What You Don't Know Can Kill You

Humans have a very hard time evaluating risk. We are not as rational as we may think and logic and reason are normally brought into our internal thought processes and external actions as a way to justify what were in truth emotional decisions. However, the degree to which we fail to logically account for risk, though it is linked to this, goes above and beyond.

There is actually sound biological reason to this. If we did evaluate risk "rationally", and thus made choices to avoid it, there would be a whole host of things we should rationally avoid. For nearly all of human history and in much of the world today the leading cause of death among women in the age range capable of baring children was and is child birth. This does not seem to have stopped the proliferation of humans to this day. In fact, lack of ability to rationalize and valuate risk has lead to much of the behavior that has allowed humans to become the current dominant species on this planet. It has also lead to our greatest atrocities.

Lack of food security risk valuation lead to the greatest mass killing in modern times.

What you don't know can indeed kill you.

However, it is also often what you do know, but do not accurately perceive that will do the same. In the modern world, near eradication of most short term risks has tremendously deteriorated our already low ability to valuate risk. This does not strictly mean that we do not under value how risky something is, but that we also have a tendency to over estimate it.

Just as we bring reason in to justify our emotional behavior, the same is done to assign disproportionate risk values to things that make us uncomfortable. This is why we see stories of kids being expelled from school for chewing their toast into the shape of a gun. This is also why we discuss euthanasia of unborn children because of genetic defects. Finally, this is why we have talk of laws against smoking in one's own house while at the same time no one seems to think it's a bad idea to get in a car and drive, an act that kills far more people every year than marginal exposure to second hand smoke ever has.

The modern world, as all worlds before it, is a complex system. It cannot be understood by simply looking at it's dissected parts, but rather requires an examination of the whole on its own terms. At the same time, all complex systems trend towards chaos, destruction, equilibrium and then back to chaos. This is as true for a sand hill piled by the wind to the point it collapses under its own weight and then is blown again as it is for a political system claiming power to the people only to be taken over by elites and then revolted against only to repeat the process again. For the time being, such absurd lack of ability to perceive reality is only an element of trending chaos. However, at the same time, it opens us to decisions and subsequent behaviors that are ultimately damaging to the human person. The world will go on regardless of what we do. However, it is our choice to what extent we contribute to that world being better and less chaotic than it was before.