Apathy and The Human Logical Error of Survivorship Bias

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”―Plato

I wanted to take a moment to set the stage here by getting you to think about how you would normally look at and approach certain situations in life that may seem challenging, or not worth your time and energy. 

After all, the day to day decisions that we’re faced with in this modern era offer a large selection of where we will ultimately decide to invest our energy, time, and resources. Given the times we live in we MUST use our time wisely when it comes to getting ahead in life due to the fact that the creation of wealth, understanding our environment, and being able to fight for the message of freedom all demands significantly more effort and time from each of us in order for us to succeed at all of it as individuals…and by extension with the survival and success of the country as a whole. 

There’s an old story I wanted to reference here regarding the significance of facing problems head on, since the trap that much of society falls into is the ignoring of problems. I thought this story was a great way to start and set the tone for today’s discussion. 

One day a long time ago a king decided to engage in a bit of an experiment to see how his people would react to a particular situation involving an obstacle. He did this by simply having a boulder placed in the middle of the road leading into and out of the kingdom. 

When he did this he went and hid himself to observe how his people would react to this situation. He wanted to watch to see if anyone would try and remove the huge rock from the middle of the road. 

The king thought that surely someone would come along and roll away the huge boulder from the street, but to his surprise, no one did. The king observed some of the town’s most prominent merchants simply walk right past the large stone. 

The king also observed several of his own workers walk right around the stone and even though the boulder was a nuisance no one still did anything about it. What the king came to realize was that despite the boulder being a large nuisance, instead of taking action to move it people chose to be content by finding a way around the large obstruction in their path. 

Everyone was looking for the king to take some action in order to move the boulder, but the king still waited to see if anyone would come along to take the initiative in order to move the large boulder and clear it from the path. 

People continued to avoid taking initiative with moving the boulder for many days until one day a peasant carrying a load of vegetables was passing by and stopped his cart in order to examine the boulder in the path. 

This peasant set his vegetables aside and proceeded to place his focus and energy on the large stone that was obstructing the path. The man placed his hands on the rock and proceeded to do his best to push and move the rock to clear it from the road. 

It was a slow start, but he kept straining and moving and shifting the position of the rock. Even though the man realized he was having to put forward a great amount of effort in order to move the rock without any help it didn’t slow him down or deter him from his mission. 

After a lot of effort and a little bit of time the man was finally able to get the boulder moved clear from the path in the road. 

However, when the man was just about to pick up his vegetables to leave he noticed a bag sitting in the path right where the boulder had been lying. When the man opened the bag he was shocked to find many gold coins inside the bag along with a note from the king that read…