The Problem With Permanency part 2
There are plenty of studies about spirituality, but not much available about its downsides. We know that war is a last resort, a breakdown of cooperative behavior. Even among those who believe they are fighting a just war, people have a tendency to get stuck in a worship state of mind.
To better understand, I found a small study drawing a connection between spirituality and stress. Examples show that, when people recounted a spiritual event, brain activity related to awareness of the self and others became less active. Activity in the same part of the brain was shown to increase when recounting emotionally neutral or stressful situations.
Their conclusion is that spiritual experiences could be serving as a buffer to mitigate stress and potential health challenges. Intense prayer, such as that of the Islamic religion, perpetuates the idea of ‘surrendering one’s self to God’, and is shown to reduce brain activity.1 Given all we know already about neuroscience and how to cope with stressful events, is more spirituality always better?
Within the study of epidemics, we see that they reach a tipping point “because of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers, [when] something happens to transform the epidemic agent itself.” Well-known to virologists, strains of flu for instance are shown to drastically change throughout the course of the spread of the virus. Much like social epidemics, the bystander effect influences the likelihood that someone will speak up and disrupt the contagion.
The ”Power of Context”, the awareness we have of a given situation, suggests that human beings are significantly more sensitive to our environment than it may seem. In the face of danger, one bystander has the power to say something and change the course of events. When there are many bystanders witnessing the event, however, the likelihood decreases, as more and more people assume that someone else will speak up, or that there is no problem.
“We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious – how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other.” This idea of “stickiness” relates to how memorable our messaging is, influencing the future of a given epidemic.2
Knowing the finite nature of resources, including people and ideas, how we stop the spread of the power epidemic matters. In other words, power may feel like a necessary component of a happy life, although in reality it may just be an expression of a lack of self-awareness. Growing out of this state of mind and increasing self-awareness requires the intense practice of familiar soft skills like patience, time management, and listening.
Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. First Edition. Boston: Little Brown, 2000.