Something Missing

There is something missing from your life. A hole at the center of your being. You are less than you should be. You want more.

You are not crazy. The world around you is crazy. And you are awake. And so it's up to you.

There are Rules

Humans are bags of meat dancing a crazy dance due to the electric current running through them. They dance to a beat and a rhythm derived from their genes and their neural pathways and modified by experience and social pressures.

If you wish to imagine an immortal soul on top of this, be my guest. But any immortal soul present seems not to intervene with the working of the human body as described above, even including the workings of the human brain. If you wish to imagine that such a hypothetical soul does intervene in the workings of the human body including the brain, then again be my guest. However, you will be correct in guessing how people behave less often than those who do not make that assumption.

With all of that sobering information in hand, let's look at how humans interact.

The Breeding Instinct

All animals exist to survive long enough to breed. This is not a hypothesis, this is a provable fact. Humans are created and derived from their genetic code, they are servants to their genetic code and strongly limited by that genetic code. That genetic code is derived from the parents of any individual human. Humans that do not breed, remove their genetic code from the human experiment, as with all other animals. And so, the imperative to breed is wired into human beings more securely than anything else. You can argue against such assertions, but adultery, Playboy magazine, polygamy, Spring Break, the film industry, pretty much every major religion, the existence concubines, and more will prove you wrong.

We can argue, if we wish, than this genetic urge should be resisted, or controlled, reined in, or transmuted (to steal a phrase from Napoleon Hill). But this only proves the existence of the genetic imperative further. Humans, and in fact all animals and plants and fungi and so forth exist to breed. If they did not, they would not continue to the next generation, because breeding is a profoundly dangerous activity that actively impedes the success of the parent organisms. At the very least parents must spend calories producing the necessary extraneous parts, and the female must devote a certain amount of time to gestating the offspring, and many animals must devote significant time and energy to new creatures that cannot contribute to the welfare of the parents. Parenthood is a profoundly losing proposition, until you take into account that we are genetically wired to find it valuable and fulfilling. We are wired to get hormonal happiness hits for meeting these genetically wired breeding milestones. And we must account for this genetic influence if are to accurately account for, anticipate and structure human behavior.

The Tribal Mind

Humans are neurologically wired to be swayed by peer pressure. You can argue against this, but decades of psychological experimentation will prove you wrong. From Stanley Milgram to Dan Ariely to Philip Zimbardo; study after study and test after test have explained that the human mind is designed to work as part of a group, not as a lone individual. Humans are apes. Most apes are social beings. Whether for prey species or predator species, social behavior is a useful adaptation. Sociability is so useful it even arises in lions, members of the usually solitary feline species. Social species develop neural pathways that are optimized for social behavior. Compare the behvior of a pet cat to that of a pet dog. Dogs are naturally social animals, cats are not. And the need for social acceptance that dogs have is so well observed its practically an accepted punch line to jokes.

Humans have the same social punchline. We are easily influenced, easily coerced, because the cost of losing in-group status is frequently death by exile. And as such we need to take our easily duped neural programming into account if we are to accomplish things that are unpopular or unknown.

Humans are wired neurologically to think socially, and we are amongst the most intensely social species in history, with brains designed to memorize faces and to notice and retain friendship and relationship statuses for the group of which we are part. But our social instincts are still bounded by biological instincts. The law of 150 is a documented general limit of the human mind to retain between 100 and 200 (generally 150) people and their related social connections clearly in mind. Beyond that number, people become strangers by biological necessity. And if you are a stranger, then the brain sees you as an other. And in the world of the tribe, the other is less than human.

If this sounds xenophobic, that's because it is. Nothing competes against an individual animal so strongly as a member of its own species, because no other species wants the same types of food, the same types of territory and dens, the same types of mates. And for social species, the only members of the species that are generally safe are those of the in group, the tribe. And so when the human brain hits its biolgical limit of 150 in this new global village it begins to strain under the new requirements of universal cooperation expected of it. two hundred throusand years of human evolution and millions of years of evolution before that has shaped the human mind to see those not in the in-group as less than human. There is a reason so many tribal people's names for their tribe translates directly as "the People". They are people, other humans are not. This isn't evil, although it may feel that way at first blush. Tribes that didn't operate this way may have existed, but they couldn't compete effectively for resources and so they no longer exist.

For the first one hundred and ninety thousand years of human evolution, the tribe engaged in social adaptation and refinement to optimize how the tribe worked related to how the human brain thought. For the last ten thousand years however, we have engaged in a massive social experiment that is unlike anything we encoutered in the previous 2 million years before, and our minds are not adapted to this new social experiment. We have attempted to mandate a change in social behvior, but the human brain has limits and unless we take those into account we will continue to get results other than what we want.

Humans, as we previously noted, compete most strongly with other humans. And in order to breed, humans must survive to maturity. Further, in order for an individual human's genes to survive in the body of their offspring, the offspring must survive. As such, humans and human groups that are better at surviving in the long term tend to continue passing their genes from generation to generation longer than those that do not look at survival as a group activity.

As such, the instinct for survival is deeply rooted in humans, but so too (in an apparent paradox) is the instinct for cooperation. prior to this modern experiment, huamn social groups balanced these instincts well and made humans one of the most broadly successful species on the planet, existing in nearly every avaiable ecosytem and on every continent save Antarctica.

Conclusions

Humans are the sum of their biological systems, their personal experience, and their social environment. And for nearly two hundred thousand years our social sturcture was built to work with and optimize our biological inheritance.

If we are to maximize what we can accomplish, we must do this again.