“If you order now, you get not just the 20-day program, but an additional 20-day program.
Double your self-reliance for only the cost of shipping and handling.”
Would that there were an infomercial for a cheap, rapid, and surefire self-reliance program. Alas, there really isn’t, but the Russians have recently run an experiment that hints at how such a program might work.
Give an isolated group people some tasks with a common purpose. Initially provide some help, as much help as the group might want. Then decrease the amount of help by decreasing the communication between an outside authority at a “Mission Control” and the isolated group. With time, the group will become more autonomous, seek less help from the authority, and make decisions to solve immediate problems. In short, as outside help decreases, the group becomes more independent, more self-reliant. This isn’t really anything new, however.
I think of an earthbound model of this earthbound experiment, one that played out historically in North America in the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. The American colonists were initially reliant on their European benefactors, but in time became not only more self-reliant, but actually adverse to advice from a distant authority. That psychological process, when tied to economic and political separation, led to the American Revolution.
Of course, centuries ago, any messages from Mission Control, say the English Parliament or the King, took weeks to months to travel across the wide expanse of the Atlantic. Isolation had its effect. The isolated group in the New World had to become self-reliant to solve their immediate problems. Autonomy seems, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, to have been inevitable. The immediacy of survival on a new continent left little room for any “woe is me” or “victimhood” personalities. So, with time, the colonists took charge of their own lives.
In our age of instantaneous communication, it’s difficult to think of the isolation that space travelers would experience by living in a Martian colony. The communication lag time would in itself be an obstacle to seeking help from people back on Earth. And that’s about what the experimenters found. In the first ten days of the experiment, the communication between the isolated crew and Mission Control was frequent and virtually instantaneous. As the hypothetical ship got farther from the home planet, the time delay in communication was increased on purpose. From the eleventh day on, the crew made fewer attempts to contact MC. After all, they had problems to solve that they knew directly, whereas MC officials knew about situations only indirectly, that is through what the crew could explain or describe. The only exception seems to have been during the mock “landing” on Mars, when the crew, during the process, sought help from MC. We can imagine that any crew that became a Martian colony would find itself responsible for its survival since any physical help would take months to arrive.
That Russian experiment was recently explained in “External Communication of Autonomous Crews Under Simulation of Interplanetary Missions” by Natalia Supolkina and others. * To me, the experiment provides a mechanism for stamping out the current milieu of “victimhood” in an American society that has seen an increase in numbers of people seeking “safe spaces” and blaming society “in general” for “systemic ills.” We have become dependent and co-dependent to the extreme. Such dependence is, of course, the antithesis of self-reliance. Such dependence favors blaming others or society in general for perceived ills suffered by individuals.
Personal responsibility is not easy to come by in an age of blame. But it is the ultimate survival mechanism. Maybe a bit of isolation and independence would serve as a way for modern wimps to become masters of their own universe. I believe that only as we increase self-reliance will we be able to decrease the perceptions of victimhood.
Note:
*Frontiers in Physiology. 9 Nov 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.751170. Summary at
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-off-world-colony-simulation-reveals-human.html
Full article at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.751170/full Accessed November 9, 2021.
Double your self-reliance for only the cost of shipping and handling.”
Would that there were an infomercial for a cheap, rapid, and surefire self-reliance program. Alas, there really isn’t, but the Russians have recently run an experiment that hints at how such a program might work.
Give an isolated group people some tasks with a common purpose. Initially provide some help, as much help as the group might want. Then decrease the amount of help by decreasing the communication between an outside authority at a “Mission Control” and the isolated group. With time, the group will become more autonomous, seek less help from the authority, and make decisions to solve immediate problems. In short, as outside help decreases, the group becomes more independent, more self-reliant. This isn’t really anything new, however.
I think of an earthbound model of this earthbound experiment, one that played out historically in North America in the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. The American colonists were initially reliant on their European benefactors, but in time became not only more self-reliant, but actually adverse to advice from a distant authority. That psychological process, when tied to economic and political separation, led to the American Revolution.
Of course, centuries ago, any messages from Mission Control, say the English Parliament or the King, took weeks to months to travel across the wide expanse of the Atlantic. Isolation had its effect. The isolated group in the New World had to become self-reliant to solve their immediate problems. Autonomy seems, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, to have been inevitable. The immediacy of survival on a new continent left little room for any “woe is me” or “victimhood” personalities. So, with time, the colonists took charge of their own lives.
In our age of instantaneous communication, it’s difficult to think of the isolation that space travelers would experience by living in a Martian colony. The communication lag time would in itself be an obstacle to seeking help from people back on Earth. And that’s about what the experimenters found. In the first ten days of the experiment, the communication between the isolated crew and Mission Control was frequent and virtually instantaneous. As the hypothetical ship got farther from the home planet, the time delay in communication was increased on purpose. From the eleventh day on, the crew made fewer attempts to contact MC. After all, they had problems to solve that they knew directly, whereas MC officials knew about situations only indirectly, that is through what the crew could explain or describe. The only exception seems to have been during the mock “landing” on Mars, when the crew, during the process, sought help from MC. We can imagine that any crew that became a Martian colony would find itself responsible for its survival since any physical help would take months to arrive.
That Russian experiment was recently explained in “External Communication of Autonomous Crews Under Simulation of Interplanetary Missions” by Natalia Supolkina and others. * To me, the experiment provides a mechanism for stamping out the current milieu of “victimhood” in an American society that has seen an increase in numbers of people seeking “safe spaces” and blaming society “in general” for “systemic ills.” We have become dependent and co-dependent to the extreme. Such dependence is, of course, the antithesis of self-reliance. Such dependence favors blaming others or society in general for perceived ills suffered by individuals.
Personal responsibility is not easy to come by in an age of blame. But it is the ultimate survival mechanism. Maybe a bit of isolation and independence would serve as a way for modern wimps to become masters of their own universe. I believe that only as we increase self-reliance will we be able to decrease the perceptions of victimhood.
Note:
*Frontiers in Physiology. 9 Nov 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.751170. Summary at
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-off-world-colony-simulation-reveals-human.html
Full article at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.751170/full Accessed November 9, 2021.
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