Those Years Were Perfect

This morning I lay awake early in bed, leaving my phone alone and instead letting my mind revisit earlier years, going back before there were even phones to distract, back when my early-morning company was all within my own head.  Going back to other Christmases, all stacked up and overlapping, so many memories now blurring and blending with time.

I recall the early years, when as a child I'd awake early with hopeful expectation and creep out to see presents under the tree, then I'd climb back in bed with my head filled with the morning soon to come.  I'd expect to stay awake for hours, yet always the demands of my young body would take over and I'd be surprised to awaken a few hours later to the sounds of my brothers loudly whispering down the hall.  Soon, we'd all be awake, picking up presents for a furtive shake, or excitedly planning what to do with any large, unwrapped gifts that might be under the tree.  "A sled?  But there's no snow!"  "Bikes!  It's cold, but once the sun is up, off we go!"

As for the tree, it was always a live tree - almost the same tree, only different - as each year we'd hike off to find a tree on Dad's acreage.  In the younger years, we would pick the trees, and Dad would point out "Too big!  Too small! No branches on this side.", and eventually we'd settle and Dad would cut it and haul it home, sometimes by hand and sometimes tied to the top of the car with perhaps a few more strings and knots than a 1/2mi slow drive required.  In later years, we boys would do it ourselves, taking turns with the work of cutting and carrying. 

Once home, we'd decorate the tree, putting the perennial strings of HOT incandescent colored bulbs, traditional ornaments that were fragile and became fewer in number over the years, the more recent treasures created in grade-school art classes and increasing in number every year, and the strings of tinsel and home-made paper chains.  It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized that perhaps using the rather mangy and tarnished (real silver!) tinsel wasn't perhaps only for "tradition's sake", but maybe also because new tinsel might have meant one fewer present.  And that the endless paper ribbons were as much a keep-busy project for rambunctious kids on chilly winter break days as for decoration, as back then the days went slowly and the breaks were long.

But eventually Christmas morning arrived!  After an interminable hour or two (or was it 15 minutes?) we would finally wake up Mom and Dad (why DID they ALWAYS seem so tired on Christmas morning, of all days???), only to have to wait for Dad to very particularly get out his camera, load the film, and ready the flash bulbs.  And then he'd interrupt present-opening (Why?  Who needs pictures???) to quickly stage a smiling boy holding an opened gift, again and again.  Then we'd eat a big breakfast, play with the new toys -- hopefully not break any -- and then squabble about something pointless until Mom ran us out of the house to expend our energy outdoors, and Dad would lie on the couch and take a nap.

Of course, years later we enjoyably revisited many of these grudgingly-taken Christmas pictures as we cleaned out their house over a decade ago now, and were mildly surprised to see more of these prints as we scoured my uncle's house last year for valuables and found pics my mom had sent him, and viewed still more as we chatted with her old friends and younger relatives on the same trip.

Those years of tight-knit rural family turned into years of cars and high-school friends and ski-trips, as carefree teens, but always there were brothers and parents around over Christmas break, and nobody even thought about illness, death, and separation.

I didn't know it then, but looking back, those years were perfect.


Fast-forward a few years and now I'm the tired dad, embracing happily with my also-tired wife at 2 a.m., reviewing our work in the family room of our rapidly-filling first "real house" adorned inside and out with festive decorations, looking at our too-large tree with thousands of mini-lights, surrounded by a sea of wrapped presents representing weeks of furtive trips to the mall and Toys-R-Us and exhausting hunts for Tickle-Me Elmo or Barbie's Dream House, and accented by flickers from the dying embers in the fireplace.   Just a few hours later as morning came, I'd be shushing the kids "Let mom sleep!", and making cinnamon rolls and orange rolls to buy a few more minutes before the kids could wait no longer and they'd try to prod their mother from bed and through her morning routine. 

Now I'm the "Smile for the camera!" guy, evolving with the years from 35mm to tape video camera to digital camera, and after the flurry of openings then making a run to the store for batteries for one toy or another, or helping to assemble a toy or a puzzle.  Then we'd head out to Mom and Dad's for a Christmas dinner, with a sensory-overloaded and exhausted toddler or two falling asleep in car-seats on the drive.  Eventually these trips morphed to going to a brother's house as we divided the holidays to make life easier on Mom, and included more aunts and cousins as the extended family expanded. 

These years went so quickly, as I noticed (not for the first time) that somehow the years accelerated, and I embraced with gusto the challenges and responsibilities of parenting.  Soon enough storm-clouds of illness, disability, and loss would arrive, but for a few short years I was aware of the blessings I had and not of the challenges to come.

I knew it then, and fondly recall now: those years were perfect.

The surreal haze of the early, exhausting, blissful, childhood years soon morph to the teen years, with fewer but more expensive kid presents as the fading magic turns into desires and expectations, and for a while the spousal gifts became practical as trade-offs abounded, and the days were logistically hectic with the kids and their friends going here and there, all amidst the challenges of caring for a disabled child as a backdrop for daily life, and with a backdrop of me navigating shifting careers and national recessions as my burden to carry.

By then we had our own traditions in our current house, and for the kids this represents the Christmases they remember, with the big holiday wreath on the wall, a progression of artificial trees but with a similar set of traditional ornaments, handmade-treasures, and strings of LEDs on the tree, a generation newer than my traditions.  I'm willing to bet there were middle-of-the night forays to peek for presents, and knowing my kids probably a few peeled back wrappings carefully re-taped as well. 

Of course, for me their Christmas tradition memory is not the only tradition, perhaps another chapter, different yet also fondly remembered, with a bit less magic but so much energy and love as children, then teenage emotions, angst, and uncertainty gave way to dreams and plans.  These happy years were gone in an instant, as the days sometimes seemed interminable but the years kept getting shorter.  I knew going through them that these years were not perfect, obviously, and learned painfully that life and health aren't guaranteed, and you must make the most of every minute.  Along the way, family pictures gained gaps never to be filled again.  Bittersweet interludes, for sure, but these years were precious.


Those years of everybody around the tree evaporated, and now the kids are spread across the country and it's rare to have them all home at once, and my brothers are scattered with lives of their own and it's rare to have us all together at once.  No more hectic weeks of finding and funding presents, as a Secret Santa gift exchange suffices.  No more can we brothers visit our childhood home, as it's been empty and sold for many years.  Now it is our house that hosts fewer big Christmas get-togethers, as our kids and their cousins are off and running in different directions with their high-school then college friends, and then significant-others and in-laws.  

This year, I find that we're in an awkward gap of grown-kids but no grand-kids (hopefully yet another chapter to come!), and Christmas holds little magic.  It's been years since I've decorated outside, and the wreath over the door went away a few years back, and the garlands on the stairs became intermittent, but this year is the first without a tree....only the big wreath and a few small decorations. Just wasn't feeling the season, and the effort seemed a bit pointless, but I'm not sure I like it this way, as the tree is a nice focus for recollecting the past and planning the future.

Certainly, life is less hectic now, but still pretty full with just two of us most days, days which no longer seem quite so long, and the years seem positively fleeting.  I can't imagine how fast the next decade will go, but perhaps somewhere in there will be childhood Christmas magic once again.  In the meantime, I will look back at the chapters of my life as the year turns over, and happily enjoy once again the memories of each. 

Sometimes, certainly, there are poignant pangs over loss, but I will strive to keep the emotion of the time with each year, so that the happy times remain as blissful with ignorance of pain to come, and the sad points do not color the years before or after but emphasize only the value of family, and after all time heals the worst of the wounds so even the hard years are mostly happy in retrospect.  And, knowing that life is uncertain and ephemeral, and aware that we must make the most of every minute, I will ensure everyone knows they are loved and cherished.  I'm pretty sure these years are just about perfect.

Merry Christmas all, especially friends and family who have been along for this wild ride.  And, in just a few days, a Happy New Year.

The Path Forward Isn't Inward

 

• I've got a bit of a confession to make.  When I started this series, I put in under a folder header with a working title of "People Suck".  The next day I changed it to "Do People Suck?", and recently "Why Do People Suck?"   And, surprisingly, I mostly now know the answer to that:  because we teach them to.  It's not that we do this on purpose, because (mostly) we (most of us) don't.  Our brains are an amazingly adaptable and complex mix of really old parts and kinda old parts tossed into an environment that is literally brand new, with just a few generations of group experience for the entire industrial revolution, and only the first one for social media.  Half the time we want to be Machiavellian, half the time Gandhi, always socially savvy, sometimes unnecessarily aggressive, sometimes unbelievable gentle, sometimes giving and forgiving, sometimes paranoid.  And, to a surprising extent, each of us is capable of shifting between modes, and indeed we're pre-wired to do so.
  
• For me, investigating this topic included some materials I'd assimilated earlier in the year, but as I looked even superficially into many topics it turned into a fairly negative effort, as there is so much in our country that is being done so badly for no good reason, much done deliberately for a bad reason, so much that needs work, and each of us is so limited in time, capacity, and influence.   
• What makes it harder for me personally is that most of the research journeys of recent years were on internal topics, like essentialism, happiness, sleep, and team management skills, or fairly technical topics like what makes cities livable, nice, and valuable, but in the final assessment this topic requires fairly straightforward internal work, but also willing engagement with other people externally to really understand, to improve the work, and even to do a good job of improving ourselves.  Time to get out of my head and into active engagement...my introverted half is not enthused!
  
• Key take-away:  Evil thrives with distance and separation, in our natures individually and as a group.  We need to stop isolating ourselves, and running off to build walls, and instead to embrace and interact.  We need to stop striving for personal success, and work together for joint success.  A few things to do:
  
  • Need to say better things to people, and not tolerate demeaning.  Words actually do matter.
    
  • Need to embrace collective action and responsibility
  • Gotta learn to think better ourselves - but interacting with others will probably help with this.  Our local "hive brain" makes better decisions than one brain alone.
    
  • From government, we need unbiased research, and highly visible trials, and feedback loops.  We as a nation need to relearn to act - to implement what we learn.
    
  • As a society, we must reduce inequity, both wealth and control, as people in power become worse and those knocked down do not thrive.
  • Overall, need to stop creating bad people and rewarding poor behaviors by powerful people and special interests.  This means reducing inequity and power structures, as a lot of crappy thinking comes from "making it" to a position of influence or wealth.
    
• Often, it seems that a core problem with "individual responsibility" comes down to us having the ability to run away from conflicts and situations instead of addressing and resolving root issues. What if we, as a society, decided to embrace our problems head-on, instead of running away far enough to be able to ignore them?  
• Distance aids evil, in multiple ways. What if we decreased distance, and intentionally gave evil less room to infest?
• Those with options then tend to advantage themselves rather than solving problems for all. Those without options are then stuck with both their own lack of agency, and having to deal with those with worse issues.
•  In the end, that's perhaps the "big lie" for "rugged individualism": that you do not have the responsibility, let alone the obligation, to make society better.  If we believe in freedoms, but not obligations; in rights, but not responsibilities; in amenities for ourselves, which do not accrue to all, then we're not actually advocates for freedom, rights, and common good, but for our privilege.
• So, summing up, we each need to work to reduce distance from "others", decrease inequity, and eliminate verbal abuse/elitism and entitlement.  Rule 303 needs to apply - if you have the means to act, and the ability, then you have the obligation.

A Better Plan

It seems to me to make progress we need a few things... 

Vision:  Find a few BFAGs that most can get behind.  Save the planet from climate change, pollution, and resource consumption.  Revisit how we build and operate cities and transportation.  Go to Mars, and then the stars.  Conquer cancer and dementia.  I'll support all of these, but honestly I struggle how to effectively champion any.

Changes:  Identify changes and define metrics: Know what we need to do.  The first part is pretty easy, as we have lots of "hard problems" that are already known, so all we need to find is solution.  Funny thing is, the US has gotten REALLY good at funding research, and equally bad at implementing what we learn, so probably with a bit of Googling most anybody could determine a better course of action that what we've been doing. 

Crime?  Homelessness?  Mass shooting?  Racism?  Poor testing scores?  Inequity?  Any of these you look into you will find research, and researchers, and advocates who ardently believe they know how to address much of the issues, and probably even some real-world examples and tests/trials that support what they claim.  

It's not so much knowledge, but determination to act.  We just need to go do some, pay close attention, revise, and go again.  Implement some feedback loops, whenever possible, too.

What can we do individually?  At least this part is actionable.  For starters, know our weaknesses and deliberately think better.  Avoid echo chambers of any sort, where you can, but especially those with drivel in them. Here's how I think of it:

Imagine you're in your garage working on a project, and a roofer knocks on your door, says you need a new roof, they are doing roofs nearby, throws out two neighbors' names, and says he'll give you 10% off if you sign up today.

What might you do?
- You COULD say "do it!", write out a check for a down-payment, and contact your insurance company the next day.

- You COULD take their card, give them 1 point for sketchiness and 1 for effort, and decide maybe it's time to consider a roof replacement.

    - Revisit how the roof is, and recent storms

    - Check with the named neighbors, and see how their experience has been (if anything at all)

    - Read up on how to judge roof condition.

    - If age is apparent, check you personal network and local recommendations for roofing inspectors or roofers.

    - Review ratings and vendor qualifications of local roofers, and pick a couple good ones for assessments and quote. Be pleasantly surprised if the card you have is actually in the list of top roofers.

    - Start a convo with your insurance company, review coverages, estimate costs, and ask their recommendations

    - Based on all the above, come up with a plan, which might be urgent, or it might be a yearly update.

- You COULD simply do nothing, and wait until a leak appears.

Which would you do?

 

Or, here's another one:  A young kid somehow gets separated from their adults, and they are lost, alone, scared, and not sure what to do.  What should they consider:
    - Wander aimlessly until a helpful man offers to assist them, and asks them to come with him?
    - Pick a random, busy-looking middle-age woman, and go ask for help?

Clearly, the man is offering his time, seems to understand there is a need, and is willing to be helpful.  The woman is busy, probably has stuff to do right now, and hasn't even noticed there is an issue.  But which choice is wiser?

 

None of us can be an expert on everything, and none of can do everything we'd like.  None of us are as smart as we think we are, nor can believe in individual convictions.  We each must prioritize what is important in our lives, but try to be reasonable discerning on most other topics, and lean into expertise.  Key points:

- Don't believe what you hear.  Be wary of new info that corroborates what you want to believe, and of new info that conflicts with what you already believe.

- Where you have new info and old assumptions, feel free to test them.  Go do some research.  Here's the thing about the modern world: we have Google.  It's not hard to find lots of info, and not even hard to find reputable info.  Having good questions is harder than finding answers, in most cases.  Just use any "Huh, that's unexpected" vibes as a cue to go seek some better info.

 

It's not hard, with a bit of thought, to come up with perfectly sound ways of making better decisions and vetting information and situations; the important part is to engage our executive function layer and decide to be smart about it.

Perhaps apply some simple heuristics, too:
- When in doubt, favor the option that is "nicer", and favors a common good.  Punch up, don't kick down.  Pull lower people up, and maybe pull higher people down.  Don't equate wealth, cleanliness, or scripture-talking with goodness or wisdom by default.

- For random data, suspect information that seems polished and repeated, and is presented as "common knowledge".  

- Suspect sources that claim agendas and conspiracies, and yet have a good story to tell.  Suspect anecdotes and individual narratives, and learn a bit about statistics and fallacies.

- For technical topics, respect education, expertise, and rigorous studies.  

- For complex, human topics, suspect simple solutions, and favor trial-and-error experimentation with feedback.

- Promote shared investment over privatization of profits.  Follow the money...

- Test your priors:  suspect your own assumptions, especially stuff instilled when you were in "training" up to adulthood.  Think back to the mainstream backlash after the 60's, and the War on Drugs, production of police shows (still a thing today, too), Tough on Crime, broken windows policing, stop-and-frisk, rugged individualism, Sesame Street, daily Pledge of Allegiance, zero-absence attendance rewards, IQ tests and grades, mandatory books to read (and those discouraged/banned), ROTC in schools, gender roles, American Dream expectations of a nice house in the suburbs, importance of a driver's license at 16, drinking laws, vies on riding transit like buses (even school buses), diversity quotas and deed restrictions, importance of credit ratings, and more.   Why were you told much of this, was it actually true, and who did it benefit?

"It' ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.  It's what you do know that just ain't so." - Twain.  Maybe worse, it often causes division and inequity across society as well.

  

 

Changing Your Mind

 This year I read (or listened to) several pretty good books on changing minds:
- "How Minds Change" - McRaney

- "How to Change Your Mind" - Pollan

- "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" - Satterfield


In a nutshell, these books suggest 3 major mechanisms:
- Psychedelic drugs, as augmented psychotherapy

- Deliberate self- or therapist- guided thinking, to retrain brain pathways

- Discussions with others, especially trusted people in your circle

Rarely do you change your mind just because you hear something randomly, or somebody forces info on you, or you happen to monitor a debate.  Mostly, you change your mind when you hear conflicting information from a trusted source as part of a believable narrative, and often enough to get past automatic brain filters.

Here is how brains work, more or less:

- You form a belief based on your priors - what you think you already know.

- Somewhere in the emotional part of your brain, this belief gets some tie-ins to topics of interest you already have, and sense of certainly that goes with it....these are surprisingly orthogonal, as you can be pretty sure about stuff that you should know is likely wrong, and less sure about well-supported info.  Hey, it's an emotion, not a quantitative rating (it just feels it).

- When info happens by that matches the belief, you get a mild drip of dopamine, and the brain-paths reinforce just a tad.  This is really easy because we have a strong confirmation bias.

- When info comes along that conflicts, our first tendency is to discard it.  Our brain usually saves us stress and effort by doing this without our conscious brain even noticing.

- If asked to explain and action or statement based on a belief, our prefrontal cortex kicks in to make up a good story.  It like narratives, and it's really good at generating them, and building logical justifications.  It likes hearing narratives, too. 

- If conflicting data comes along frequently enough, or if you've put yourself into a receptive, learning mode, you may perceive conflicting data.  Usually this means 30% conflict info, and it doesn't really matter if this new data is right or wrong.  

- If you do perceive or integrate new data, your beliefs will change.  But since these are at the emotional level, changes to them are not really perceptible to you, as they wag the tail (the prefrontal cortex), not the other way around.  So, you probably don't even notice.

- Your pre-frontal cortex is good at noting changes in other people's narratives and logic, though, and they are good at picking apart yours.  "You've changed", they say.  "No, I haven't", you claim, mildly confused.  Then they try to prove you've changed, and you get defensive, and your narrative engine kicks into overdrive, and so does their.  Fun times!

So, to change your mind, you need to upset brain pathways and build new ones.  Depending on what your goal is, hallucinogenics seems to break open a lot of barriers and enable new paths.  YMMV.

You can inundate yourself with repetitions.  It works pretty well.  Depending on perspective, we call this "brainwashing", or "rosaries", or "daily reflections" or "marketing", or "evangelism", or "French Lessons", or "Q-Anon".  If you hear it enough and repeat it enough, it'll sink in, for good or ill.

You can also be deliberately introspective, and engage your executive layer when you see yourself going down one thought path, and steer to a new one.  This isn't easy, but it's also not all that hard, at least in peaceful situations.  This is the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

This is a really short treatment, and it probably fails to sell the importance and profoundness of the implications.  In fact, most readers are probably saying to themselves, "this is NOT how brains works!  I know mine doesn't!" - and that's your prefrontal cortex narrative-rationalization engine at work.

But then, you'll think "Hmm...this might explain some of those Q-Anon sorts I'm seeing on Twitter.  And hey, that 'super-religious' couple at church is a lot like this, with their list of things they do 3 times per day.  And why is it that 3rd graders have to say the Pledge at school, and line up when a bell rings?"

Think a little deeper, and you might get, "I've always been the same person since I was 16.  But there was that cringey Ayn Rand - John Galt thing for a few years, and I did help vote in that lower tax guy in the 90's, and I used to hate the concept of speed cameras.  And I thought I wanted to be a C-level executive up until 10 years ago.  Why was I that way?  When did I change?"


One final point out of this is that since we can't very well see our minds changing and we know our beliefs and our sense of certainty are suspect, we can't very well trust what our narrative engine tells us.  But we CAN trust that it is pretty adept at critiquing other people's narratives and changes, and they are pretty good at picking at our arguments.

So, if we have an important topic, whether an anecdotal concern about neighborhood safety or a global issue about politics, or something in-between, we should feel encouraged to "bring in the brain trust" and have a group discussion.  Make it people with some existing relationship strength, and add some food to improve attitudes, and dive in. Maybe add a bit of alcohol (not too much), if the tone is tight.

Guess what?  We've just reinvented how people have shared info and come to agreements for thousands of years. 

Let's summarize and bring this together:  one reason our brains have Kahneman's "fast and slow" modes is for efficiency, because active neurons take a lot of power.  As a social species, off-shoring some memories and creating a joint decision-making engine is good for the individual, and for the group.  We're in essence a distributed-computing machine, often running stand-alone.  Perhaps this is even why our brains can afford to shrink a bit with stable civilizations -- there is less we each must remember, there are others to lean on to help think stuff through, and with less brain cell and muscle cell power consumption a few more people can survive the lean times.  We get the ability for lifelong learning, less aggression, and more sex as a bonus.  

Now we know:

- Minds CAN change

- You can change your mind on purpose

- You can change other minds with a lot of work and repetition

- Open-minded groups will tend to do a better evaluation of any topic than one person alone

- Words matter, and our brain assimilates data and makes modal changes we aren't necessarily even aware of

- Power structures come with societal impacts, perhaps some good and some bad

So, knowing what we know, what can we do differently, deliberately?

Human Self-Domestication and Sociopathy

So, why was the discussion of "original sin" important?  Because Pygmalion and Golem effects are significant, and how we view other people makes a real difference on how they behave and perform.  We're full of mirror neurons that can serve us well or ill, depending on how they communicate to and from those around us. 

Experiments tell us that it is important to not have any notions of biases, especially for children. For children, and even for rats, across repeated experiments, those presumed to be smarter actually do better on tests, simply because of more positive attention. This is the Pymalion Effect, which is a self-reinforcing tendency for those who are proclaimed to be "better" actually end up ahead.  Similarly, those presumed to be dumb do worse. This is probably one of several reasons that when "science" said Black people were less smart, they did much worse in school, which is the Golem Effect.  We have instituted some oddly self-destructive feedback loops into the structure of our society.

And where do these sensitive neurons come from?  Surely they are in-built, but why?  Why is that we automatically categorize individuals and with very little prodding will favor "those like us", and behave to match?  Why do we value fairness and kindness, yet we readily subjugate these notions for our "tribe" of whatever sort?

Revisiting an earlier timeline, about 600K year ago we split from Neanderthal and Denosivan cousins, which then died out maybe 40K years ago.  Probably, like dogs and chimps and bonobos, these branches of the family tree had some mirror neurons working similarly too. 

Which brings up an interesting point, why is it that some animals, like domesticated dogs and foxes, are friendly and playful, while most adult animals are not?  Why do human children play for a decade or more with whimsy and imagination, and only slowly settle into a less playful adult grind?

One well-supported supposition is the humanity has domesticated itself.  Domestication across species has quite a few conserved features, and some are already pinned to genetic variations.  A quick sample includes:

Physical changes - thinner skull, fainter brow-ridge, bigger ears, smaller teeth/smaller jaw,more frequent and nonseasonal estrus cycles, alterations in adrenocorticotropic hormone levels, changed concentrations of several neurotransmitters, and reductions in both total brain size and of particular brain regions, sometimes depigmentation

Behavioral - Communicative, less aggressive, docility, prolongations in juvenile behavior, play

Other features appear to be conjoined with our "self domestication".  It's odd that across species, the same patterns often appear with domestication, and smaller brains, docility, and higher intelligence come along with smaller teeth, softer features, and (where applicable) a curly tail.  Silver foxes were domesticated by a Russian team for decades during the Cold War as an experiment, not much connected to other research, and yet selecting only for gentle pro-social behavior (wild Silver Foxes are really mean) brought out all the same traits, resulting in domestication in about 40 generations.
 

Interestingly, though brain-size get smaller, overall intelligence increases, especially with regards to communications, learning, and working together.  Perhaps it's the extended childlike/adolescent periods where brains are growing and learning, and internally growing/pruning connections (and in this, human are unique), and with a natural tendency to investigate concepts through play, and to follow the lead of role models, and then finally to quickly grow with a (again human unique) adolescent growth spurt as we move into adulthood. 

When did all of this happen for humans?  Well, we've been painting caves for 35K years, and evolutionary anthropologists say we've been able to talk longer than that.  Somewhere along, sexual selection apparently provided evolutionary pressure favoring mates whose features and behaviorswere less "alpha," or aggressive. "There was active selection, for the very first time, against the bullies and the genes that favored their aggression". 

Are we more like bonobos or chips? Again, the answer is "some of each, part of both".  As it turns out, Machiavelli fits chimp behavior better than human, and fits empowered humans more than those in service roles. 

Low-status people tend toward empathy and communication, and are perhaps more bonobo-like.  High-status tend toward sociopathy (power does corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely), with lower empathy, less shame, and greed with conspicuous consumption.  Note that it is not necessarily the case that sociopaths get into leadership roles - actually, empathetic congeniality tends to find more initial success -  but that once in a role of power they acquire sociopathy, and in modern society strong incentives to justify and maintain advantage.

This is a profound point:  our roles to a degree determine our attitude and even our feelings, modifying the operation of our mental pathways.  How people treat us, and how we think about ourselves, significantly changes who we are, and what we are capable of.  On top of that, we generate favorable treatment for our "tribe", where membership can be based on literally anything, and we do this from childhood on.  Our brains, group interactions, and society overall are impacted, even governed, by the interplay of these often mutually-reinforcing patterns. 

How did we get to this point where we have powerful, privileged, sociopathically-leaning rulers, from a group of fairly egalitarian hunter-gatherers?  Clearly, it came along with farming and cities, and the need to coordinate larger numbers of people.  We know there is balance of human desires, and maintaining a leadership role with relative inequity requires avoiding the strong desire for fairness, and so leaders have to justify why they are better and more deserving. Historically, this is done with religion (ordained by god), intellect (smarter than you), power (stronger than you), and charisma (nicer, more generous, etc.).  Perhaps this justification is part of the rationalization engine each of us runs to generate support for our emotionally-underpinned decisions?  Maybe it's a driver, and maybe it's an emergent behavior, but probably now powerfully linked?

Knowing all of this, can we re-orient toward more equal societies?  Can we envision a gov't that presumes well-behaved, responsible citizens, with a Pygmalion effect as a result?  Can we somehow avoid forms that enable power capture, and growing inequity, with some trapped by Golem complex by others leaning into sociopathy?

Original Sin

Why do Christians (most denominations, at least), and certainly our country in general, have a view of people as inherently flawed -- fallen, sinners -- by nature? Christians have this as a part of a the fundamental creation story, from the very beginning, with Jesus as the path to at least partial redemption.

What about other religions? I think Judaism and Islam do not have the same concept of "original sin".
Judaism: The term “original sin” is unknown to the Jewish Scriptures, and the Church’s teachings on this doctrine are antithetical to the core principles of the Torah and its prophets.

Islam: The concept of original sin simply does not exist in Islam, and never has, but no great notion of inherent virtue either.  Also has no notion of evil thoughts as sin:  "good thoughts are not always the first instinct of humankind. As such, the Islamic understanding is that the very conception of good deeds is worthy of reward, even if not acted upon. When a person actually commits a good deed, Allah multiplies the reward even further."

Hindu: There is no concept of original sin in Hinduism. It is an aspect of a duality, its opposite being virtue or dharma. 

Taoism:  While English lexically differentiates theological sin from legal crime, the Chinese language uses one word zui 罪 meaning "crime; guilt; misconduct; sin; fault; blame." 

Buddhism: The problem with original sin or mistake is that it acts very much as a hindrance to people. At some point it is of course necessary to realize one’s shortcomings. But if one goes too far with that, it kills any inspiration and can destroy one’s vision as well. So in that way, it really is not helpful, and in fact it seems unnecessary

In any case, even in the secular US people tend to believe that people are inherently flawed. Why?

Well, for churches, if all believe that people are born sinful, but "we" now are not, that makes for powerful in-group signaling. Plus, it means others are fallen, and that provides opportunity for opinionated evangelism "we NEED to save them" & "you're going to hell" as motivation, & (importantly) more virtue signaling to the in-group with "good works" as you proselytize to the out-group.  Best of all, you can tie evangelism strings to every charitable gift or outreach.

Believing that all are born "of the devil" also demeans, automatically "othering" the out-group, as capable of ANYTHING evil, and that's an important step in being able to oppress, take from, and even kill them if required. It's not a small feature, if you look at western imperialism & the ongoing justifications of land-taking, slavery, and oppression over the centuries.

From psychology experiments and empirical experience, we can confidently say that it's hard to convince people to do harm to those "like us", but it's pretty easy to get people to do pretty evil acts if you have a "higher calling" for people to sign-up to serve.  It's even easier if the intended victims are seen as a threat, undeserving, evil, or not quite human.

Still, I think this is not the worst part, which is that for the average person a pervasive view that other people, and even themselves, have an in-born bias to evil does a lot of psychological damage.  It means that we are predisposed to presume negative motivations (even more than our in-built Fundamental Attribution Error tendencies already do), and we have some license to behave badly ourselves when it suits us, or to act holier-than-though if that better suits.  We have top-cover to immediately think the worst of people, or to justify it, as our desires warrant.  And, with no real basis for it, I'll suggest that perhaps avoiding sin is like learning to ride a bike and trying to avoid trees or mailboxes:  the harder you focus on the tree you DON'T want to hit, the more you steer directly toward it.

- Homeless?  Probably the wages of sin.

- Drug addicted?  Fallen nature taking root.

- Speeding in a school zone?  All have fallen short.

- Find cash in a dropped wallet?  The wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.

- Pastor molests a child?  Terrible, but the devil targets pastors through their flesh.

- Disciplining a kid?  Spare the rod, spoil the child - beat the devil out of them!

- I want to spend the rent money on an Xbox?  The flesh strikes again!

For the non-religious, the heavy Christian bias of the US makes some of this foundational thinking sink in even without embracing the religious tenets.  "People suck" is easy to believe.  Every stranger is a threat, and any slowly creeping car captured on your Ring doorbell is casing your house.  Add a few more of our brain faults, like confirmation bias, recency bias, and loss aversion, and we're well on our way to paranoia.

If Everything We've Been Taught is a Lie

Most of us read "Lord of the Flies" growing up, a cautionary tale about the tendency of humanity, even youth, toward division and violence.  Many of us learned in high-school and college of worse aspects of humanity from the Milgram shock experiments, the Stanford prison experiment, and (near to home) the Robbers Cave youth group experiment.  Some of us have enjoyed reading pop history about Heyerdahl's Easter Island and the global impacts of Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".  

None of these paint a very pleasant picture of humanity.  Why do we lean into these stories? Why do we want to believe the worst about our species?  We know that somewhere in our primal brains we are attuned to narratives of dangers and horrors, and probably this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: for most of our history, it paid to be a bit paranoid as being a little too afraid of things that really might kill you probably was better than ignoring risks and finding out hazards by personal experience.  

When most stories were passed on my word of mouth, it was pretty easy to question the tale-spinner to identify misconceptions, lies, or alternative explanations, and simple reputation over time would help mitigate the impact of those who told tall tales to some degree....still, though we WANTED to believe.  And we still do.

But today we have mass-markets for promulgating tales to the greater populace through formal education, news, and social media, and we have a finely nuanced understanding of what makes narratives "sticky", and how to word a narrative just right to get past our few defenses and into our beliefs via communications mediums that make it hard to properly question and rate the story teller.
 

 

So, what if I told you that the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies was a seriously flawed and negative man, that both the Stanford prison experiment and the Robbers Cave experiment were carefully managed to generate conflict, and that for these 'experiments' it was difficult and took repetition to get the salacious results?  What if Easter Island wasn't a worrisome microcosm of resource mismanagement and inter-group conflict, but a story of happenstance and repeated Western atrocities filtered through a lens of sensationalist pop-anthropologists seeking fame?  What if Milgram in his shock experiments DID find some worrisome patterns, but in our embrace of dark fears we missed the important positive points while picking up the most negative ones?  

Indeed, all of the above seems to be the case ("Humankind" - Bregman, and other mostly-ignored expositions), which begs the question "Why do we WANT to think of humanity as inherently evil?".  Most of us have heard this church, in the fall of man as an underlying point of the creation story, and pervasively in society, and with this foundation our narrative-picking filters will reinforce this at every turn, with the evening news helping out to reinforce the brain-paths daily.  What disservice would such a negative bias bring us, if we all have a negative view of, well, all of us?
 

What if, instead, we told ourselves (and taught our children) that people are mostly good, if a bit susceptible and wayward, and you need only to be a bit discerning when watching out for the worst of people, and more discerning about what you feed your mind each day?  

These are not idle points, as we KNOW that brain pathways are built upon repetition, and that repeated patterns reinforce belief or instill willingness to believe without our even realizing it ("How Minds Change" - McRaney).   If a dictator puts up propaganda pics on every street corner and repeats glorifying statements on the air every hour, it's because it works.  And so does daily prayer, mindful daily introspection, deliberate musical practice, or saying a pledge. 

"I'm smarter than that!" you say?  Perhaps you can intentionally analyze the repeated noise and through deliberate attention insulate yourself from the effects, but probably we'd all be better off to avoid circumstances and venues that pummel us with questionable information.  Really, you are not a very good judge of what you will believe, given half a chance.

If people mostly are good by nature (we're talking about regular people here, not the 1% sociopaths, which might be worth another posting of its own), and require several specific steps of indoctrination to do evil, then why do we fall into these traps that convince us that most people are bad, and through our resulting beliefs and actions actually make this somewhat self-fulfilling?  Who does this serve, and is it deliberate, or some sort of self-inflicted brain-washing as an unfortunate accident of our modern society?  Maybe some of both?


In summary, let's consider the proposition that people don't inherently suck, they aren't mostly born with evil tendencies, but that through teaching and training can be readily made to both believe that others suck and to behave in truly suckish ways themselves (to be hateful authoritarians, or clever criminals, for example).  And then let's see if we can deprogram ourselves a bit, create some new brain pathways deliberately, and improve our social habits to reinforce this premise, and see what happens.   Changing your own mind, and maybe how to change other peoples' minds, might be the topic of the next post.