Event Thinking is Dangerous

Most people live their life without exploring the systems all around us. They remain in the 5 o’clock news version of life. They get all the highlights and the attention-grabbing headlines but barely understand what actually happened or why.

Take Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. News reports at the time reported rapes, murders, roving gangs, gunshots ringing out, etc. That image has remained. The mayor even perpetuated those. Column writers, pundits, journalists all piled on and took those reports and grew them larger and larger and larger.

That image remains for most. Because it was on the news, it must be completely true. It must be worse than what they are reporting because they witness see every crime.

In HumanKind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman, the author breaks apart this narrative and explains it was false. Once the shocking news reports ceased and researchers started to investigate, they found a different version of the events.

Bregman says, “What sounded like gunfire had actually been a popping relief valve on a gas tank. In the Superdome, six people had died: four of natural causes, one from an overdose and one from suicide. The police chief was forced to concede that he couldn’t point to a signle officially reported rape or murder. True, there had been looting, but mostly by groups that had teamed up to survive, in some cases even banding with police.”

What happened? How did we go from reports of anarchy to a reality of people coming together to help each other? And why is the lasting memory that of chaos and human evil?

The world is presented as a shockingly evil place. There are certainly terrible tragedies in history and they will continue. If you live life in the 5 o’clock news version of life, you will become engulfed in the shocking, in the evil, in the narratives.

There is an alternative. Instead of getting the surface-level understanding, dive deeper into the system. The systems thinking iceberg says that above the surface lies the event. But below the surface we find patterns, structures, and mental models. Most of the story and all the detail hides underwater.

Why would a journalist exaggerate the bad? Simple. They make a living, grow their career, earn bonuses and accolades, etc. by getting people to tune in to them. To get their attention. And it is much easier to push fear and danger with touch of anarchy than it is to show the mundane. Show the mundane and people tune out and go find your competitor who has reports of murder and rape. It appears they did their job and you missed the important parts.

The premise of Humankind is that “most people, deep down, are pretty decent.” Yet we all remember history lessons of corruption, destruction, and atrocities. Why? Because that event may have only occurred to 0.00000001% of the world’s population, it is what is remembered. What about the rest? They were going about their lives, unaffected by the tragedy. So, we ignore it all except the evil.

If you have 1,000,000 people who are deep down, pretty decent, but one that is pure evil, that one person impacts us much more if we don’t explore beyond the event. If we stick to the headlines, we never even know what those 1,000,000 people do. We don’t know they even existed. We don’t know what they did today. We don’t report when they shovel their elderly neighbor’s driveway or hold the door for a stranger. We don’t know what charities they donated to or how they worked hard at a nonprofit to benefit the community. Those all get ignored even when the patterns, structures, and mental models all show the full picture.

If you want a rosier view of the world, it turns out that you simply need to be open to reality. If you shut off the screaming, attention-grabbing headlines, what remains is a world that is much better than presented on tonight’s news broadcast. Maybe pause your judgment when those headlines try to convince you everything is terrible. Dive into the system and an entirely different reality will appear.