New thinking, anyone?

Albert Einstein is an interesting character to me not because of his theories, but because of
his remarkable capacity to make good observations about nature and about the human condition.

Born a Jew, he had to leave Germany in fear for his life. One day he realized, while in Belgium, that his name appeared in two Nazi lists. One of trouble-making Jews "not yet hanged", and another, an assassination list, that placed a $5,000 bounty on his head. This was 1933, a lot of money at the time. His very existence was a discordant note in the Nazi thought symphony of Aryan supremacy.

Einstein was not a particularly good person in his private life, a fact that is largely ignored. He renounced of his German citizenship to escape the draft in his youth. As a middle aged professor, he used to take graduate students to his bedroom upstairs, while his very lowly looking, aging second wife cooked dinner downstairs, heartbroken. He did not even try to pretend the visits had anything to do with work. His wife lived a long, miserable life married to professor Einstein. Americans and westerners in general fell in love with his witty sense of humor and eccentric demeanor.  We westerners like to keep our stories simple and uplifting. We prefer it this way.

I do admire Einstein's ability to observe nature clearly and to think deeply about what it means.  Einstein had the opportunity to watch the end of World World I, the Great Depression,  the rise and fall of the Nazi cult, the dominance of the Soviet bloc, the rise of America.  All this happened under the backdrop of the incredible acceleration of technology in the forties and fifties brought about by the theories developed at the beginning of the century, some of then by Einstein himself.

What a great time to observe human behaviour at the limit of good and evil. What would a scientist think about all these events? Einstein concluded "we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that we used when we created them". This is a very insightful observation. Now move forward to our present time and place. Think about the fundamental problems we face now, and this is not limited to the US:

Low economic growth, in other words, high unemployment.
Unsustainable government debt growth, multiple times GDP growth.
Increasing income inequality and social decay (drug abuse, violence)
Diminishing personal freedom (religious, sexual orientation)
Increasing risk of a nuclear event in the middle east.
Increasing evidence of potentially dangerous climate change.

I have watched the candidates in this 2012 US election debate these topics. I have heard the same boiler plate ideas to solve these problems. Some of these issues were not mentioned at all. No mention of global warming by either of the candidates. It makes you wonder.  Otherwise, most of the prescriptions would have been right at home in the Kennedy-Nixon debates in the sixties.

We got to the present situation by pursuing a line of thinking that has become stale and ineffective. Politics is, if you would, is a contest of interests that is thinly veiled as a contest of ideals.  Candidates behave, more and more, as employees of the interest groups that sustain them. So I wonder how their policies, that got us here, are going to help us to go to a better place. We have protected the interests of the few in the past, and not only the rich. We are in trouble, now what?

Like the eighty year old man that thinks that checkered pants are still in fashion, our candidates repeat the same sound bites that we have lived under for the last century and expect something different to come about.  Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results".

What would be the new framework that truly addresses our problems? When Einstein developed relativity, most of Newton's calculations on gravity stayed valid and relevant. I would hope that a new way of thinking, even if it is a radical new approach in terms of perspective, just like relativity was vs. Newton, would validate Newton's theory as accurate under normal circumstances. Only in special cases, like near a large source of gravity, does relativity deviates from Newtonian gravity. New thinking is revolutionary, but it does not entail to throw away the past. Let's not be afraid of the new for that reason. Let's enhance our thinking, understand the limitations of our current views and develop a broader perspective that fits the new times.

We are now in the new normal.  Globalization has brought about new challenges and new opportunities. This is a new page in history. It all looks much the same to the average citizen, but we are fundamentally in a different place. We need new tools to wrestle with the new problems.

New thinking, anyone?

 Bueller?........