What's wrong with people?

Well, other people really!

This will be my point: other people. The word other is key, because I will argue that the root of our inequalities of wealth and opportunity lies in where we draw the boundary of our concern. But also, and importantly, that the boundary can be drawn by social mores; or, by default, is controlled by our instincts.

Importantly, the social mores that we may have carefully instilled in us, can be dramatically and quite suddenly turned off, resulting in whole groups or even populations of people behaving sociopathically towards others.

The cause for my reflection on this topic is the unbelievable revolution taking place in the USA - for so long the self-styled exemplar of democracy. But now, to everyone's confusion, behaving as a dictatorship.

What, we ask, is the matter with them?

For most of our evolutionary history as homo sapiens tribes have been our basic social unit. That has been the case since before the time that we developed speech. In in that pre-articulate state we relied very successfully on instinctive behaviour to control our actions. ‘Primitive’ tribes, when discovered recently and therefore not described in theologically paternalistic tones of disapproval, are very successful in nurturing their young and looking after their elders and vulnerable members. Violence only emerges when hunting prey or defending the tribe against other competitor tribes. From an evolutionary perspective there is no advantage to be gained from being empathic towards competitor tribes since they perpetuate competitor DNA.

So, ‘naturally’ we have a tendency to be kind and empathic towards members of our own tribe but ruthlessly aggressive towards members of a competitor tribe. And early tribes were small – prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes were in the range of 30 to 50 people.

Larger tribes existed where there were consistent resources – like a river valley – and they might extend to 150 – 500 in number. (It’s interesting to reflect on the Dunbar number,150, an estimate of the limit of the number of people that can naturally cooperate with each other.)

The development of settled living required cooperative behaviour on a much larger scale than the innate cooperativeness of small tribes – maybe 500 to 5000 in number.

At the same time as these larger social groupings were developing, language was emerging too; and I suspect that this was essential to the ability of humans to extend their boundary of care. To extend instinctive empathy to those not of my instinctive tribe I need to understand ‘how it is for them’, and that is enabled by language.

Furthermore, in order for this new empathic behaviour to be maintained and taught to the young, rules need to be generated that will remind us that certain people, though not instinctively recognisable as ‘our tribe’, are nonetheless to be treated as ‘us’ and not ‘them.

Religious belief systems clearly embody these rules in myths and legends that ensure the passing on of the system to future generations.

And some religious beliefs are universal, in that they see the divinity as being concerned with all people, rather than just one nation.

In this context, it could be argued that Christianity has been the most successful universal faith and its missionaries were very effectively used by early capitalist societies to pave the way for international trade (I am not arguing that they were fair or equitable; but they did transcend what I would term instinctive tribal boundaries.)

Our world has been dominated by the advance of free trade and democracy, as a result of this early missionary activity, up to the point when a nominally Christian country (the US) had held many of the strings of power simply as a result of being the creator of the international currency – the dollar.

And the various international institutions – United Nations, World Trade Organisation, European Union, International Criminal Court – to name but a few, have developed huge collections of rules by which nations try to encourage one another to behave empathically towards each other.

As long as this trend continued, many of us were optimistic that, on balance, the world was becoming a better place.

Suddenly, all that has changed, and seemingly at the hands of one person, the current occupant of the White House.

But behind him there are, increasingly visibly, the multi-billionaires who pull politicians' and media organisations’ strings.

What is even more curious is that many of these individuals, who until now have often seemed to be very concerned about the fate of the poor or the planet, have suddenly switched to pouring their resources into Trump’s coffers or campaigns.

So what is going on?

My assertion is that the answer is surprisingly simple.

If you accept the theory about small scale tribes being instinctively able to cooperate internally, but being naturally aggressive towards competitor tribes; and that this instinctive behaviour is extended and codified in larger populations by appealing to common codes of behaviour, then it must seem clear that such complex behaviour, being essentially un-natural, is vulnerable.

And the main enemy of this extended empathic behaviour is fear. When we fear something we tend to revert to instinctive behaviour. The greater the fear the deeper the regression.

There is another element which we need to consider though. Every tribe of above a certain size tends to need a tribal leader, an alpha male. And tribal leaders that demand greater loyalty will defeat those that don’t.

Moreover, aggressive tribal leaders are more attractive to their members because they demonstrate that they can be ruthless and strong in battle. The harm they might do their own tribal members is an acceptable collateral risk.

So, at the same time as humans’ empathic boundaries may be extended, building ever larger societies, so the ‘ambition’ of tribal leaders to become the alpha male grows to match the potential boundary. An alpha male will never be satisfied while there is a competitor alpha male within its group. The more we see ourselves as part of a single human species with equal rights and therefore equally deserving of our empathy, the more universal the alpha males’ ambition becomes.

So, on the current stage, we have a number of “strong men”, rival global alpha males – Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Trump…  who see each other as competitors. And the curious result of this is that they view each other as members of the same tribe – but not a tribe that any normal person will ever belong to; it’s the tribe of tribal leaders.

They are of course supported and encouraged by the billionaire string-pullers, who may indeed have their own alpha-male tendencies, but are too polite to expose them in public; the ‘strong men’ are their proxies.

I would argue that they too are members of the ‘alpha male tribe’ but are more canny about their activities.

So, when an increasing sense of fear is felt by the nations of the world (largely created or encouraged by the social media) ALL members of our human societies tend to revert to instinctive tribalism. The result is the withdrawal of empathy for those outside our local tribe, the condemning of ‘others’ as now being enemies, the drawing in of our extended tribal boundaries, the increase in suspicion of ‘others’, an increase in the perceived need to defend ourselves and so on. And the ‘strong men’ tribe are not exempt from this. In their case, they drop their empathy for everyone who is not in their tribe – which is why, apparently suddenly, the wealthy string-pullers have stopped caring about mass killings in Gaza, or climate control targets, or the needs of the poor.

They are driven by exactly the same fear to cast the rest of us to our fate, that drives us to close our borders, or write off whole nations as being ‘mad’.

There is a psychological model which interestingly models this on a personal scale. In “The Chimp Paradox’, Professor Steve Peters argues that a significant part of our brain is dedicated to instinctive behaviour, which is largely selfish; but more recently evolved parts of the brain introduce reflection and self-control – a conscience. If we let the chimp rule us without control we embark on a route that is largely destructive both to ourselves and other people, because it works only to protect natural tribes – maybe of no more than 50 people.

But the thing about chimp behaviour is that, because it is instinctual, it is easy! You don’t have to think about what to do or say. You just follow the first thought that comes into your head. No responsibility, no need for a conscience.

This fits perfectly with the behaviour of humans who, because of fear, abandon their social mores and ‘go with the flow.’

For a brilliant (though in places rather rude!) example of this chimp model see the comedy series with Nina Conti and her ventriloquist dummy “Monkey”. And see how quickly and effectively the chimp can demolish, derail and manipulate the host (Nina) and all those around her. 

So to answer the question “what is wrong with ‘other’ people?”

It’s the fact that we now consider them as ‘others’ – which we have been manipulated into doing by the social forces of internet, which having no effective system of mores or controls, has become the playground of our chimp nature.

The fact that world population may seem to be growing uncontrollably and that we are headed towards disaster because of global warming may well have added to this reversion to instinctive tribalism.

Asking the question “what’s wrong with other people?” is a symptom of our disease.