Dear Elon Musk:
I love your battle cry! Snap out of it, we are going to Mars
You can imagine the future.
Just curious who do you listen to about the challenges for humans in working and living together to get to Mars or anywhere?
Can you design a cooperative living space for humans to get to Mars? What does cooperation look like on a spacecraft?
How will people behave once they get to Mars?
In order to build a city on Mars, what might you learn from mice? Just another mammal, with a brain and similar instincts to humans. Perhaps you prefer mice over men since we can see how crowding impacts their behavior.
Who do you pick to teach us about what we will face in getting to Mars and living on Mars? How will the human family develop on Mars? What kind of life will the new child be born into?
PHOTO
I was born eight days before Pearl Harbor.
As an engineering problem-solving genius, you inspire people to see Mars as an important future for mankind. You know how to pick great engineers. But who will you pick as experts in managing yourself in a group, a family group? Perhaps you might consider those from the past who also could also imagine the future.
Jack B. Calhoun could imagine the future for humanity, based on how mice manage the increasing population in The Rise of the Beautiful Ones – Science on the Web, [1]
What a jump Calhoun made from an experiment showing how populations crash, to one that designed a more cooperative space, allowing mice to tolerate eight times the stress before the colony collapsed. Few people focus on the cooperative universe. I am sure you know how that comes to be.
At the base is the questions: How to find a way to manage the stress that is created when one encounters frustrating interactions. This is also a question for those who cannot make the spaceship to Mars but who are restrained here on earth.
In a crowded space, some will have more frustrating interactions than others creating a hierarchy formed by simple luck, the luck of having the space and time to recover from frustration.
For this, we turn to consider an expert on the family as an emotional system, Murray Bowen, MD. Bowen had the ability to describe variation in families as a system. His focus is how to manage to be more separate and yet connected to important people individual. The effort he called being a more differentiated individual, enables people to develop the inner space necessary to relate to others.
The family is where all our vulnerabilities are expressed, and the reason people often flee from home and family. what can we do about this anxious reaction?
Bowen was the first psychiatrist to define himself publicly in his own family. One of his hypotheses was that by staying in touch with one another and by not reacting, one would have the strength to get to know all the people in one’s family.
Bowen use to call your family “free group therapy.” Now the family is a new frontier to be discovered. The family is the emotional gym where you go to work out before getting on the rocket to Mars.
Some say the family is either the promised land where one works on self or the killer of different people and their lands.
The connected tribal affiliations that people are forming now are more tribal. At least according to David Brooks. In the future, people might have more options for being their true self. But even with new friends, those who cannot relax in the presence of an up-tight nuclear family should not go to Mars.
The hypothesis is that groups of non-related people can form cooperative tribes for a time, but tribal people can also cut off people who are not like them, just like families do.
These are patterns we inherit to deal with increasing anxiety. Cut and run is a short-term solution. There is no freedom when patterned reactions dominate your life.
Tribes are suspicious of strangers and are programmed to kill them before they welcome them. In the old days, you could live your entire life without ever seeing a stranger. And if you saw a stranger then there was fear, war, and death.
Ötzi, also called the Iceman, is the natural mummy of a man who lived sometime between 3350 and 3105 BC,.Ötzi is believed to have been murdered, due to the discovery of an arrowhead embedded in his left shoulder and various other wounds.[2]
Elon, here is my dad on the right with a B 29 pilot on Saipan. The fire-bombing of Japan was their job. Killing civilians is done with obedience to an instinct that guides you to never question the leader.
How does one learn who he or she is? How did you learn to express yourself without giving in to group pressure?
Did you take on your dad or your mom or grandparents, or make friends with someone your mom or dad respected, to peruse your own path?
Bowen suggests getting to know and deal with your family is one way to see and deal with the controlling emotion of your family system and to be more capable of being connected to others without the fear.
A leader in this new venture to Mars will have to know about the weakness of humans and the way to inspire them beyond reactivity.
A leader may be someone who can operate beyond the selfish desire to benefit from the mission or control others. Instead, this imaginary leader/person will be able to be separated emotionally but not cut off from others. This is the work Bowen called differentiation of self.
Before liftoff we might have to ask, do you, Elon Musk, know how to make a reasonably accurate science out of human behavior?
As humans, we have evolved from the primal ooze with the promise that we can use our big brains to understand how the surrounding system is influencing us.
Will our big brains help us see the big picture of the future that is possible for mankind, or will our overspecialized brains continue to want to win wars and dominate others, most especially the strangers in our families?
Can it be that systems knowledge will enable us to make better decisions and many more discoveries as to the unknown potential for the human who can manage to relate well to others?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doOXWSXbRCc
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi