Ive been
thinking about all the selfish behavior we humans are prone to and all the ills
that are caused therefrom… Actually, its more or less been a recurrent theme
for my thinking for many years and I expect that’s the same for many other people
too. I should probably note also that I frequently demonstrate the “bad” traits
of human nature myself, and not infrequently to an exemplary level. ...Bummer!
So as usual, Im
really trying to get a better understanding of myself as well as the larger
view of our species as a whole. And the
state of my current thinking goes something like this:
I believe
that no matter what you do or how long you wait or how much carful childrearing
and social conditioning that you do, that the “bad” traits in humans will
persist… And I expect many of you probably agree with that thought, but I also have
some semblance of a “rational” reasoning to go with that statement which I
feel like sharing :) (not that that means that the reasoning is correct
at all… I could be completely wrong!)
Anyway,
my logic goes something like this:
The
concept of “bad” is effectively asocial one. It’s essentially behaviors of an individual
that are counter to the desired behaviors of the society that the individual is
interacting with. So “bad” really means the individual is acting against the
society… And I think we would all agree that individual and social objectives
are often in conflict… And conversely, “good” behavior is also only valid when
individual and social agendas are in conflict but in these cases the individual
chooses to align with the social agenda instead of the individual one… And for
the most part we don’t even notice when social and individual agendas are
neatly aligned. J
Now I
think its easy enough to see how individual oriented behavior is often good
from an evolutionary point of view… survival of the fittest… If you have
something I and Im stronger/smarter than you then I just take it and when the
going gets tough, I survive and you don’t and thus nature selects the strongest
genes (with the most desirable behavioral preferences) for the future.
And I
think we can also all see that these purely selfish behaviors get modified for
the purposes of reproductive success since we have evolved a sexual reproductive strategy (rather than an asexual one), and if we were all completely selfish then our species would long ago have come to a
pretty swift and boring conclusion! J… And from there we can see that
family units banding together in many situations again have a distinct
advantage over the individual and the single family unit and so again we can
see how evolutionary processes would favour the development of social behaviors
at the genetic level. There are of course many genetically inherited social traits, the most obvious of which is probably our language skills that other animals just don't have. Note, even for many “solo” predators in nature that
operate almost entirely as “individuals” there is usually a certain level of
social behavior whereby they don’t just end up killing each other at the first
encounter… species survival is better that way J
But the
question is, with humans being so well adapted to “acquire” any social behavior
that benefits survival through our amazing ability to learn, Why does the
selfish behavior persist, when it might seem there are so many more
advantages to operating as a fully constructive social system (instead of the
only somewhat constructive social system that we have currently achieved)?... “Logically”,
we would always get the best information available and let the most qualified
people decide what was best for the group based on that information… We could
easily create “decision processes” that would run our entire society to achieve
whatever we deemed as the most desirable outcome. We would achieve immense technological
and social heights in very short periods of time… Honestly, “progress” would be
so fast it would be mind blowing…
But of
course we would have completely sacrificed the “individual” and likely become
something of “hive mind”… but isn’t that evolutionary success? Isnt that
exactly what our genes want to achieve??
And I
think it is yes, but I think it is also a self-defeating outcome!
I think
that complete success as described above actually weakens the gene pool of the
species… One aspect of (and perhaps the most important one) the human species success
story is our ability to acquire new beneficial behaviors. But we have at least
three ways of acquiring our behaviors.
First
option is the original… genetic… we innately have responses passed down to us
from our parents through our DNA… These are our instincts and the reason we
still have them is that they work very well and they keep us alive in
situations that we have not had the chance to “learn” about from our social
group… And as you would thus expect, most of these behaviors are most clearly demonstrated
when we are very young and have not yet “learned” much.
The
second option is thus “learning” and this form pretty much overwrites all of our
innate behaviors after we are only a few years old… We still have innate
desires (like im hungry or Im lonely) but the behaviors we employ to address those desires
are all learned from the other people we are around (ie whether we use out
fingers or chopsticks or knives and forks etc, and whether we find the food,
buy it, steal it. or ask someone for it etc… all learned behaviors). And this
is where we get the vast majority of our behaviors from.
But the
third option is the one that is absolutely critical and without it we would not
be the evolutionary juggernaut that we seem to be… It’s the ability to “Invent”
totally new and innovative behaviors (behaviors being just one sub-class of
things that humans invent) from our imagination… without precedent in our
experiences!
And the
thing about “creativity” is that its necessarily “random” in nature (and by random I mean that you cant limit it to certain areas, It is a "general" ability) … If it wasn’t
random then it wouldn’t be creative. The only thing that defines weather these
occasional or frequent “invented behaviors” become entrenched in the individual
and from there in the society is whether or not the new behavior is beneficial…
And there is the rub!
It is the
individual’s survival within the society that defines the “individual benefit”
of the behavior, and it is the society’s survival that defines the “social
benefit”… And the two can clearly be in direct conflict.
So, the ”natural”
process is for a pretty much constant stream of invented behaviors to be being
generated by people (both outright new behaviors as well as old ideas being
reinvented again or simply re-tried again). And its up to the “selective
environment” to determine which of these new behaviors (if any) get to “persist”.
So, in
short, there will always be people who will be “trying out” new behaviors… No
matter how much we “purge" so called “bad” behaviors from our societies; Even if we
started with a clean slate of absolutely socially compliant individuals, there
will always be a new batch of social lairs, cheats and thieves coming along to
corrupt the social structure.
And those
anti-social behaviors will always persist to the level that the society tolerates…
It is societies constant task to weed-out (by whatever means it chooses) the
new “bad” behaviors. And in fact, I believe there will always be quite a high
level of lying, cheating, and stealing in human societies… And thats because
the more socially compliant the society becomes (ie the less bad people there
are) then the more opportunities there are for the few non-socially compliant
individuals to thrive! Its kind of like
saying the ability to detect “bad” people is only developed by having “bad”
people about… and the more there are of them, then the easier they are to
detect and eliminate (well the behaviors at least)… But we are very clever
creatures and we are always finding ways of out-smarting each other… so it
becomes and indeed verifiably is something of an “arms race”.
So, what
does that mean from an individual’s perspective within the society (as we all
are). Well, in simple terms it means that if you want “bad” behaviors in
society to stop then you must be active in supressing them because if you are
not then they will spread and persist. The detection and suppression methods
are of course defined by the society its self (and hypocrisy here is absolutely
ineffective since it encourages other bad behaviors instead J… It all rather sounds like the state of the societies
that we currently have to me… Its enough to make all those social
revolutionaries who like to believe that any real “worker” would never
deliberately take advantage of another real “worker” roll in their graves….
Bollocks! I say… We absolutely will take advantage if we can because it is our genetic birth-right… The right of “creativity”…
unbridled, ,undirectable creativity! It comes down to our decision over individual vs social gain and we all get to make that decision hundreds of times each day... I know for a fact in myself that the individual choice often wins out over the social choice :)
And it means that the task of “suppressing” is
an endless one…
There
never will be a perfect society… Not even close!
… But that’s
not to say that the “balance of power” in that arms race is forever locked
where it currently is… On the contrary, it’s a very dynamic balance and one
that can swing through very large ranges as history clearly shows. And I fully
believe that we can do a lot better than we are currently doing (and social
equity is a major player in the swinging of that pendulum).
Im not
sure what others will make of this “argument” and Im sure there are plenty of
holes in it from others perspectives, but for me this line of thinking helps me
to understand at least one reason why we are the way we are and why there never will and never
should be that mythical “perfect society” (in either the completely social or completely individual directions).
Back to
riding my bike through Africa J
