Last week I discussed how humans are wired to pay attention to scary things. In financial speak: risk. Darwinism has chastised those who ignore risk by rewarding them with an early grave, and by process of elimination rewarded those who stay out of the cross hairs.
Thing is, we no longer live in a world where saber-toothed tigers threaten our existence. In today’s world far greater risk lies in the truly enormous and disproportionate emotional attitude to (and assessment of) risk.
This has nothing to do with Darwin but rather more to do with an educational system designed and built for the industrial age. Education today is an advertising agency which leads us to believe we need the society on which it relies upon for its existence.
Beginning with the schooling system and followed by “higher education”, the middle and upper middle class in developed societies are by and large serfs. And they’re serfs because they don’t understand risk.
The overwhelming majority look at risk incorrectly. They look at it two dimensionally: “The more risk I take the more ‘volatility’ I have.”The fact is, risk is actually subjective to your own personal situation. Mismanaging your own personal situation increases risk disproportionately.
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