Who should you blame

 

Hans Rosling, Factfulness, 2018                                             [ ]

p.221

Who should you blame? 

p.221

   Similarly, resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately).  Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong (which sometimes they do, but often with good intentions).  In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything.  Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking.  And it's always always more complicated than that.  It's almost always about multiple interacting causes──a system.  If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face. 

p.222

  • Look for causes, not villians.  When something goes wrong don't look for an individual or a group to blame.  Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to.  Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation. 

  • Look for systems, not heroes.  When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing.  Give the system some credit. 

   (Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness : ten reasons we're wrong about the world ── and why things are better than you think, 155.9042  Rosling, 2018, ) 

     •   “The failure to see the world as humanly made is 

          called reification, which can also be defined 

          as the tendency to see the humanly made world 

          as having a will and force of its own, apart 

          from human beings.   ...   But if we talk about 

          technology as if it were a force in its own 

          right, the people who do the building and 

          choosing disappear.   ...   Reification keeps 

          us from seeing that the force attributed to 

          technology comes from PEOPLE choosing to do 

          things together in certain ways.  

          If we don't see this, we may forget to ask 

          important questions, such as, Who is choosing 

          to build what kinds of devices?  Why?  

          How will our society be changed?  

          Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose 

          because of these changes?  Should we avoid 

          these changes?  Who will be held accountable 

          if these changes hurt people?”; pp.21-23, 

          Michael Schwalbe, The sociologically examined life, 1998.   

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