Let us ponder further on hard and easy problems for humanity.
Of course putting a man on the moon (and the subsequent space programme) was/is technologically challenging and was truly a great achievement for humankind.
We will be looking at Myth vs. Reality in a later Section, and I believe that JFK put a lot of effort into promoting the myth that going to the moon was hard.
I don’t believe that it was really that hard. It was a mega-engineering project. The USA did it by pouring almost unlimited amounts of money into the problem, buying the best mathematical and engineering brains and paying them very well, acquiring as many material and human resources that are needed, solving problems that inevitably arise by pouring more and more money into them until they are solved, and (vitally important) harnessing all media/publicity resources to convince the taxpayer that it is far more important to spend billions going to the moon than to invest resources in, say, helping young men stay out of trouble in deprived communities.
Even the convincing the taxpayer bit was easy to do because of the bias that the population in general has against such young men and communities anyway.
They also conveniently forgot – and buried the fact – that some of the leading rocket scientists were ex-Nazis who never faced justice for their part in using slave labour in their development of the V1-V2 rockets during World War Two.
When firing up enthusiasm among the population of the USA for what was known as the Space Race JFK tried to make citizens believe that they’d be very proud if the country succeeded in landing a man on the moon. Part of this national pride would come about from beating the much despised Soviet Union [1].
People would feel this pride even though the vast majority of the population would have no hand, act or part in it, or experience of it, other than reading about it or watching it on TV. Obviously, our need to identify with heroes that get one over a loathed enemy is greater than our need for togetherness – or even our safety and security.
Strange – when you think about it!
(This is actually in direct contrast to hunter gatherer society where it is the opposite. We will revisit this in our discussion on Anthropology in a later Section).
But even more revealing is the mega-myth of the War on Drugs, [2] which I will also mention later (No. 5 in the Table in this post) as it has particular relevance for communities whose residents live with the realities of a high level of drug misuse among their population.
It says a lot about what we find hard and easy that we choose to solve such a basic, down to earth, useful to humanity, protection-of-vulnerable-children-from-being-involved-in-drugs goal by expenditure of billions on a high level of incarceration coupled with deployment of military and para-military forces utilising high-powered sophisticated weaponry.
We don’t have to think too deeply to see who profits from such action – once again – follow the money…….
[1]. Just as a little addendum to the Space Race – despite the fact that the USA landed a man on the moon some people argued that the Soviets were actually as advanced, if not more advanced, focusing on things that were more useful to humanity, such as building the Space Station Mir which laid the foundation for the development of the current International Space Station.
[2]. You may read that the term War on Drugs has fallen into disuse in latter years as it (the term that is) was deemed to be not helpful to the overall goals of reducing drug misuse. But very little of substance has changed really in respect of policies or practices despite the name-change.