Why Do People Make Absurd Choices?

I’ve been thinking of this, to me, baffling problem: what induces people to believe a fraud like Donald Trump who enacts policies that show his contempt for them and actually damages them, and yet refuse to support someone like Bernie Sanders who is offering policies, like Medicare-for-all and action on climate change, that could measurably improve their lives? How do we make sense of this? It is similar to the problem that absorbed Tolstoy in War and Peace: how could someone like Napoleon induce hundreds of thousands of men to move from West to East and risk their lives in brutal wars, and likewise, more hundreds of thousands to follow the lead of Russia’s Emperor Alexander in a mass movement from East to West to war on that same Napoleon? Tolstoy concluded that it was not Napoleon’s so-called “genius” or Alexander’s noble aura that moved millions, but some larger global force that he likened to destiny or spirit. And that “great men” were merely swept along in these global movements. I’m not going to conclude here that a similar global or spiritual force drives Trump’s minions (or those of any other movement), but rather look to what we now know, or think we know, about psychology, culture and/or brain structure for my tentative answer. 

            When I was in the Army reserves many years ago, I was required to go for an annual two-week summer camp for ‘training.’ This one year we were in upstate New York, at a little-used base where the barracks we were housed in were in desperate shape. The latrines were filthy and the floors, covered in a kind of linoleum tile, were dirt-covered and deeply careworn. The sergeant of our barracks, a weekend warrior like the rest of us but rather gung-ho, decided that we should really spruce up those floors and outshine our co-warriors in neighboring barracks. But we had no real spit-polishing supplies. So he decided to take up a collection, and one trooper would be designated to go to town and buy things like wax or mop-&-glow or some such commercial cleaning product, and we’d have the shiniest floors on the base. To raise the necessary funds, everyone would chip in a dollar or less. All were enthusiastic about this chance to rise above our neighbors, and willingly contributed. I alone refused. I explained my reasons: why should we be responsible for buying supplies? If the Army wanted the floors to be shiny, then they should supply us with the goods; the military budget was ridiculous and bloated enough to be able to afford us basic supplies. My stance was met with surprise, dismay, and outright anger. ‘I was not going along with the program. I was not a team player.’ And it was true. I was not. The whole thing seemed like puerile pandering to the “bosses,” a vain attempt to prove how much we valued our training and the spirit of the military—which I did not. 

            Those two positions—obedience to current authority, as opposed to thinking something through and evaluating it—seem to me to mark the poles of this question. When faced with a choice, does a person accede to the constituted authority—be it Napoleon or my sergeant or a boss or some wannabe dictator like Trump—or think things through and come to a decision based on the information and conditions that pertain? How do people decide? What inclines some to go one way and some to go another? What motivated so many Frenchmen to defy authorities and opt for revolution in 1789, even agreeing to cut off the heads of the king and many of his nobles? Why did others refuse to take part? Surely it had to do with more than bread, though starvation must have been a major factor. And I am not here talking about heroics; I am wondering about average people who are either driven to take actions from which there is little hope of returning, or of opting to side with order and authority no matter how battered by that authority they may be. I suppose in the end it is a question of risk. What inclines some people to opt for some action that risks their very lives and way of life, or to refuse the action, fearing to take that risk?

            Social psychology has confronted this question extensively in recent years. The experiments may seem trivial, but they are nonetheless revealing. And they involve, in the classic experiments created by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, presenting test subjects with a choice: how willing are you to risk $10 on a bet? Would you do it if the odds were even, that is, rewarding you with $10 for a win? Or would you need more potential winnings to risk your $10? The answer is that the majority of subjects required the chance of winning to be 2-1/2 times the chance of losing before they’d take the risk. If they were offered a potential $22.50 return for a $10 bet, most people would go for it. Less than that—say the possibility of winning only $15—and the fear of losing the $10 they already had loomed too large. In other words, average people most fear losing what they have, and will not risk it unless the possible gains are substantially greater than the loss. The pain of losing appears to be greater than the possible exhilaration of winning. This seems relevant to our discussion of people’s choices in a crisis. Many people will be reluctant to take a chance on some candidate like Bernie Sanders who promises revolutionary change—even if that change promises much-needed relief to them and theirs. The fear of losing what they have, or think they have, is much greater than the potential gains offered. By contrast, some of the people attracted to Trump are clearly attracted to his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The promised gain here suggests that the America where they had good jobs, and were in solid control regarding their position in the social hierarchy—that is, as white Americans who were clearly in a superior position to Blacks and Hispanics and immigrants—would be restored, or at least preserved. And it was great enough to move them. There would be no left-wing social leveling with consequences that were unpredictable, if not dire to them. There was a risk—which they are now discovering thanks to a virus—but it must have seemed that the great potential rewards in revived social superiority were worth that risk.

            The notion of control is also an important factor here. Ray Lancaster, in a November 2018 post on quora.com, emphasized three factors—control, connection and consistency—that are crucial psychological needs for most people, relevant to decision making. The first of these, control, looms large both today, and in our evolutionary past. For hunter-gatherers, that is, it was crucial that they could control their access to food. This was not only the case in fair weather, but perhaps moreso in cold months when food was harder to come by. Thus, controlling food so that some was stored for winter would have been crucial to survival, and those who exerted such control would have better survived to pass on their genes (this goes mainly for groups in temperate climates with severe winters; those who live in the Amazon, for example, have been shown to be noticeably casual with food supplies that are almost always available). The fear of loss would operate here, too; those who refused to risk losing their food reserves—e.g. who maintained control of their food supplies—would have had a better chance at survival than those who were profligate with food. 

But for these same ancestors, maintaining connections to others in their group would have been no less important. Connection with others would have been crucial for access to females, always a negotiation where leaders tended to monopolize such access, but also for successful hunting and for finding and maintaining shelter. Connection—here shorthand for social and cooperating skills—thus was, and still is a key development for humans. Maintaining such connections, indeed, is what prompts much of our decision-making discussed above. Why do most people tend to obey authorities, even though they might really want to go off on their own and please themselves? Because they fear to lose that social connection that obedience assures them. They go along to get along. Indeed, many try not to stand out for the same reason: to maintain that social connection by conformity.  And the inhibition on refusing to go along in a social situation—like the one in my army barracks noted above—stems from this same fear of social exclusion. Which is why ostracism was such a dire punishment in ancient cultures like Greece and Rome, and even for Napoleon himself, exiled to Elba. The many eons when ostracism meant certain loss of the protection of the group, and often certain death, still resonates in our psyches. Finally, consistency would have been necessary, to remember what processes had been used to store food, and what to keep doing, not just for food preservation, but also for the relationship between signs and meanings. The rise of a certain phase of the moon, or star, or the appearance of a given plant would be always looked for to maintain the best chance of survival. So would ways of cooking or hunting or eating or a thousand other procedures, all of which become consistent parts of the group’s cultural heritage. And consistently maintaining these would, to a large degree, help ensure individual and group survival. We see this today in the thousands of ways that cultural groups conserve practices or rituals that, to us now, seem useless. We also see it in the reluctance of decision-makers to withdraw their support from a leader like Trump because of new evidence; such a switch of allegiance would make them seem inconsistent, not only to others, but to themselves.

            The above-cited conditions do not exhaust the list of factors that affect risk aversion in choice. Research has shown that three more factors—individualism, masculinity, and power—also seriously matter when it comes to taking risks. People from cultures that privilege the individual—like the United States—over the collective—like many Asian countries—tend to be more risk averse. The reasoning is simple: if your decisions are solely your responsibility, then the burden of that risk, and possible losses, are yours alone to bear. Conversely, if you have a family or group to share that burden, the risk of loss is more likely to be shared, and thus proportionately less onerous for you. All other things being equal, you can afford to take more risks. The relative masculinity of a culture likewise affects risk aversion. People from cultures that privilege masculine values such as aggression, that operate on fear, and which are highly goal-oriented toward wealth and career, also tend to be more risk averse. That is, where these things matter highly or even exclusively in the way people assess an individual’s worth, the loss of any of them figures to be critical to most of its members. The tendency is to be extra reluctant to risk whatever one has accumulated (money, property) because it means a loss of social position as well. On the other hand, those with power tend to be more willing to take risks. The obvious reason is that people with power have more confidence in their ability, and thus are more confident in their ability to win. They are also likely to have more wealth to fall back on, and more education, another factor that has been found to make such people willing to take more risks than those without education. 

We should be cautious in this regard as well, however, for recent research has shown that leaders—presumably those with power—especially if they are men, tend to overvalue their decision-making abilities. Such men tend to be much less reflective, and hence ignore their actual ignorance and the downsides in a given situation (one again thinks of Trump). This means that such leaders often lead their countries or states or companies into highly risky and sometimes disastrous situations. We need only think of Napoleon and his ill-advised invasion of Russia in 1809, or Hitler doing the same thing in WWII. The results for both leaders and their nations was catastrophic: Napoleon lost almost his entire army of 600,000 men, while for Hitler’s forces, the punishing losses they suffered in the Russian winter marked the beginning of their total defeat by the Allies.  

There are certainly other factors that affect risk aversion and choice—such as the relative presence of the neurotransmitter dopamine, so important in the brains of addicts like compulsive gamblers. More dopamine apparently means more willingness to take risks. This does not cancel out the effects of fear—mediated mostly by the amygdala—but it tends to weaken the fear response. But enough said. We can see that numerous factors can affect how given individuals respond to risk in making decisions. Does this tell us anything about how people choose in a political situation? Perhaps not. But perhaps we can see that the dominance of certain factors over others will tend to shape decision-making. And perhaps what seems baffling can make more sense, as we take some of these factors into consideration.

Consider, for example, Trump voters. On the face of it, one might think that people whose lives have been decimated by the transfer of so much American manufacturing to foreign countries, by the ravages of climate change that promise more damage in the future, would be receptive to a political promise of government action and direct help. Such as a higher minimum wage. Or better protections for workers. Or the ‘Green new deal.’ Apparently not. All these were outweighed by Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants said to be “taking American jobs.” But most of those immigrants worked in jobs like farming or meat processing which American workers had abandoned years ago. What sense did that make? But perhaps if we consider that many of these voters come from cultures that place a high value on traditional masculinity, not to mention individualism, we can better understand their tendency to avoid the risk of “liberal” promises in favor of a candidate like Trump who gave them an easily-understood target to vent their anger and frustration upon. And perhaps the image of a confident, authoritarian leader induced them to place their bets on the man who appeared capable of taking charge and implementing policies that would favor white conservatives like themselves, rather than one making “pie-in-the-sky” promises for government action that was characterized as ‘socialism.’ Far better to pledge loyalty and obedience to a Big Daddy figure; and stay with what everyone around one appeared to favor as the cultural choice (action against abortion; action against ‘government handouts’ for those outsiders who ‘can’t take care of themselves.’) Stay within, that is, the collective judgment in their traditional communities. 

So what do we have? Just this. If people can be convinced that their choice will keep them within the protection of their own valued culture, the culture that has been handed down for generations (what’s good enough for my father is good enough for me), they appear willing to take a risk even on someone who resembles them hardly at all, but appears confident and powerful. Someone who inspires obedience to fatherhood and the flag and ‘one nation under (their) God.’ Conversely, they appear unwilling to take a risk on someone who seems to promise what they actually need, but whose credentials appear to align him/her with a central government that seems to favor those who do not deserve their consideration. The poor. The ones of a different color. The ones who fail to conform to what they consider acceptable sexual or social mores. Outsiders. Foreigners. Those who don’t belong. Why take a risk on them? Why risk losing one’s place—the place that one has come to believe one deserves? It makes no sense. Whereas taking a risk on someone who seems to promise to restore what one had and valued above all else, and to suppress those who seem to be eager to take it from you—that seems a risk worth taking. 

And yet, even given all these sound psycho-social reasons, I have to confess that the enduring support for this liar, this philanderer, this huckster and money launderer, this bankrupt several times over, still makes no sense to me. It continues to baffle me that people, no matter how disappointing their lives, no matter how in love with their supposed white supremacy, can be so deceived in their basic ability to evaluate another human being (and themselves). It is as if all their hard-won faculties take a vacation. As if they do not see, or don’t want to see the catastrophe bearing down on them. As if they are not just unconscious of what is happening to them, but actively courting disaster. And there is, in fact, some reason to think that at least some of them—the fundamentalists who believe literally in the biblical prophecy of the end times—really do want the whole society to come crashing down just as they are elevated at last into paradise. That would really ‘make (their) America great again.’ Make it the holy site of the great Rapture* so fervently desired by evangelicals. 

Too bad their choice rather ensures that they’re more likely to find themselves proceeding rapidly in the other direction.

Lawrence DiStasi

* After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever (1 Thessalonians).

Corporate Hacking

Dr. Robert Lustig is probably best known for his books and activities warning about sugar and the damage it does to the human body, notably in his bestseller, Fat Chance. In his new book, The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains (2017), he continues that warning, pointing out that refined sugar (refining sugar turns it from a food into a drug) is “the most expensive burden on society,” worse than either tobacco or alcohol. Refined sugar wastes some $1.8 trillion in health care spending in the United States alone by contributing to the diseases known as “metabolic syndrome”: heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, chronic liver disease, and cancer to name only the most prominent ones. But Lustig is not content with warring on sugar here; he adds several other addiction problems that are promoted by corporate America in its lust for profit, mainly alcohol, sex, processed food, shopping, and the technology that has given us the internet, computers, and the smartphone. What is really compelling about his book, though, is that Lustig makes use of his background in neuroscience to explain for us just how these “pleasurable activities” work in the brain to motivate us, reward us and often get us hooked. The major theme he propounds is that the corporate promotion of such activities intentionally confuses us about the difference between the reward system which gives us pleasure, and the happiness system which gives us contentment. That is, we are constantly shown via advertising that Coke, for instance, will make us happy, when what it really does is gives us a momentary pleasurable hit (and no food value) from sugar and caffeine. This is because the two systems at issue here— reward on the one hand and happiness on the other—are mediated by different brain systems. The reward/pleasure system is governed by the neurochemical dopamine, which provides motivation or drive, and the opioid peptides like endorphin, which provide us with the reward. Contrarily, the happiness/contentment system is the product of serotonin, which operates via two receptors, one of which provides contentment, the other of which often provides mystical experiences. What’s interesting is that “the same factors that increasedopamine (technology, lack of sleep, drugs, and bad diet) also decreaseserotonin” (p. 147 note). 

            What Lustig does is show us, first, how the dopamine system works, and the negative effects that happen when cells get overloaded, down-regulate (meaning we need more drug to get the same effect) and we get addicted. This is not necessarily due to weakness or moral failing. It is due largely to the fact that modern life (driven by the “corporate consumption complex”, i.e. the six industries that sell us tobacco, alcohol, processed food, guns, cars, and energy) loads us up with chronic stresses via easy access to addictive substances and activities. You might think it is exaggeration to include processed food in this list, but Lustig gives us a statistic that simply stuns us: where the annual profit margin for Big Pharma is 18% (pretty hefty), it is paltry compared to the processed food industry which grosses “$1.46 trillion per year, $657 billion of it gross profit, for a gross profit margin of 45%”(p. 87). So these hucksters have a very big incentive to get us hooked. 

But, you may ask, why are we so driven by dopamine in the first place? Because, Lustig points out, dopamine is the neurotransmitter that ensures the survival of the species. We need to be motivated so that we act to preserve ourselves and pass our genes on to the next generation (hence we are powerfully driven to eat and to reproduce.) To demonstrate this, Lustig tells us about an anti-obesity drug called rimonabant. It was approved in Europe as a drug to suppress obesity by blocking the CB1 receptor from access by our own brain compound, anandamide, which keeps us eating. Rimonabant actually worked quite well; people who used it stopped eating junk food and lost weight. But the problem was, they lost all pleasure in food and became anxious, depressed and even suicidal. In other words, to lose your motivation for reward (via dopamine) means you lose your motivation for life. 

            The problem comes in with our modern civilization (as Lustig puts it: “reward and stress are the hallmarks of modern civilization” p. 146). We are stressed by daily life, not just short term, which is what the cortisol system is for—to prepare us to fight or flee—but chronically, constantly, as in many modern occupations. In the face of chronic stress, we are encouraged, brain-washed really, to seek relief and happiness in the substances and procedures that seem to offer happiness, or at least distraction: sex (instead of love), smartphones, sugar, processed foods (loaded with sugar) and so on. And we are encouraged daily, hourly, every minute on platforms like Facebook, to buy our way out of stress; to see buying as happiness itself. As Lustig puts it, “Conflating pleasure and happiness is inherently biased and misleading” (p. 190). More simply put, it is propaganda. And the corporate purveyors of this propaganda have succeeded in finding ever-more accurate ways to target those most likely to seek happiness by buying their useless products. As part of this propaganda, we are told that having all these choices in products makes us “free.” Lustig begs to differ: “Our environment has been engineered to make sure our choices are anything but free. It chronically nudges us toward reward and drives us away from happiness and contentment” (p. 147). 

            Having cell phones, especially smartphones, is only the latest invention of such environmental engineering intended to work on our dopamine system. It takes very little to understand how addictive these devices can be. As Lustig points out, “for most people, the cell phone is like a slot machine. With every ding, a variable reward, either good or bad, in store for the user—the ultimate dopamine rush” (192). Why is this? Because we have a need for surprise; it’s visceral, says Lustig: as humans we are always looking for something new. This, according to Lustig, “stokes our dopamine and our nucleus accumbens” (the brain area where dopamine registers), and “the frequent checking of cell phones, waiting for something to change, is linked to anxiety and depression” (193). This is key to understand. Sold as a way to keep us instantly gratified and thus make us happy, cell phones in many users seem to have the opposite effect: they make many of the most ardent users depressed. Lustig cites a study of 4,000 teenagers, where “total media use correlated with the prevalence of eventual depression, especially in boys” (197). He also cites a horrifying 2010 case from South Korea to demonstrate how addictive such technologies can be: a couple became so obsessed with raising their two “virtual children” online that they let their actual three-month old daughter starve to death (p. 194). He also cites studies by Sherry Turkle demonstrating that “there is a forty percent loss of empathy in college students as a result of possessing a smartphone” (p. 235). 

            Enough said. Lustig has recommendations for his readers, and they are astonishingly simple (though probably not simple to accomplish in our society). He calls them the Four C’s of Contentment: Connect, Contribute, Cope, and Cook. Connectsimply means develop face-to-face communication with a network of friends, as humans are meant to do. Contributepoints out that self-worth is enhanced by volunteering or otherwise working to enhance the well-being of others. This has been proven over and over. Coperefers to several things: getting enough sleep, which is vastly underrated in our culture, getting exercise (also underrated), and mindfulness, for instance, through some form of meditation. Simply slowing down, turning off one’s devices, can be vastly effective. Finally, Cook: do your own cooking with real ingredients. This should be the simplest one of all, but not for the “one-third of Americans who currently don’t know how to cook” (p. 279). This is simply mind-boggling to this writer, but apparently it’s true. And the fallback for all those non-cookers is one of the chief contributors to our health crisis, processed food. Loaded with sugar and fat and chemicals and made to survive almost forever, it is the chief culprit contributing to sicknesses that should never happen in the first place. 

            Lustig has some fascinating things to say about the serotonin side of things as well, not least the reminder that psychedelics, once criminalized, have been making a comeback among therapists and brain researchers. This is because their chemical structure is very similar to the structure of serotonin. So, compounds like LSD and psilocybin bind to both serotonin-1a and -2a receptors, meaning that they provide both contentment, and mystical experiences. Anti-depressants also work in these brain areas, blocking the reuptake of serotonin so that more is left to contribute to happiness rather than depression. But I will have more to say about these when I write about Michael Pollan’s recent book, How to Change Your Mind, which investigates the new therapies and his own late-in-life psychedelics trips in depth. 

To sum things up for Lustig’s book, we could do worse than use his own coda: “the corporate consumption complex—technology, sleep deprivation, substance abuse, processed food—these are the killers of contentment and the drivers of desire, dependence, and depression” (p. 280). Find ways to rid your life of those, or at least keep them in check, and you can go a long way toward moving in the direction of that happiness whose pursuit is promised as an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Fatally Flawed?

I keep thinking these days about the terrible facts that confront us as humans. We have, at the head of our so-called democracy, a man so obviously unfit for the office he holds that it would have beggared belief to imagine him lasting a year. And yet he has. How could this be? How could Trump have even won, which is to say, how could millions of adults have actually voted for such a boorish, vulgar, criminal fraud? And that is the question I’m really interested in here. We Americans are a putative democracy, but our people are not alone in displaying a preference for demagogues who promise to revive a narrow nationalism that will seal us off behind ridiculous walls to exclude the rising number of migrants flooding the world. Hungary has made the same kinds of moves against migrants. So has Germany. And there are even rumblings of discontent in those bastions of tolerance, Sweden and Denmark and Norway, with France, Italy and Spain following suit, and the nations from whom we expect such policies not disappointing in this regard either: India has a right-wing Hindu nationalist in Narendra Modi; Japan has one too; and even the Buddhists in Myanmar are implementing one of the most vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing ever seen against the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya. More than half a million of these Rohingya migrants have now decamped for refugee misery in a nation, Bangladesh, that can barely keep its own people alive. In fact, a recent article about authorities in Bangladesh considering a sterilization program for Rohingya refugees (“Bangladesh Eyes Sterilization” by Shafiqul Alam, Agence France Presse, reprinted on Reader Supported News) is an indication of how serious the problem is, how much, because Rohingya Muslims reject the idea of birth control and purposely have large families to ‘secure their survival,’ it is a harbinger of the future. And worse, for all the signs indicate that this massive global movement, sure to be exacerbated by global warming and its attendant disasters, has only just begun.

            With a world population of 7 billion threatening to increase to 9 billion (one of the Rohingya women interviewed admitted to having 19 children, for security), and 14 million additional migrants each year roaming the globe without a place to live and survive, what are we to imagine? (See the Lancet of October 31, 2017: “Lancet Study warns of Global Health Crisis and 1 Billion Climate Refugees by 2050,” reprinted in Reader Supported News.) With more and more nations closing their borders and shutting down their empathic responses to these desperate millions, and with ever greater signs that artificial intelligence and robotics will be decreasing rather than increasing jobs normally done by such workers, what are we to conclude?

            I have to tell you, I begin to wonder if humanity, if all life, isn’t somehow constructed amiss. This is no idle exercise of the imagination. A recent book I’ve been reading, Why Buddhism Is True, by Robert Wright, outlines a conflict that puts the burden on evolution itself. Very briefly, what Wright tries to emphasize (and many others agree) is that human behavior is driven by natural selection to perceive and behave in the way that best ensures the survival of its particular gene pool, regardless of its validity. In short, our brains have evolved feelings to drive us to find desirable that which best guarantees the procreation and survival of our genes, and, at the other end, to consider as hostile any outside entity that would appear to threaten the survival of ourselves and/or our progeny. Here is one of the ways he puts it:

Good and bad feelings are what natural selection used to goad animals into, respectively, approaching things or avoiding things, acquiring things or rejecting things; good feelings were assigned to things like eating and bad feelings to things like being eaten…Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do (Wright, p. 124).

In this way, we are emotionally driven to perceive eating, sex and the like as good, and to perceive those outside our group competing for such things as fearful and bad (actually, as Beau Lotto points out in a recent book, Deviate, our perception is even more solipsistic than that: “All perception is just your brain’s construction of past utility… our senses rely very little on the external world, but more on our internal world of interpretation” [p. 110]). It should also be noted that the neural system that rewards our desires, the dopaminergic system, rewards (with dopamine) our anticipation of a goal such as sex more robustly than its achievement. In this way, we are kept always slightly unsatisfied, and hence always hoping for the next hit. The corollary is that we are prone to cast our vote for demagogues who promise to a) expand our chances of thriving (make our businesses less regulated and more profitable, even if it means polluting the air we breathe and the soil we need to grow our food) and b) lessen the danger from predation or competition by outside “others” (even if that means risking nuclear holocaust for our enemies or ourselves or whole sections of the planet). For Robert Wright, this means that Buddhism represents the chance to objectively examine these feeling-driven impulse-perceptions and to see, eventually, that they are illusory. To see that there is mostly suffering (the Sanskrit word dukkha is also translated as “dissatisfaction”) and nothing substantial or essential at the heart of this protective reactionism; that the responses it initiates are often premature and unnecessary; and that, ultimately, there is no separate, enduring self to really protect, no separate “other” to revile or destroy. But I do not here intend to get into the details about whether such insights would “solve” the problems we are facing in our world. What I am interested in is the analysis of natural selection and its logical outcome with respect to homo sapiens in general.

            And homo sapiens is really the problem. For most other species, any over-development that results in its overwhelming domination of a given environment, and hence an explosion in its population, generally runs up against natural laws (as lemmings or locusts do). The population in question consumes too much of its prey, outruns its vegetal or animal resources, and sooner or later must retract or collapse for lack of food and habitat, or due to balancing outside pressures from expanding predators responding to its own expansion. For humans, however, the capacity our species has evolved to alter the environment itself to the point where it can overcome natural limits and the normal feedback threats, has led, as everyone knows, to a population explosion of alarming proportions. At the time of the Buddha in about 500 BCE, for example, there were an estimated 800,000 to 1 million humans on the entire planet. And that population, driven by early agriculture, was already a substantial increase over what had been able to survive previously; disease, starvation, and natural shocks, including the vulnerability of children starting with their birth, cooperated to keep the population of hunter-gatherers well below half a million for millennia. But in the years of our era, and especially in the years around 1750 beginning with fossil-fuel-driven machines and industrialization and modern medicine, the human population has expanded so rapidly as to cover even what had previously been uninhabitable parts of the globe. Human population, in short, has been doubling every few years, and that can only mean—even with advances in agricultural productivity, which, ironically, tend to increase population even more—more conflict over resources and habitat. Which is to say, increased use of what natural selection has equipped us with: emotion-driven desire for increase of our kind, and aversion to the increase of others. And, perhaps most important, a tendency to view these imperatives in the short term: it is always “good” to increase our gene pool, and to do whatever is necessary to decrease the gene pool of “others,” no matter what we are told or see in our rational moments about the dangers in the long run. The long run is always discounted. The long run always loses out to short-term survival. And that is why we choose a demagogic imbecile to lead us: he promises those irresistible short-term advantages (fewer regulations; more coal jobs; more oil jobs; more pesticides; more mining and fishing and tax breaks to benefit ‘our’ businesses) that natural selection predisposes us to feel as favorable to “us” and unfavorable to “them.” And there seems no help for it. The appeal to the “fast” parts of the brain that do most of the decision-making, such as the amygdala, simply overpowers (in sufficient numbers to make the difference) the inhibitions that under favorable circumstances can come from the pre-frontal cortex—those parts of the brain dubbed “slow” by Daniel Kahneman, parts which can carefully consider things from a more rational perspective (does it make sense to elect a lying racist? to further poison our air and water and soil?).

            To be sure, this is over-simplified. But the population figures, and the projections about the coming damage to planetary resources like oceans depleted of fish, and forests shrinking to make way for cattle or crops, and the fast-developing resistances of natural pests and bacteria to our best efforts to destroy them, leave us little room for doubt. Our stone-age brains have not had time to evolve more rational responses (we are, after all, only a few thousand years from hunter-gatherer ways and ethics). Short of an unexpected neuro-shift in huge portions of the population, our emotion-thoughts seem well on the way to driving us to irreversible disaster.

            This is not to say, of course, that the project of life on earth will fail. The planet will survive our best efforts to fuck it up as it has survived countless times in the past. Yes, the earth will survive until, several billion years hence, the dying sun expands to engulf it in a fiery end. Indeed, life itself will survive, having no particular need of a brainy ape to continue. And even the brainy ape will probably survive in some form or other, in some quantity or other—perhaps less driven by its short-term good/bad centers, perhaps more chastened with an expanded cortex that will be more adept at seeing long-term consequences. But the civilization that we have created in the last 10,000 years, and the industrial-electronic-agricultural complex we have forged in the last few centuries—that may well be doomed. And perhaps that is as it should be. We have come, like many civilizations in the past, to expect our inevitable progression as the “crown of creation” to continue forever. But we may soon discover that nothing is forever, not even so supremely-adapted a gaggle of primates as we think we are. One wonders, though, if there will be an aware one like Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, to provide our epitaph:

                        My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

                        Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

                        Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

                        Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

                        The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Lawrence DiStasi

War or Peace?

This week being the first anniversary of the Newtown school massacre, I thought it a good time to try to write something about that age-old debate: are we humans by nature warlike killers, or are we peacemakers who are driven to pursue happiness?  A book and a video and an article have each added fuel to one side or the other of this argument: anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s recent memoir, Noble Savages, about his more than 30 years studying the Yanomamo of the Venezuelan/Brazilian rainforest; the documentary shown recently on PBS called “Happy”; and a piece from Think Progress, “Five Reasons Why 2013 Was the Best Year in Human History.” Though they seem to be at odds, taken together they may add up to a reasonable view of just what we, as humans, are and have been and may be evolving to be.

Chagnon has a fairly simple, though not uncontroversial theory. Based on his years living with the Yanomamo—an essentially stone-age people living in small villages where, until recently, they hunted, fished, gathered local crops, and farmed some of the staples like bananas and manioc that sustain them—Chagnon concluded something radical: their frequent fights and wars with their neighbors were not about gaining better territory or increasing their hold on material goods. Rather, their raids were almost always about capturing women. The headman of a group would almost always initiate such raids, as he was the one who almost always came away with an additional wife or wives (the Yanomamo practice polygyny, where the most powerful men have more than one wife.) This in turn meant, according to Chagnon, that the Yanomamo, like most other biological organisms, compete for reproductive access and success: whoever has the most wives has the most offspring, and therefore the most allies to count on whenever a conflict comes up. Those within a given village cooperate with others (villagers are mostly related), but inter-village rivalry is intense and often leads to ‘wars’ where many warriors get killed. These wars, in turn, most often result from the attempt to avenge a previous raid where women were abducted. This accords with Chagnon’s research which shows that most Yanomamo villages have a shortage of women, first because of preferential treatment of male offspring (who are helpful in wars), and second because of polygyny: even were the number of males and females in a village roughly equal, the fact that powerful men take several wives means that there are not enough females for all the males who want one.

Many anthropologists dispute Chagnon (and also Jared Diamond whose recent books have emphasized this same extreme warlike tendency among tribal peoples in New Guinea, who always consider a stranger a dangerous enemy) about both the warlike nature of primal humans and the reasons for their wars. This is why Chagnon subtitles his book: “My life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.” According to him, conventional anthropologists insist on a materialist view of human culture. That is, conflict is believed to arise over access to good land for growing crops, over power in the most material sense of ownership of the most valued goods or means of production, but not over access to females. Chagnon, by contrast, is persuasive in his argument that the access to fertile females really is the key to conflict. In his view, humans are like all other organisms, wherein individual males fight with other males to gain access to females and reproductive success; and where females tend to select the most powerful males (and their genes) so as to give their offspring the best chance to survive. Everything then flows from this: the constant wars, the tendency of males to be killed in such wars (thus producing even more imbalance between men and women), and the constant rituals and games training males for combat. And if we look at some of the early documents in human history, such as the Iliad of Homer, we can see that though the Mycenean Greeks had a very advanced culture compared to the Yanomamo, the root cause of their legendary war was the abduction of a choice female—in this case the abduction of Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, by Paris, which led directly to the tragedy: the siege of Paris’ city by the allies of Menelaus and the destruction of that home, Troy, along with all the Trojans save a few who managed to escape. Not coincidentally, those few, according to legend, founded the next great city-state, Rome, where, according to another legend, there followed the abduction or rape of the Sabine women from the indigenous people so that they, the mostly male followers of Rome’s mythic founder Romulus, could have wives and many offspring. Up to the present day, most literature relies for its drama on this same male conflict over females—in a sublimated form, to be sure, but with the same essential roots.

Chagnon’s research uncovered one more contributing fact to this thesis. The male warriors who have killed at least one enemy in their battles are known as unokais. Chagnon has a chart in his book showing the relation of unokais to the number of offspring. The summary is clear: unokais have almost three times as many offspring as those men who have not killed anyone. That is, the unokais had, on average, 4.91 children compared to the same-age non-unokais, who average only 1.59 offspring each. Among the yanomamo, at least, it pays to be a killer.

I should make clear at this point that I am mainly a pacifist with an abhorrence of war and fighting, so these conclusions do not please me. I would prefer a view that accords with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s idea that humans in a state of nature, without the corruptions attendant to civilization, would have been innocent and playful and loving and peaceful—noble savages. But I also have a commitment to the truth, and the truth seems to be that in the earliest human groups, killing of rivals was routine, and that killing, as with all other animals, most often occurred in the conflict that erupted over access to females. Those who were most successful in battle were most often the ones whose genes were passed on through reproduction. It is not hard to see, even today, the indelible marks of that pattern in our cultural preoccupations, in our sports, in our wars, in our very brains.

The video entitled simply “Happy,” takes another view entirely. Like many others today, it emphasizes the benefit of cooperation, of helping others, of being involved in community. We are shown several “happy” communities: the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, where the nation’s output is measured as “gross national happiness;” Okinawa, which boasts more 100-year-olds per capita than any other place on earth; several people being trained to meditate focusing on compassion for others, whose brains are literally said to change for the better as a result; the San Bushmen of Namibia, who testify to their complete interdependence, and therefore their happy outlook; and a co-housing community in Denmark (said to be the happiest industrial nation on earth) where about twenty families live together while working at normal jobs but are happy due to the sharing of cooking, childcaring and other chores. We are also shown the rat-race in Japan, and one family in particular whose male head worked such long, intense hours for Toyota that he simply dropped dead from overwork. Modern industrial Japan is said to be the most unhappy nation on earth.

The documentary also presents us with scientific validation of its message. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson shows us how Buddhist monk Ricard Matthieu is put into an MRI contraption, and measured while he does compassion meditation. His left prefrontal cortex lights up—indicating that not only is this part of his brain activated to make him more happy, but also that focusing on compassion changes the brains of those who engage in it. That is to say, training the brain to focus on compassion for others, and in fact, actually helping others, re-wires the brain for more happiness. We are told in the very beginning, in fact, that it is not material wealth that leads to happiness since, after a certain level of comfort via possessions, acquiring more wealth simply has no effect. Rather, what leads to ‘positive’ brain states and the release of ‘happiness’ brain neurotransmitters like dopamine, are positive acts and thoughts: compassion, cooperation, and relationships with others. P. Read Montague, PhD says this specifically: cooperation, working with others, actually produces dopamine in the brain, in effect being just as good in this regard as taking drugs. Added to the testimony of old women in Okinawa smiling and dancing, and one single mother in the Denmark co-housing community brightly telling us how well cared for she and her children have become since living there—with the children even taking part, once a month, in cooking for the whole community—this becomes a powerful argument for changing the way most modern humans behave (looking out for number one) and how modern industrial communities (commit any act to increase profit) are structured.

It also challenges the post-Darwinian view that humans are naturally prone to conflict and war due to the evolutionary demand to augment, in whatever way possible, the number of offspring one has. Human nature, in this view, is simply a variant of most animal nature: a no-hold-barred competition to survive and out-reproduce all rivals. Rather, according to “Happy,” human nature must be seen to include the positive effects of selflessness and cooperation and a supportive community. To be sure, these emotions have always been available, even to warrior societies. The difference here is the idea that compassion for all—not just one’s immediate family or neighbors or nation—leads to even more positive effects. We see Andy Wimmer, for example, who trained and worked as a banker, until one day he decided there must be more. He signed up to work in Mother Theresa’s home in India caring for the sick and dying. According to his testimony, and despite having to wash and feed dying, suffering humans, he has never felt more fulfilled, happier. The same testimony is given by a woman hospice worker who deals with terminally ill people all day every day. She is bright, cheerful, and apparently unaffected by the dire circumstances that surround her. And it is obvious that those whom she treats and encourages adore her.

Finally, the article by Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress, reprinted on Nation of Change (http://www.nationofchange.org/5-reasons-why-2013-was-best-year-human-history-1386859589) offers 5 reasons why 2013 was ‘the best year in human history.’ The reasons are: 1) Fewer People are Dying Young, which shows that as recently as 1950, global life expectancy was 47 years, while today it is 70 years. In other words, averaged globally, most people live twice as long today as they did in 1950. This is due both to medical technology and a growing interest in the welfare of foreigners—as indicated by the assistance given to poor countries in fighting diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, and HIV. 2) Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, with its corollary, a happier world. Just since 1981, the percent of the population that lives on less than $1.25 a day has dropped, globally, from 40% in 1981 to 14% in 2010. Even in low income countries, the percentage has dropped from 63% in 1981 to 44% in 2010. 3) War is becoming rarer and less deadly. According to Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, both war and related forms of violence, including the death penalty, are on a clear decline, especially in the last fifty years. From nearly 300 war-related deaths per 100,000 world population during World War II, the rate has declined to less than 1 death per 100,000 in the 21^st Century. Even the death rate in civil wars has declined. Among the factors contributing to the decline are the spread of democracies worldwide, and the invention of U.N. and other peacekeeping operations. 4. Murder rates and other violent crimes are in free-fall. Even in the U.S., violent crime has declined from its peak of 750 crimes per 100,000 Americans in the 1990s to less than 450 in 2009. The same decline is seen in other countries. Among the major reasons—including better lives from improved economies—is one surprising one: the decline in leaded gasoline. With lead banned in 175 countries, the decline in blood levels of lead has reached 90%, and this decline tracks the decline in violent crimes. The reason: lead exposure damages the brain, specifically the parts that inhibit people’s aggressive impulses. With the decline in lead comes more control and less violent crime. And finally, 5) There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world. This is not to say that racism is dead. Far from it. But there is also no denying that greater tolerance is demonstrable everywhere. Look only at the disabling of white minority rule in South Africa, or the fact that much of the United States, where discrimination was once openly defended, now operates under a national consensus about the ideal of racial equality and integration—not always honored in every situation or locality, but increasingly prevalent, especially among younger populations who will soon be the majority. And when it comes to marriage equality for all, regardless of gender preference, the trend is clearly towards greater tolerance: in 2003, there were no states with marriage equality laws; today there are so many that 38% of Americans live in states with such laws.

What, then, are we to conclude about the nature of human nature? Are we humans, by nature, xenophobic, paranoid killers of anyone who is a stranger or a rival? Or are we cooperative creatures disposed to tolerate each other regardless of outward appearances or origin, cooperate with each other beyond familial or national borders, compassionate creatures who, in helping those who need it, become more and more happy with ourselves?

Perhaps the best we can say is that the truth seems to be both. There is no doubting that evolution has shaped us to be violent, aggressive creatures who fight with little provocation and who routinely kill those who threaten either our well-being or our ability to reproduce. But there can also be little doubt that our brains—particularly the more recently developed parts of our brains: the neocortex and especially the left prefrontal cortex involved in compassion—may well be evolving (spurred by the example of culture heroes like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama) towards less aggressive, more compassionate patterns. Otherwise, why would acting compassionately, placing the welfare of others over our own, and living in cooperative and communal ways deliver the good feeling we now know to be the product of dopamine release? This is not to say that dopamine release was “designed” to make humans cooperate (it was designed to provide a powerful reward for whatever enhanced our survival). Rather, it is to say that human development seems to be employing the available neurotransmitters to a greater extent in ways that foster the expansion of cooperative, communal, helping behavior. Whether this trend will continue is anyone’s guess. Life has a way of confounding our fondest hopes and expectations. But if what some of the evidence shows is true, then human development, as Abraham Maslow long ago suggested, is moving towards an optimum functioning marked by greater tolerance, empathy, and helpfulness towards not only our fellow nationals or even fellow humans but the entire planetary population. The only question remaining is, will it come soon enough to head off the residual disasters—nuclear weapons, global warming, the die-off of species—that our older operating kit has brought to critical mass.

Lawrence DiStasi