William P. Best

Reason, Emotion, and Human Error William P. Best

Successful businesses maximize income and minimize expenses to enhance their profitability. As a general rule, a dollar reduction in expenses will add as much to profits as a dollar increase in income. Societies likewise maximize the creation of value and minimize its destruction in order to enhance the bottom lines of their quality of life balance sheets. During the twentieth century, Western societies have improved the quality of life of their people remarkably well, largely because enterprises profited by delivering the requisite goods, services, and creative ideas to do so; but those societies haven't constrained destructive influences nearly as well, perhaps because businesses would not have found providing that constraint to be as profitable. In any case there would seem to be more potential for improving the quality of life by attenuating destructive influences, than by further increasing the already rapid rate of value creation. Consider just a partial inventory of the many things man has done well: the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason it engendered, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the final abolition of the abomination of slavery for the first time in history, and the stunning scientific discoveries and technological developments that have made our lives longer, healthier, and more productive and comfortable. To appreciate those monumental achievements even more fully, consider just some of the creative minds that contributed to them, giants such as Aristotle, Beethoven, Jesus, Michelangelo, Mozart, Newton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and they are just a few examples. The amount that their creativity has enriched the lives of so many is simply beyond measure. Then in contrast with those remarkable human accomplishments, consider some of the awful disasters that we have allowed to destroy so many lives: the Dark Ages, the Inquisition; secular wars; holy wars such as The Crusades, the latest of which seems to be manifest tod