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.
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