No one will receive additional goods, services, land, jobs, health, or freedom from a terrorist act. At best the act gets the attention of people whom the terrorist feels "have taken" these from his or her people. The important word is "taken." It is not being poor that motivates an individual to become a terrorist. It is the loss of well-being. For a dirt farmer, it is not the absence of a flush toilet or an electric light that promotes extreme action. It is the loss of land or water, and thus dignity. If this analysis is correct, to rid ourselves of terrorism we have to change the behaviors that cause "taking."

From the terrorist's point of view, institutions do the taking. However the causality does not end here. "Institutional taking" is driven by the taking behaviors of its constituents. Individuals, creating their families and lifting them to a better life, create the political and economic forces that drive institutional taking.

The connection between personal action and the taking that results in terrorism is easily seen in the case of our forefather settlers. Their benign acts (providing for their families) took enough from the existing tribes to provide today's Native Americans reason to be terrorists.

Today, each individual's "family related behaviors" take from someone on the globe. The taking created by these acts is as invisible to us as the taking performed by our forefathers. The remoteness and the time delays of results of those behaviors keep us from making the connections and allocating full meanings at the time the behavior is chosen. I call this cognitive failure "time blindness."

Time blindness is not another word for genetic selfishness or cultural ethnocentrism. Time blindness is the result of the way we have mentally developed from birth to analyze and understand the consequences of actions. It is this time blindness that has been creating terrorists from the beginning of civilization. And it is time blindness that will continue to make terrorists as long as it remains a limitation in our thinking.

People who suffer from time blindness cannot personally change the way they gather, process, and value information.

However, they can understand the structure of time blindness and infer its implications. They can decide that life with terrorism is too big a price to pay, and work toward preventing the time blind thinking limitation from becoming part of the next generation’s cognition.

In order to understand temporal blindness you must first understand what is meant by a thinking limitation. A thinking limitation can be described in the abstract, or though examples, such as, a 15-year old’s smoking decision, a shipmates well being decisions, or the personal decisions each of us makes that, taken collectively, nurture terrorism.

What is a thinking limitation? A house cat sitting in your living room makes the same size image on your retina as a tiger at the end of a football field.

A cognitive process converts one of the two images into a serious danger. If the process did not correctly use the "distance to the tiger" in calculating its size we could call ourselves "space blind."

Time blindness is a similar limitation in cognitive process. It miss uses "time to event" in assigning the event’s meaning. As a result, a loss expected to happen next year looks smaller than that same loss happening next week. An expectation of your son being killed next year brings you less anxiety than an expectation of your son being killed next week?

Let me use a young person’s decision to smoke to demonstrate the immense bias created by "time blindness." Each smoked cigarette robs an individual of about 10 minutes of life (1)(2). On average, smokers die nearly 12.5 years earlier than nonsmokers (3). As a result, each smoker loses 3-5 times the vacation in retirement (he dies before he can enjoy it) than he or she has enjoyed during his or her entire working life. Furthermore smoking causes major capital losses that diminish retirement conditions. Taking grand kids on trips in a motor home and up to his or her cottage on the lake are prevented, because the pack a day smoker bought 18,000 packs of cigarettes at $3 a pack. Without investment, that’s $54,000 not available to purchase the motor home. With investment that’s $341,000 not available to purchase a cottage. If these losses were not enough, the smoker will also suffer the pain of coughing and shortness of breath. He or she will lose additional retirement vacation in medical treatment.

Which brings us to the crux of a young smoker’s choice "to smoke," – he or she makes the selection early in life. At age 15, retirement at age 65 is 50 years in the future. The above future liabilities, from here, look pretty small. The mental scales filled with "peer pressure to smoke" (translated heavy) on one side and "abstract future liabilities" (translated light) on the other, tip toward smoking.

In this case time blindness successfully inhibits the creation of a future image of oneself suffering. Time blindness inhibits the connection between the smoking behavior and the suffering condition. Time blindness inhibits the transference between a parent suffering lung cancer and oneself suffering from lung cancer. Time blindness even discounts a transmission of the connection, for example the Surgeon General’s warning.

Now let me turn to the role of time blindness in shaping an individual’s "taking behaviors." Visualize a large ship. The ship never makes port. Getting "on" the ship requires a birth. Getting "off" requires a death. Each couple has around two children. Some people do not have any. The ship’s population is constant.

The ship has limited space and materials. It has energy sources and technology that allows it to create shelter, food, water, health care, and recreation. Each person on the top deck gets a large portion of living space and ship’s services. Each person on progressively lower decks gets a smaller portion.

From any deck people can see a better life. There is a constant scramble by each person on the ship to improve his or her conditions on a deck or to move up a deck. The channels of success are achieved either by increasing productivity and efficiency or by redistributing existing resources through social structure, cunning, or violence.

Shipmates welcome increasing productivity and efficiency. However, during redistribution, one person’s success pushes another to a smaller space or to a lower deck. Some people get pushed so low they have too little food and die from starvation. Some die from lack of health care. Some die from physical hardship of hard work. Some die in the conflicts that arise from violent acts of redistribution.

Each day just before sundown everyone gathers at the back of the ship for sea burial of the dead. All those who died from old age or natural accident are buried off the sunny side. All those, whose lives were cut short by starvation, inadequate health care, hardship, or violence, are buried off the shady side.

If this society wanted to assign responsibility for shady side burials, it might consider the following paragraphs, which describe the consequences of various behaviors.

Which behavior caused the death of a child if the parents had the flow of resources to feed the child when they conceived it, however, after living conditions changed aboard ship they did not? In this case, the child’s death can be attributed to an individual whose behavior consumed additional resources, which were not offset by an increase in productivity. That is, if the individual did not consume these additional resources (and the starving child did) death would have been prevented.

When a person kills or is killed in fights to regain lost resources, people who increased their consumption and first took these resources share responsibility. For if they did not take the resources in the first place there would have been no need to take them back.

If a ship has too few resources to support all its passengers, even no change in distribution produces shady side burials. Anyone who consumes anything helps account for the shady side burials already in place. That is, if any individual ceased to exist, the resources that supported him or her could be used to keep others from shady side burials. Thus, every individual shares some responsibility.

This responsibility might be calculated by taking the total number of shady side deaths viewed during a lifetime and dividing that number by the number of passengers. For example, if half the people were going over the shady side, then each person would be responsible for half a person shady side burial. Every pair of consumers, on average, would be responsible for one shady side death.

Let me propose a behavior that will stop all hardship and conflict due to resource limitations. While it will not sound humane, it will be enlightening.

Each day just before sundown everyone gathers at the back of the ship for sea burial of the dead. All those who died from old age or natural accident are buried off the sunny side. All those, whose lives were cut short by starvation, inadequate health care, hardship, or violence, are buried off the shady side.

If this society wanted to assign responsibility for shady side burials, it might consider the following paragraphs, which describe the consequences of various behaviors.

Which behavior caused the death of a child if the parents had the flow of resources to feed the child when they conceived it, however, after living conditions changed aboard ship they did not? In this case, the child’s death can be attributed to an individual whose behavior consumed additional resources, which were not offset by an increase in productivity. That is, if the individual did not consume these additional resources (and the starving child did) death would have been prevented.

When a person kills or is killed in fights to regain lost resources, people who increased their consumption and first took these resources share responsibility. For if they did not take the resources in the first place there would have been no need to take them back.

If a ship has too few resources to support all its passengers, even no change in distribution produces shady side burials. Anyone who consumes anything helps account for the shady side burials already in place. That is, if any individual ceased to exist, the resources that supported him or her could be used to keep others from shady side burials. Thus, every individual shares some responsibility.

This responsibility might be calculated by taking the total number of shady side deaths viewed during a lifetime and dividing that number by the number of passengers. For example, if half the people were going over the shady side, then each person would be responsible for half a person shady side burial. Every pair of consumers, on average, would be responsible for one shady side death.

Let me propose a behavior that will stop all hardship and conflict due to resource limitations. While it will not sound humane, it will be enlightening.

Assume that society commanded each pair of consumers to shoot someone. The released resources would prevent shady side burials that were caused by starvation, lack of medical attention, physical hardship, or social conflict induced by scarcity.

This new social design will produce the same number of shady side burials. The shooting acts would produce the same number as the consumptive acts of the non-shooting system. The only difference between the two social systems is the people in the shooting system can see the connection between behavior and result and people in the consumptive system can not.

Because the relationships among the ship's resources and population are simple, they allow one more hypothetical extensions.

If one individual lowered his or her consumption to alleviate starvation and someone else besides the starving party consumed these relinquished resources, then, responsibility for the starving person’s early death would then be transferred from one consumer to another. The mobility of responsibility suggests that each individual on the ship is not equally responsible for the downward push of people to a lower deck or off the shady side in a burial. Those with larger consumption must take a larger portion of responsibility.

If we allocate responsibility as a function of consumption, the pairs who consume 100 times those that are shooting just one person would have to shoot 100 people. Pairs that consume 100th as much, shoot only one person to fulfill the responsibilities of 100 pairs. If everyone followed this proportional proposal the shady side burial number would be the same.

What does it imply when the shooting behavior and the consumptive behavior have vastly different acceptance among the ship’s company but create the identical results? It may mean each individual’s thinking process can make the connection between the shooting behavior and death but not the connection between the consumptive behavior and death. The difference between the two "behavior/consequence combinations" is the time delay between action and outcome. It may mean, time blindness makes a death due to consumption mean very little in selecting the behaviors that cause it.

Now let me move on to the meaning of our temporal blindness to our social condition. The earth, being physically and socially more complex, has many additional ways to produce shady side deaths. On earth poor people have children they know they can not support. Power hungry leaders cause violence for their own self-aggrandizement. Benevolent parents have as many children as they can support. These behaviors, not present on the ship, on earth cause additional shady side deaths.

However, there is no reason to assign all shady side deaths to these "additional" bad behaviors. If you are not a person who had children you could not support, an evil leader, or the parent of three or more children, do you want to know how many people you kill through your consumptive behavior? Would you like to consider the number you would have to shoot if our global society chose the "proportion to consumption shooting protocol" as a means for eliminating the deaths due directly to scarcity and conflict that arises from scarcity?
My analysis uses two numbers, 75 (the average age at death in developed countries) and 62 (the average age at death in undeveloped counties.) The age difference is 13 years.

The relationships connecting consumption and longevity of these individuals are complex. However, if I assume that there exists a reduction in consumption of a person from a developed country (not large enough to affect a change in his or her longevity (4), that will release enough resources to help four people in undeveloped countries increase their longevity to 75 years. Then, each individual in a developed country, in choosing to maintain his or her consumptive pattern, takes 13 years from each of four people in an undeveloped country.

Four times 13 is 52 years or 70% of a 75-year life span. Thus, living a developed world life style on average means shortening another human being's life by 70%. Each of us, by living in the developed world, is doing the same harm to our fellow humans, as if we shot someone who was 23 years old to prevent him or her from consuming resources the rest of his potential life. It is like killing 0.7 people.

This analysis overestimates and underestimates the number. For example it increases the number because it does not adjust for the deaths of children of irresponsible parents. It does not adjust for the deaths due to irresponsible leaders or deaths due to people who have three or more kids. It increases the responsibility of a rich person and decreases the responsibility of a poor person by assigning all of the "shady side" deaths to the top 20% of the consumers even though they account for only 80% of the consumption. The calculations also overestimate an individual’s responsibility because they do not adjust for the deaths caused by our predecessors’ behaviors.

However, the largest error in estimation of an individual's responsibility caused by this computation, an underestimation that may more than compensate for its overestimation, may be that it does not adjust for the future deaths that result from today’s behavior. Thus the
.7 number is probably a conservative estimate of the responsibility of an average person living in the developed world.

If this number does not seem significant in the selection of a terrorist target, consider that this average does not take into account that among the top 20% of the world’s consumers, consumption can vary by more than a hundred fold. Some of us are responsible for killing one and two people every year just by living our normal life style. If a shooting protocol was implemented, that is how many we’d have to shoot. With our time blindness, most of us did not see our consumptive behavior as this deadly.

Even those that have a vision of the "taking" problem and are motivated to search for a solution will not immediately find the "population reduction" solution. Even if they did, lowering the birthrate could only be implemented by actions of six billion individuals whose temporal sight caused them all to choose a one child per family behavior.

With our time blindness, we, the six billion people of our earth do not have the abstract cognitive abilities to see our procreative acts as causes of, or potential cures for, the hardship realized by 80% of the earth’s future inhabitants. We do not have the temporal sight to give much value to those future injuries. When we balance the expected benefits that accrue to us as parents of a second child, against the "invisible" or "under valued injuries" that accrue to others, possibly our grandchildren, the scale tips in favor of having the second child every time.

With our time blindness we fail to see that our children will live in a world with even greater pressures pushing them to lower decks. We cannot see that these pressures will increase generation by generation. We fail to see that each generation of children will have to be launched to higher levels than were their parents. Each future generation will have to be brighter than their parents just to live on the same deck.

And shamefully, each generation will have to be more ruthless and more indifferent in dealings with their less fortunate earthmates.

Six billion people promote global problems because their abilities to see and value future conditions created by present behavior (to perform temporal inference) are no stronger than those of a 15-year-old potential smoker.

If the temporal inference thinking capacities of a future generation could be free of these limitations, then, it would be possible for that generation to see and feel in their gut the future their actions promote. It would be possible for that generation to choose behaviors that we can not choose. It would be possible for that generation to create a world we want but cannot produce.

To overcome time blindness, our challenge is to create a generation that has temporal sight. The challenge is to describe the temporal inference thinking processes that allow behavior to reflect its future outcomes. The challenge is to create the learning environments that develop these thinking processes.

This solution will require an enormous research and development effort. It will be attempted if the losses caused by temporal blindness look equally enormous; that is enormous to people who live today; that is enormous to people who are as time blind as you and me.

The terrorism we now face may be this motivation. Bin Laden may be a deranged diabolical power hungry maniac that should be in a mental institution. However, the people that trained in his camps can not all be that crazy. Many are men who see themselves as victims (and children of victims) no different from Native Americans. Their people had land and resources that were taken away. Some see the supports of their present life still being taken away. As long as our global society creates these men we will have terrorism.

Terrorism may motivate this enormous effort because it shatters the myth that the twenty-first century is a time of wealth, health, and longevity; a time when the smartest will live like kings supported by a peaceful population of 6 billion paid servants. Terrorism speaks for the people who see themselves losing their well-being and dignity. It speaks for the 40,000 children who die each day die from starvation or its related diseases. It speaks for the 700 million people who are starving. It speaks for those whose average age at death is 13 years shorter than it could be.

As these numbers grow, terrorism will grow until it wakes us up and we implement what we thought we could not do – create a community of individuals who allow the future to influence their behaviors.

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1) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Office on Smoking and Health, unpublished data, 1994 URL http:// www. cdc.gov/tobacco research_data /health_consequences /mortali.htm
2) Every year in the United States, premature deaths from smoking rob more than five million years from the potential life span of those who have died. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Smoking-attributable morality and years of potential life lost--United States, 1990. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1993; 42(33): 645-8. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/mortali.htm
3) Smokers in the US consume 500 billion cigarettes a year -- USDA 1993 http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/mortali.htm.
4) Christopher Jencks, Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies Winter Colloquium 2002
Stanford University 3/6/02, Primary analysis cited, Angus Deaton, Health, inequality, and economic development, Center for Health and Well-being., Princeton Figure 2, Primary data, National Longitudinal Mortality Study