This picture was taken during my visit to our London
office in October 2010. Someone had obviously put this unusual pair together,
intending to create cognitive dissonance in the eyes, and hence mind, of the
beholder.
What is it about a simian
reading a book, that disturbs the placid lake of our
conventional thinking -provoking a smile if the book is about Peter Rabbit, and perhaps
a smirk when it's about complex systems?
So much change since we
climbed down a tree and picked up a book, consummated only through eons of
evolution. Yet the chilling tale ‘Planet of the Apes’ by Pierre Boulle speaks of a planet where
apes evolved from humans.
With this new perspective,
the picture now represents an intelligent human who ran up the tree (and
residing in a nicely decorated tree house) and sat out evolution over a book.While the same picture would
not evoke a sense of cognitive dissonance amongst the simian citizens of the
planet of apes, it certainly would if they had to see a human reading such a
book by the fireside. When in fact, he should be comfortably swinging
through the trees, as rightly imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Hence cognitive dissonance,
as intended by my colleague in London, is a matter of perspective. An outcome
of conditioned thinking striding several generations and peculiar to the human
race on planet earth, circa 2013.
Things could change very
soon. The pace of evolution is exponential and as Alvin Toffler quotes U. Thant
in ‘Future Shock’, “It is no longer resources
that limit decisions. It is the decision that makes the resources”.
Significant changes in evolution which were earlier measured eons apart, can
now be flipped at will, with a few snips to our own DNA.
We can decide whether
we want to continue the pace of climbing down the tree, or freefall into a
completely different organism by the time we hit the ground.Shake the tree and
an apple can indeed fall far from the tree, changing into a pear along its
gravitational trajectory and thumping into the earth as a pineapple – or something
more exotic.
The key question is, will we be able and willing to 'unshake' the tree if others experience cognitive dissonance looking at us then?
