Jared Diamond: What therapy can teach nations
Jared Diamond: What therapy can teach nations
JARED DIAMOND I'm Jared Diamond. I'm professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. I got my PHD in gallbladder physiology with the birth of my twin sons in 1987 made me realise that the future of my boys was not going to depend upon gallbladders but on history and geography. CAPTION Jared Diamond has published over six books and 600 articles He is 81, has learned 13 languages and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, Upheaval, looks at how nations cope with crisis. JARED DIAMOND I'm looking at national political crises from a new perspective and that's the perspective of the personal crises that all of us have to deal with as individuals. We all undergo crises from, for example, the break-up of relationships, of marriages, of other relationships, or from the deaths of loved ones, or from setbacks to our health, or our career, or our finances. Naturally I'm interested in personal crises because I've experienced my own share of them but also because my wife Marie, is a clinical psychologist with a specialty in crisis therapy. Crisis therapists have to figure out fast how to help their clients because of the risk that the client may try to take their own life. Each week, Marie would come home from her office and tell me about the discussions that she had with a fellow therapist about what makes it likely that this person will or will not deal successfully with their crisis. It began to dawn on me that similar factors, in some cases, virtually the same factor also apply to the outcomes of national crises even though national crises obviously pose unique problems that don’t arise with personal crises. For example, a first step in a personal crisis is to acknowledge that you're in a crisis. If you don't acknowledge you get nowhere. Another first step is to accept responsibility, that you can do something about the crisis to avoid falling into the trap of being a victim and pitying yourself and just blaming others because again, if so, you will get nowhere towards resolving the crisis. It's important at the outsets to do what's called 'building a fence' namely to recognise that it's not that everything in your life has gone wrong but there are some things within the fence that need changing and the rest of you outside your life, is OK. We all experience that it's important in a crisis to get help from others - something that's called ego-strength. Having confidence in yourself makes a difference. Honest self-appraisal is essential. So all of those are examples of the factors that make it more or less likely that a person will deal with a personal crisis but as Marie talked about these things I realised that similar things apply to national crises. Countries do or do not get help from other countries. Countries do or do not acknowledge their responsibility. They do or do not acknowledge that they are in a crisis. But there are differences - that countries have leaders and we as individuals, don’t have leaders. The United States' geography gives us a lot of freedom of choice. We have a strong national identity -we have a history of flexibility - that might make one optimistic. Reasons why one might be pessimistic about our future are that so many Americans don't recognise that we're spiralling into a crisis. There's a conspicuous lack of honest self-appraisal in the United States today and the United States is reluctant to learn from other models. We have this neighbour Canada, and Western European countries that have dealt successfully with the same problems that we are facing - problems of health and education and immigration but because of our belief in American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States is like no other country and can't learn from any other country, we refuse to look to these models of countries that have dealt successfully with our problems. To continue with a cheerful note - there are the problems that the world is facing not just the US and the UK. Among the big problems that the world faces today are the risk of a nuclear holocaust, the fact of climate change, the fact of unsustainable resource management that can go on for only so long, and inequality around the world. The fact that consumption rates in the US and the UK, and first world countries, are on the average 32 times consumption rates in developing countries like Kenya. All of those things might make one pessimistic about the future of the world. But again, thinking of Marie's outcome predictors there are grounds for optimism. The fact is that the world has dealt successfully in recent decades with really difficult problems. We've had world agreements that have eliminated smallpox. We've had the world Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer. There was the MARPOL Agreement to make oil tankers on the high seas safer. So the world really does have a track record of solving difficult problems. Frankly, I regard the world today as engaged in a horse race. A race between the horse of destruction and the horse of hope. But this is not the normal horse race where the two horses run at constant speed for the whole course - instead this is an exponentially accelerating horse race where the horse of destruction is racing faster and faster but where the horse of hope is also racing faster and faster and within a few decades we're going to see which horse wins the race. So, in short, we are in a world crisis, we are in national crises. There are many countries that have successfully overcome crises just as we people usually overcome our individual crises. We know what works. What is essential now is for the world to learn from its previous experience of crises and do the things that it takes to get out of a crisis. I hope that we do it.
