People who feel at ease in the larger society tend to believe the world’s troubles are caused by all the “bad people” out there. They’ve never really met these bad people, except on television and in the movies, but in any case, it suffices to blame all these other people out there for social ills.
To some extent, it takes someone viewing from outside to see that pretty much all problems are the emergent result of millions of everyday people pursuing their self-interest.
Except we don’t directly tell ourselves: “I’m pursuing my interests today.” when we wake up in the morning. That’s what our emotions help us out with.
They steer us towards survival and reproduction without us having to think about it.
However, few people actually recognize these survival impulses for what they are.
Thus a group will quickly eject someone who doesn’t like the same bands or wear the same clothing. Something will just feel ‘off’ to them and they’ll invent some kind of excuse based on how they ‘feel’ to justify carrying out the will of their collective.
Problem: Someone who doesn’t fit in is a liability to the group:
-Opportunity cost. A human can handle 150 or so social relationships at once. It is not rational to spare a slot when better applicants are available.
-The person in the group who feels the least unity is the one most likely to sell everyone out.
-Or leave for a group that’s a better fit. All the time and energy invested in them has gone to waste.
Solution: Eject them.
But to think like this would be Machiavellian and calculating.
The solution: Don’t think. Just be emotional.
But people who don’t understand themselves as human beings or as human animals(most people) fail to recognize that “just going with emotions” will consistently guide them down exactly this path of Machiavellian self interest.
And so long as most people are unable to reflect on the true nature of their drives and actions, there can be no change in the overall nature of societies.
You can have a revolution, lock up lawbreakers, play with political reforms…
But there’s been thousands of years of this with no significant change in the basic function of your typical pyramidal agricultural society.
There’s something important in this for the lone introvert who’s struggling to survive.
Even if you lack social skills, you can predict what the people around you will do next.
Just figure out what is in their best survival/reproductive interest, then watch them actually do it. Each action will be accompanied by some sort of justification that puts them in the best possible light.
After this elaborate process, not one of them is the wiser about what actually happened or why they did it.
This observation has given me a lot of misanthropy in the past.
I’ve heard often: “But can you really blame them? People aren’t evolved to recognize their emotions and counteract them, just as people aren’t evolved to think skeptical. It’s something one has to actively learn and pursue.”
I’m not sure about that. Children are pretty darn skeptical and they remain if it isn’t hammered out of them by “society”.
I still am.
BUT, children aren’t very introspective, maybe that’s really something that doesn’t come naturally.
Gluon – I’m glad you are posting again – I like to reflect on your posts.
Hank – I think introspection is more natural to some people – of course it can be trained to a certain degree. However, we’d need some pretty good science to know which way for certain.
C
Hi, I’ve been reading your blog, and a lot of it resonates deeply with how I feel. Thank you for writing.
I recently read an economics book (The Logic Of Life, by Tim Harford) that hammers on exactly this point. In fact, a lot of the subject of economics is based on the premise that the things that we do, despite appearing “emotional”, are in fact entirely rational. So rational in fact that you can actually build models to predict the emergent dynamics of groups and societies with a good degree of accuracy. I found an affinity for pop-economics for just this reason.
As someone who sees Darwinian evolution as the purpose of life itself, sometimes I can’t help but envy the people who manage not to think of these things. It’s much harder to do the necessary evils when you have a clear realization of why you’re doing them.
Consider the act of breaking up with someone: “I have accessed your characteristics, and deemed you unsuitable or insufficient to continue supporting your life. I believe that I have the capacity for better, and feel my energies can be best dedicated elsewhere.” It feels Machiavellian even as I do it, under the guise of emotions and justifications. I’ve been avoiding relationships exactly because of this feeling.
Yet so many “emotional” people are out having fun, collecting breakups like it’s nothing, genuinely seeming happy with the way things are, only pausing to reflect on the things they lost by not being with someone anymore. It’s almost like masking out the selfish rationality is a skill that lets people be the sociopaths they are freely, and largely without regrets.
I think they call it “confidence”.
You have brought up a favorite quandary of mine.
Here are a few thoughts of mine on the matter.
In short, I believe there ought to be a pragmatic route to a sort of ‘intelligent benevolence.’
I think we limit ourselves by drawing a dichotomy between being stupidly idealistic and ruthlessly Machiavellian.
As far as leaving a legacy:
I perceive two kinds, not just one.
-Genetic
-Memetic
I perceive genetics and memetics as one and the same, just one abstraction level away. The brain, in my entirely unscientific understanding, is the organ that evolved so that we can adapt more rapidly to external stimuli – not by changing our physical form, but what we do with it, our behaviour. After all, large scale physical changes are just the result of changes in the behaviours of the cells that compose it… Just as memes are the behaviour of the body of which we are the cells. But that’s a whole other fascinating subject.
I do accept that idealism is often unproductive. I used to be an idealist until I discovered I’m allowed to *want* things. It’s not a concept that I was born with, at least not on a scale that encompasses everything in the universe. Then I realized that all the rules of society that dictate what I can and cannot have is just other people wanting things too.
Having the realization that everyone wants, and everyone is just like me, makes accepting the Tao at the same easier and harder. Easier because I understand that my purpose in life is to Win (for whatever definition of Winning I choose to pursue), and that ultimately my success is a benefit to the meme; but harder because the mechanism of empathy makes me suffer when my winning causes others to lose, because I know that their loss means as much to them as it would to me.
Yes, genetics and memetics are interlinked parts of the biological being.
But even should one die without children, their memetic progeny might live on well after one’s death.
And likewise, one who has succeeded genetically might not have succeeded in instilling their outlook and values into even their own children.
They succeeded genetically, but failed meme-wise.
Surely, it might be a noble goal to succeed on mutiple levels of behavior.
After all, look at the blossoming field of epigenetics. There are many ways that neuro-behavior and cell-behavior influence one another.
I suppose idealism doesn’t have to be shortsighted and naive, but usually it is. If anything, trying to change the world by paying attention to what actually works is just a form of idealism that tries to avoid the pitfalls of its previous incarnations.
Without idealism or imagination, one sees no problem with leaving things in their present state of nature. I am supposing idealism at its most fundamental level is the drive to make the world into something it isn’t already, to have a vision of some kind.
Empathy becomes a liability in mass societies because it’s an emotional behavior originally meant to ease co-existence with 150 or so tribal insiders. However, you also need it to be somewhat extended to have a somewhat functioning society of millions of people.
Agricultural societies seem to encourage the formation of a class of social predators.
But predators cannot exist without cooperative, empathetic people who actually create something that can be preyed upon.
If the predators begin to become too strong, they begin to strangle the source of their livelihood.
The ratio of power between predators/prey may be skewed right now, but we can predict that there’s a certain Nash equilibrium that will correct itself.
Actually between wiki-leaks, hacker e-states that can challenge real world governments, the trend of non-state affiliated adversaries on the battlefield, a public steadily abandoning state controlled sources of media for the internet, the wave of worldwide political unrest that began in Tunisia…
we already begin to see the pendulum swinging back the other way.
It is no longer a free-for-all for the central enclaves of power, a fact they’re only just beginning to grasp.
As far as being like other people, yes all our basic needs and drives are the same, but I’m sure you will find it is a main thesis of my blog that in many ways, there are types of people not at all alike.
In truth I believe people tend to be more different from one another than alike and that humanity itself is constantly changing with each generation.
Great post, of course reassuring to find I’m not the only one who thinks these things…
I suspect introspection is in a large part due to environment (i.e. upbringing). My parents expected me to have a large amount of self control and balance my self interests with the interests of the family.
However I believe their is also some genetic element. Given that this kind of self doubt probably hampers one’s reproduction odds you’d expect our kind to die out completely fairly soon.
I suppose first you have to have a certain nature and then environment determines how it gets channeled.
So yes, I believe we’d have some quirks no matter how we were raised.
Ha! You realized that being blithely unaware of our real motives is actually a survival advantage.
We already seem to be greatly in the minority.
Our ancestors did not do the best job of perpetuating us. But we have survived.
The thing is, early hominids that followed their existing programming without a hitch had a distinct advantage over those that wasted their time playing with sticks. But it seems likely those more curious specimens must have been the ones who invented the first clubs.
Being able to think in new ways and take things apart slows us down and causes us to fall behind. But if we figure out something important…
I’d say people who think like us are still in gene pool because our profile is high risk, high reward. Every now and then one gets lucky.
Amazing. Personally, I find no problem with being openly calculating about whom I associate with. Why should this be wrong, as society would tell us it is. We all do it, simply being honest about it in fact makes it less of a personal rejection. ‘You are unlike me, you don’t have what I want, I don’t need you in my life.’ There. Simple, easy rejection. I’m getting fed up with peoples’ ‘emotions.’ If people could put their emotions in there proper place more often, life could move more smoothly and with less drama. A greater degree of self-awarness and honesty is largely needed in society and I’m rather sad to see this not being recognized yet. Perhaps soon…
Referring to the “Problem: Someone who doesn’t fit in is a liability to the group:”. I would add that each group has a leader formal or informal and “not fitting in” is a form of challenging authority of a group leader. Once “noncompliance” is detected, then a sequence of actions that you described as “each action will be accompanied by some sort of justification that puts them in the best possible light.” unfolds.
Evaluating potential emotional stock in people is a normal part of the social cycle because it is perpetuated by self-interest. There is nothing wrong with that. Why is suicide so vehemently frowned upon in so many value systems? To best benefit others, you yourself must receive some benefit.
In a mind where self-interest is demonized, objective analysis is discouraged, so you have many who fail to see that there is nothing that is not objectively logical about any human impulse or decision. The result: conceit and self-righteousness due to unchecked self-interest.
“But to think like this would be Machiavellian and calculating.
The solution: Don’t think. Just be emotional.”
You just about floored me with this. What sentences!
Sorry for the rather useless comment, but I’m quite abuzz over this. You’ve given me much to think about in a few phrases.