The same as our "sight" depends on our brain, our decisions are also based on our inner vision. This is affected by the current pieces of information provided by our senses, but much more by our current model of the world inside our brain.
The basic example can be religion: religious people process all information through the patterns given by their faith, be it the law of Karma, acts of various gods, or the words of the New Testament. A more complicated example is to understand that our current "western vision", the "faith in democracy or science" is absolutely not more founded than any other religion (democracy does not provide "freedom, equality and brotherhood", science seems to do more harm than help, the World Bank seems to fail on their noble "Working for a World Free of Poverty", quantum physics is an expanding collection of facts that our calculations simply don't explain, etc).
If we take otherwise similar people, what they actually see when checking the same news depends on their vision of the world. Consequently, even if they have the same logical thinking and generic morale, they will make different decisions in exactly the same circumstances.
Lots of people know the famous quote from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" Perhaps much less know that this is already a modified version of an older statement from Andrew Fletcher (around 1700)
"... if a man were permitted to make all the ballads,
he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."
he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."
These "ballads", the repeated stories that are told to the next generation of people actually train their minds how to build their inner image of the world, what is good, what is wrong, how to handle various situations. This works exactly the same way as repeated trial and error experiments of infants to touch, move, interact with, crawl to objects appearing in their eyesight, connect images to sounds, smells, physical touch sensation: it forms our internal vision of the world, how we should handle external information, what to keep, what to throw away.
During the past few decades, our inner world has drastically changed. It started with the sixties, when the intellectual vision of the "western world" suddenly expanded: people not just read stories about different cultures, but could actually go there and interact with people having an alien inner world, and understand that it can be just as coherent and logical as their own. The previously simple control (ballads by the politicians to start war on the other end of the globe) did not work anymore, and this allowed creating an (almost) completely global mankind.
It again expanded now, when individuals are able to receive and send messages, images, films in this global communication network, with practically no delay, and no limitation on the size of the audience. During the latter rapid fundamentally technical progress, we were so afraid of how to get money for the new inventions, that we forgot to think about what it does to our brain, especially with the next generation that gets the new environment as its natural living space. This change has multiple aspects that also interact and enforce the others.
- We have the power to separate ourselves, but what is more important: our children from frightening situations. We have the resources to feel more empathy to them, so for example we don't send them alone to anywhere where they can die or get hurt because something must be done. This is absolutely different from the situation even a century ago, when sending your kids to the market or even the backyard could be the last moment you saw them. We don't usually feel real hunger, thirst, fear, injustice, loss, a quite little chance to get crippled by simple mistakes and live together with several people who did. Luckily, those times are gone, you say. But this also means neither you nor your child has to learn to deal with real fear and danger: our brain has to work in an alien environment, fundamentally different from what it was optimized for during its evolution.
- We are raised in an environment full of science and more information than our brain can hold. More and more time we spend on interaction with machines, from the light switches and television to tablets and mobile devices, instead of organic creatures: plants, ants, birds, pets and other human beings. Naturally, we use machines instead of sharing our time and resources with them. We control them in a very simplified and quick commands, of course we don't have empathy towards them. We get angry and cry for replacement if they don't work as we expect it, we don't waste our time to understand them. Our brain is heavily trained to rule and change the world instead of learning from it.
- Our ballads... This is a long story, but in a nutshell: the human civilization is a complex network of interacting communities, which are held together by shared and aligned motivations of their members. The "glue" is a common mythology, ideas, "memes", which affects the vision of the members, allows them to use similar terms, set common aims and support cooperation, sharing efforts, constructive and honest communication. The "old ballads": faith, nation, etc. 1: gone through the same evolution process: the stronger, more coherent ballads formed stronger communities that conquered weaker ones, 2: their development was very slow; 3: they were filtered by the listeners, who were confident, critic adults, checked their usability against their own, very hard life, they were extremely hard to impress.
We have thrown away these ballads, and make new ones very quickly, we don't test their inner values and even don't care; we use ballads not to understand and explain our problems, but to forget about them. Today we create ballads that are far from our own experiences, focusing on heroes instead of real human beings, external actions instead of human interactions - and those that deal with humans (soap operas, reality shows) give useless, dumb cliches.
In short: instead of passing values, helping to grow up and think, our modern ballads keep us in infant state, and infants want even simpler ballads, resulting a cultural landslide.
Today, our brain must quickly receive tons of information in which it is simply not good: it's just an organ to keep us alive and happy, trained and evolved in a very closed environment. It malfunctions, but at the same time it further changes its own environment. The race is getting faster and faster, we get more and more bits of information.
We are hungry for understanding, but it does not mean receiving more, but processing less information and share our results among our communities.
We seek for truth, but don't accept that a single human being, just like the whole mankind simply can't have it: we have a current understanding that always change as we improve. So, we today have biased media to feed us with "our truth", making us unable to communicate with people having different "truth" - faith, social, scientific vision, etc.
We don't live in our own life, but act as a kind of news channel; we receive and forward information instead of having experiences that change us; we act like sensors and relays instead of processors.
We live in our dreams (I mean the "lucky part of the world"), and have the power to make our dreams true. This makes dreaming very dangerous, and from a remote point of view our world looks pretty childish (luxury buildings, cars, car racing, people competing as animals, economy and politics built upon goofy lies) and sad (the price of the dream: suffer, poverty, collapsing nature cycles, ...) This is a clear representation of the fact that even the most complex external, technical organization of our civilization (because we have that for sure), does not substitute the coherent inner structure (intelligence) and controlled flexibility (wisdom) of our brains.
We try to simplify ourselves to the level of machines, compare the human intelligence with a machine by numbers, forgetting that we as individuals and communities are fundamentally different from them, and process information, build our inner, and shared external world in a very different way. We as individuals, must be more human to keep up with our more mechanic world.
The mechanical skeleton and the informatics neural system of the global mankind is ready and active - the conscious human spirit, built up from self conscious and responsible human beings as cells, is far behind at the moment.
We are sleeping in the control room of a giant machine,
and don't seem to have too much time to wake up.
