The emperor's clothes

The emperor's clothes
November 27, 2001
By Peter Stair

Inexperienced in the ways of the world, can the young also be clear-eyed prophets? I think yes. And I think we young folks can help others by speaking out more often, more loudly and now.

Others agree that the fresh-minded are often wise. Many professors acknowledge that most of their best ideas come from students still unschooled by conventional thinking. Thomas Kuhn, in his history of science, took this even further, saying that every major shift in human knowledge has come when someone was willing to question the “paradigm” they lived in, whether that paradigm was the Ptolemaic universe or the divine right of kings. Buddhists say that we approach enlightenment by first approaching the world with a simpler mind, the mind of the Buddha. And, in the business world, firms hire consultants, and CEOs like Bill Gates and Andy Grove take sabbaticals in order to see things from a fresh perspective.

As youths it is especially easy for us to have this fresh perspective. Because we haven’t identified ourselves as a cog in the status quo, we are more free to criticize it without feeling we are criticizing our life’s work. We are less invested, less afraid and less indoctrinated. Remember, it was a child who said the king had no clothes.

It is no surprise that modern college students are often the leaders of social change. We have changed the world by starting up high-tech companies and by calling for civil rights for women and minorities.

What is surprising, though, is how easy we seem to think these changes can be. Especially in calls for social justice, we are easily discouraged by the eloquent and confident arguments of our commissars. To be sure, seeking knowledge from those with more experience is a smart strategy. But how often do we trample our intuition with uncertainty? How often do we defer to experts, intelligent people who are nonetheless worthy of suspicion by their very pre-eminence? At what point do we stop thinking for ourselves?

Nazism, slavery and feudalism were once eloquently explained by men of great prominent and respectability. Almost undoubtedly these men told young folks that they didn’t understand how the world worked, or that certain things were just human nature.

Which of our current customs will our grandchildren consider abhorrent?

I’m not sure, but I’m virtually certain that there are some. And I, a 21-year-old, am going to risk being wrong by saying what I feel.

We are deteriorating both the physical environment upon which we depend for survival and the human connections upon which we depend for meaning. Both are the result of our societal

infrastructure.

I think many of us realize this already. I think it is a big fat elephant in the room that few are talking about.

We may not say it, or even profess to believe it, because our understanding often lies below the level of our frontal lobes. But our bodies know: we are perpetually stressed, under-slept, over-fed and loaded with various drugs and synthetic poisons. We are aware of this strain somewhere in our consciousness.

Sometimes this awareness may manifest as a question. “Why am I always so busy that I don’t feel in control?” “Why am I 20 years old and saying that I don’t have time to date?” “Is this college, really ‘the best time of my life?’ ” And, for some, “Why do I feel guilty about my options for employment?”

We may question why we define prosperity as a time of increasing Gross Domestic Product, which says that clear-cutting a forest or hiring someone else to take care of our children is an unmitigated good.

Don’t people value more than priced “goods and services?”

Indices of social health that account for a broader ranger of variables, like crime, working and commuting hours, and environmental quality, indicate that our lives have been growing steadily more difficult since around 1970. I think we sense this.

In our times of “prosperity,” affording a nice place to live is becoming more and more difficult, so is finding a quiet place for reflection, or even a place not made of concrete. Traffic is epidemic. Our education system is failing. And our bridges and roads are falling apart.

As companies grow, workers and employers feel less loyalty towards one another. As we build more gated communities and jails, and hire more police officers, we indicate our fear of each other. Increasingly, we are going to bowling alleys alone.

Storing our elders in nursing homes doesn’t quite feel right, nor does always considering death a problem, rather than an essential part of life.

Biologists tell us that we are experiencing the greatest extinction event in tens of millions of years, that it’s possible, probable, that 90 percent of extant species will go extinct in a hundred years. Quietly, more and more authorities are saying the same thing: that we must act immediately and intensively to reduce more serious environmental degradation.

Global climate instability is already real, as the number of natural disasters serious enough to require outside help has increased from 20 in the 1950s to 86 in the 1990s. Meanwhile poor people deforest housands of acres of forest land in search of fuel, while Americans drive SUVs.

Americans are growing more and more obese. The number of us afflicted by Diabetes II has skyrocketed in only the last 15 years and grade school children grow more and more pudgy each year. Meanwhile McDonalds still spend billions of dollars pushing its products, and millions of non-Americans starve each year.

If the poor don’t starve, they contract diseases that might easily spread back. Or they grow angry with the disparities they see and so increase the building international rage against wealthy Americans.

These are serious problems, requiring serious introspection and something more than simple reforms. Yet only six companies — companies so large they are intimately invested in the current arrangement — control most of our news, music, books and movies. Together with their advertisers, these companies give us information that rarely mentions the disturbing trends that define our era.

We, for our part, are willing to believe everything is okay. We buy the distractions, turn off the (rare) upsetting programs and proceed as if our age were nothing but gilded. Some of us note problems, but have no satisfying solutions. Others are fanatical: depending on a blanket solution — like “more free markets” or “education” — for everything.

Who among us will protest what we feel today? There are many opportunities, in the dining hall, in class, with room-mates, to parents, on e-mail and via a handful of student groups.

Who among us, in making preparations for a career, are preparing to think outside of the narrow box of convention?

Who will be the accountants who insist that ignoring the environment is doctoring the books? Who will be the mathematicians who will say that a society cannot be dependent on perpetual economic growth (perpetually compounding interest) because there are no natural analogies ?

Who will be the psychologists who speak out against the endless blitz of sophisticated propaganda that is our information system, the advertising that comprises the largest social psychology experiment ever conducted?

Who will be the doctors who say that we’re becoming fatter not only because we’re eating more, but because we’re lonely, stressed or dissatisfied? Who will be the spiritual leaders who encourage us to find a more comfortable relationship with our natural environment?

Who will be the politicians willing to lose an election in order to make a public statement of principle? And who is willing to be a true leader by modeling their beliefs with more than words but with a integrated lifestyle?

Most importantly, whatever they stand for, who will be willing to say unpopular things?

I think many of these leaders might come from Stanford.

Peter Stair is a junior studying human ecology. For the record, he does not think the sky is falling. He is interested in what you have to say, so e-mail him at pstair@stanford.edu.