Someone Else's Perspective: The Entropy is Strong Here

There is a persistent difference here in Africa compared to America… And its pretty much the same difference between anywhere in the “developing world” (India, Mexico, Kenya etc) and anywhere in the “developed world” (Germany, Canada, Australia, Britain etc). The difference is clearly apparent in everything you come into contact with or see and for want of a better description it’s the “quality of maintenance”…

Everything here is terribly maintained, and it means that everything that should “work” only does so in a semi-complete way. And this reflects into every aspect of people’s lives and that effects how people behave and the whole situation compounds and persists… and so the world of people seems divided between the “haves” in the developed world and the “have nots” in the undeveloped (pc developing) world.

There are so many examples its not funny!

Pretty much every door latch and every window seal and absolutely every electrical connection or plug or switch, and every plumbing fixture (be it tap or shower or drain pipe etc) is pathetically maintained! It’s a wonder anything technological at all works here. But its generally not the original installation that is too much of a problem… You can see that in newer places things are working better and that when it was all new, things for the most part were reasonably installed and worked as intended… It just seems that things get horribly abused and are generally not maintained, and if they are maintained it is in the most shoddy and un-professional manner possible! And painting (walls, cars, anything! ... Its pretty much a universal indicator... In the developing world paint is universally applied in an extremely sloppy manner with "collateral damage to surrounding objects seemingly as an unavoidable necessity, while in the developed world it is pretty much universally applied in a controlled and accurate manner...

Why is it so???

And its easy to see how European people initially felt this was due to the mental limitations of the people who lived in these remote places… “Look they cant even manage to use a toilet… How can they fix an automobile… They are clearly stupid and closer to animals than us… not even fully human… We are obviously better than they are!”. But of course after a few centuries of slow but steady progress on our social consciences/moral values/clinical mental faculty understanding, we know that it is absolutely not due to any genetic mental limitations. And there are millions of individual examples of people from any and every “race” and region who are highly sophisticated and fully capable of living to “developed world standards”, and of course conversely there are as many individual examples of people from the developed world who seem only to be capable of living to “developing world standards”… And there are even examples that come to my mind of whole countries that achieved “developed world standards” in decades past that now seem to have largely reverted to “developing world” levels (The strongest example in my mind is Argentina!)

…And so the burning question is “Why the difference?”, and “Why is it so hard to change things in the developing world for the better?”

And while Ive been traveling here in Africa Ive been trying to pay close attention to locate the source of the problem… And I finally have myself a more or less completed answer …

And Im sure its essentially the same answer that many other people have come to but as usual I like to figure these things out from scratch for myself… So, here goes…

Its as simple as they say… Its “Education”… But its also not at all that simple… and its not what you think it means J

When I say education, I don’t mean reading and writing and arithmetic… And I don’t mean spending 7-20+ years of your life five days a week in a formal education system, and I don’t mean learning about why personal hygiene is so important or why contraception is a good idea and why throwing your litter in the street is bad or in fact “why” anything!

Its not that teaching “why” is bad… On the contrary, teaching the whys is incredibly important. And in fact if you put someone through those 7+ years of schooling 5 days a week you have a better than average chance of creating a person that can/does live to developed world standards than someone who does not… But I would argue that it wasn’t the teaching of the “whys” or even the “hows” that made the difference! What I think makes the difference is the other things that were learned while the hows and whys were being taught… and it comes down to “discipline”… mental and behavioral discipline is in my opinion the only real difference!

You see, I think the really important thing that we learn through our schooling is in fact discipline… We learn to pay attention and we learn to concentrate on a certain thing for longer and longer periods of time as we progress through school. And we learn to have more and more organised thinking and how to analytically solve problems… These things are absolutely critical as factors affecting our ability to work with complicated technologies and especially how to repair and maintain them… It takes an organised mind to see that when the door handle starts to get loose that its going to get worse and eventually break and then the door wont work right, so I should probably do something about that distant future problem now to avoid having a big problem later… And the next step that is equally important is recognizing that Im the one causing the door handle to get loose in the first place and that maybe if I don't want to have to keep fixing it I should start treating it differently, and maybe I should not slam it quite so hard! etc etc... Its amazing how many people manage to not make that extra step of thinking no matter how obvious and how significant the problem they are creating for themselves... We humans are inherently extremely lazy creatures... If we can possibly avoid doing a thing then the vast majority of us will!

And that’s where the other half of the equation comes in… Behavioral discipline!… In school, along with learning to think in an organised way we also learn to behave in an organised way and to keep our world more organised… We learn to stand in lines and sit in rows and our writing has to be neat and in straight lines. And we have to keep our books and desks tidy and to clean up our own mess and not throw rubbish on the classroom floor, and we have to be punctual to class and we have to plan our toilet breaks to coincide with recess times etc etc. And it may not seem like that stuff is too big a deal but in reality its an enormously important factor in being able to live effectively in an organised world… and that’s what our city life is… extremely organised, and that’s what our technologies require too. The point is really that in reality we all spend very little time actually thinking about the things we are doing... Almost everything we do is done on a sort of "auto-pilot" where once we have decided what it is we want to do, our behaviours used to achieve those ends are simply "replayed" from our set of pre-learned behaviours... so if in the past we have always thrown the plastic bag wrapping our food onto the ground after we finish with it then that's what we will continue to do in the future... We just don't think about most of what we are doing.

And when we learn these subtle things as children and they are reinforced again and again and again as we go to school 5 days a week for 7- 20+ years in a row… Well, the habits of a lifetime are set during our school years. And having traveled a lot and seen how people with basically the same capabilities can end up operating in so vastly different ways, to the point where in one place a simple door with a handle and two hinges cant even be kept in working order for just a month after it is installed in perfect working order, to another place where you are hard pressed to find any tool out of its place or any bolt or screw missing from an entire automobile that is 40 years old… well, It makes you wonder. And Ive wondered long and hard and that’s what I think the difference is… habitually organised thinking and behavior…
... And in fact its really the only thing that differentiates us from other animals (whom we know can a do have emotions and problem solving abilities etc)... Its our organization abilities and it pretty much defines "civilization".

A truly amazing human achievement… but one that is harder to achieve than you might think J

p.s. And just to emphasize how significant I think this point is and how much I value getting to this conclusion and this deeper understanding of "us"... Id say that just this new "deeper knowledge" alone is for me well worth the entire cost of this trip... tens of thousands of dollars!

Addendum:

Just to clarify; I believe “organizednes” is exceedingly important but is only one of several exceedingly important aspects that when combined make for a “high function” person in the modern technological world… Others would be Observation skills, planning and temporal skills (memory and prediction), analytical skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills… All are critical and when they operate together have a very high degree of synergy/amplification.

But the Habitual Organization is I think the key missing ingredient in the “developing world”.

All these aspects have a “native” presence to a greater or lesser degree in every person… The trick is to foster them in the growing child to get “the most” out of the native abilities.

Second Addendum:
After some time has passed I feel I should also add a couple more clarifications:
First, This post is not in any way trying to suggest that "Africa is a failure because they are un-organized... and Africans are incapable of being organized"... Quite the contrary. I believe Africans are just as capable as being organized or otherwise as any other group of people (divided by whatever value you care to choose). Yes on the whole Africa does appear less organized to the mind of someone raised in the a developed nation, but in other ways Id say Africa is far more organized... for example, I suspect that the social organization in societies (friends and family links, interactions, hierarchy etc) are probably significantly more organized than in many other places... simply because that's a higher social and survival priority there. My main point of this post is that being orderly and organized (as our developed world lives are) is basically a set of habits that takes a couple of decades and total immersion to develop in any person... Its not "innate" and its not necessarily "better than" any other learned set of behaviors, but it is "necessary" if you want a highly technological society.

And following on, I believe that schooling and behavioral discipline (or lack thereof) are not the main obstacles to the majority of Africa "rising out of poverty"... Though it is a smaller partial factor of course, as it is wherever there is endemic poverty, though I think its really just as much an effect as a cause... I believe that the main culprit in the apparently incurable state of most of Africa is "Corruption"... The lack of fairness... Africans, in all the different peoples and nations on this vastly diverse continent, are just as creative and intelligent and complex as peoples and societies from any other part of the world. And as such, they can create new businesses and are motivated to work and create wealth if given a fair chance...
But that's the problem... There is a lack of fairness here in Africa that is far worse than in the developed nations. Its Corruption and Nepotism and Tribalism etc.
The essential problem is that the people with the power use their power to keep everyone else from having power (which translates in general to money). The elites simply gather all the created value to themselves or destroy the creators of it if they cant.

Sadly, that's the big issue here and its basic human nature... And that's a problem that I haven't figured out yet... Our general prioritizing of self over society... Il keep looking I guess :)