Delusion and the American Way

I just returned from a weekend away, and by away, I mean not just away from my place of residence or work, but away from the internet, TV, e-mail.  While I had plenty that I was itching to blog about to the void, I had the opportunity to be in the now, in the present, to think and ponder as I am wont to do.  While my electronic connections were severed I spent time observing connections to the naturosphere in the place where I was.  Thousands of connections to the hydrosphere hitting me as I walked from inn to state park to store to community center.  I was on an island surrounded by water, being dumped on by water and walking across soft ground saturated by water.  Not a bad state of affairs, all in all.  This experience was made the more interesting by getting a small taste of a community that, as one mainlander put it, hasn't fundamentally changed in the past 50 years.

I saw a distinct sense of caring in that community for the island and its way of life - cultural, historic, social preservation was obviously the norm rather than the exception.  Perhaps, preservation is the wrong term here.  Preservation connotes a sense of stasis, while the history, culture and social structure of this island seemed to be quite alive and vibrant.  Here was a palpable sense of conservation in a most constructive manner.

Contrast that with a community in the high desert of Oregon that fought tooth and nail for the right to continue polluting their drinking water.   Here I find a palpable effort to conserve the status quo in the most destructive sense.

You may recall that headline that caught my eye a couple weeks ago where Deschutes County was setting up a system to pay homeowners to, in short, protect their drinking water supply.  I was urged by a reader from that area to educate myself on the situation following my previous post.  I found a huge, and I mean huge, amount of information on the county website at www.deschutes.org/cdd/gpp/.

Conventional wisdom would say that a community in a region labeled "desert" and which gets very small amounts of precipitation a year would have a high level of stewardship for water resources.  That water would be highly valued and protected in an area where it is, by visual comparison with the Willamette Valley, scarce.  After all, this is a fundamental tenet of economic theory, that scarce resources are more valuable.  Well, after giving myself a relatively brief familiarization with the issue in Central Oregon, apparently scarcity does not always increase value or husbanding of a resource.  This community came out in arms to fight, through abuse, lawsuits, referendum, you name it, the county's efforts to clean up the communal act of polluting drinking water.  A short description of the problem is that the community there uses septic systems to somewhat treat sewage before it is discharged into the ground.  Once it's in the ground, this somewhat treated sewage travels to groundwater and, in case you haven't figured out what happens next, yessiree,  the locals pull out that groundwater for their residential supply by thousands of individual wells.

Big pause.  These people are pooping in their own water supply and fighting to continue the practice for the foreseeable future.  Pogo was right, we've seen the enemy and they is us.

Now I could make all sorts of comments poking fun at this situation and the caliber of people that this community harbors but that would distract from a more interesting topic.

What rationale spurs a community to bite the hand reached out to help?  What rationale causes a dog to bit a hand reached out to help?

I say this with some trepidation that I will sound like a broken record:  Fear.

I can picture it now.  The ivory tower intellectual scientists march in with all the evidence showing what's happening in the real world and what's going to happen in the future.  The problem can be fixed but it will take money, more money than can be had so, gee, the people causing the problem will have to pitch in.  Fear of money flowing out of the household is greater than fear of the sewage flowing out of the household and into the drinking water well.  The prospect is too horrible to believe, the more vehement types start trying to talk about "reasonable doubt" just like the tobacco companies, and a delusion is born.  It's too horrible to be real so it can't be real.  Delusion, straight up and unadulterated.  Delusion and denial, coupled with a determination to prove it, make a potent force for even the most brilliant minds on the planet.  Think about the parallels with the climate change issue.

What is interesting is that, in other social contexts, being delusional and/or in total denial of the facts is often a call for some kind of psychological help, particularly when your delusion presents a threat to yourself or others.  Having community members saying that a community shouldn't do anything for the time being about poop in the water supply is pretty self-destructive and irrational.   The threat to self and others is obvious and yet these delusional people are treated with the same respect as the rational.