not just general education, but a long, concentrated training for which no one in power seems to have much interest at the moment.

Pessimism is justified here. And yet, in the long run, we have no other. Either we will become literate and skilled in managing our cognitive mechanisms, or we will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. Archetypal and impulsive illiteracy are the main reasons why - according to the famous statement of the Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath - 'civilizations are rapidly collapsing into barbarism, and not the other way around.' , are stunning. In just a year or so, highly civilized societies, we thought, began to sink into chaos, insecurity, incompetence, racism, and social disorder. The most advanced economies on the planet that send intelligent robots to Mars cannot produce simple surgical masks and even simpler plastic aprons for medical staff. Or to solve the supply of the population. Thin as an egg shell is the glaze - or, as Joseph Heath calls it, the ‘scaffolding’ - of a civilization that covers our evolved impulses.

Impulse control training (and the narrative tactics we are consciously served to trigger them) is one of the most important we will ever undertake. It is also another opportunity for cognitive scientists, marketing strategists and sales experts to contribute to society outside of their professions. They are in a unique position to separate the heavy draperies of the great theater we are surrounded by and to show us the machinery behind the scenes: incitements and narratives designed to trigger the impulses on which various hidden interests profit.