Category: Culture and Society

You Animal You

Chris Wilson1 Comment

Original Post (with comments)
A couple of recent posts have generated some lively discussions, and some of them have led to the nature versus nurture debate. I have been arguing that we come with many of our basic emotions pre-wired, and that it is only the relatively new emergence of malleable cognitive faculties that gives us the chance to change the outcome of situations that would otherwise go down as instinctive responses to external stimuli. Basically, the complexities of cognition and consciousness provide us with free will. Some, however, do not agree. They believe that the hard-wired parts of our minds are limited to the autonomic stuff and the basic survival skills (fight or flight, etc.). They think that the only way I can be right is if humans are robots, robots that were designed. I’ve made my case in comments and will probably attempt to summarize once the dust settles, but I think there’s some value in introducing some basic cognitive science into the picture. What follows is taken almost directly from Chapter 3 of my book.

Contrary to what many people like to believe, no need to believe, humans are not cosmically special. We are animals, not uber-rulers of a vast universe. Yes, we are sophisticated and capable of staggering feats of intelligence, but we are also consistently guilty of acts of passion that mirror the instinctive exploits of our animal cousins. What can we say? It’s in our genes. We all have the same basic genetic framework. The same four letter DNA alphabet (A, T, G, and C) serves as the underlying scaffold for all life on earth. Strands of DNA form genes. Throughout the history of life on this planet, genes have given rise to new organisms that were incrementally different from the ones that came before. However, new organisms were not created from scratch every time. Their designs were built upon designs that have worked well all along. This is why it makes sense that we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, but only 90% with mice. This notion of conservation of design is starkly evident when it comes to the design of the human mind.

The vertebrate brain is divided into three major divisions: the hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain. It turns out that the structure and function of the hindbrain and midbrain in humans are very similar to what is seen in reptiles, birds, and other mammals. All vertebrates have basically the same organization in the spinal cord, brain stem, thalamus, and cerebellum. That goes for rats, lizards, chimps, and humans. To go even further, we know that the same neurochemicals found in the human brain are also found in the nervous systems of leeches and worms, as well as reptiles, birds, and other mammals. Of course, this is not to say that we have the same minds as other animals. Humans are certainly endowed with mental structures and capabilities that far exceed those of any other animals on our planet. The point, however, is that the aspects we share with other animals are playing a leading role in our everyday lives, whether we know it or not. A light exploration of the architecture of the human mind will give us a feel for this.

The fact that we share our emotional infrastructure with other animals has a profound implication on how we experience life and on our search for truth. Consider the following diagram.
Brain Diagram

It depicts the pathway from an emotional stimulus to a bodily response in the brain. The first thing that happens is the emotional stimulus (say spotting a bear when you’re walking in the woods) sends a signal to the thalamus. The thalamus sends the signal to both the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. The amygdala (a brain structure known to be critical in the execution of basic emotional behavior) is responsible for issuing the response as quickly as possible to prepare you for action. The thalamus to amygdala loop constitutes what we’ll call the emotional pathway. The response it issues manifests itself not only in the immediate body response (such as elevating your heart, causing you to freeze, and preparing your muscles to act), but also in a signal to the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex has the luxury of taking its time to receive the signals both from the thalamus and from the amygdala. It also sends signals back down to the amygdala to be processed along with incoming information from the thalamus. So, the conscious emotional experience is separate and comes after the emotional response. The emotional response is what we share with all vertebrates. The emotional experience is reserved for those of us with consciousness. The jury is out as to exactly where that line is drawn, and I won’t dare hazard a guess. But I’d like to believe my dog is conscious. In any case, there are some points to be made about this arrangement between emotions and cognition.

In terms of the brain, there is a “low road” and “high road” when it comes to mentally processing an external stimulus. The low road is the evolutionarily old route. It corresponds to the pathway from the stimulus to the thalamus to the amygdala to the bodily response. This is the basic flow of what we can think of as emotional programs that take place in what is known as the emotional unconscious. It was designed by evolution to produce survival-enhancing responses to stimuli in the real world. This is really the point of the emotions we share with other animals – they are our rapid-response system. The high road, on the other hand, is the evolutionary new kid on the block. It corresponds to the pathway from the emotional stimulus to the thalamus to the cerebral cortex to the amygdala (and back to the cerebral cortex in a loop) to the bodily response. The cerebral cortex is, in a sense, where the cognitive processing happens. While the stimulus is eliciting a response on the “low road,” the cerebral cortex is assimilating both the stimulus and the emotional response into something that can be considered in a larger context. There are two aspects of this arrangement that have implications on our everyday lives.

The first is the notion that emotional processing inhibits cognition. Look back at the diagram and notice how the brain’s cognitive and emotional equipment are connected to each other. As crude as it is (I hear publishers have editors for this kind of thing), the arrangement is deliberate. The emotional low road is connected more closely to the nervous system, and therefore to the environment, than the cognitive high road. This is because, in evolutionary terms, it is much older. It is the part of the brain that we share with other mammals. In a way, our emotions are our brain’s first line of defense. The cognitive loop is “above” the emotional loop in the sense that all stimuli pass through the emotions en route to the cerebral cortex. The thalamus to amygdala loop, therefore, gets first right of refusal in terms of mounting a response to any given stimulus. It gets to decide whether and how to react to a stimulus before the high road is ever involved. This is important because, when the emotions take charge, there seems to be little room for cognition. It’s that simple. And there are plenty of examples in everyday life to prove it.

Ask almost any first time mother of an infant this question. When your baby cries, how easy it for you to think clearly? My straw poll of some well-educated young mothers yielded a pretty much unanimous response, “When my baby cries, I become completely stupid.” They went on to explain that the sound of their babies’ crying brought out feelings of anguish to fix the situation. Of course, as the children get older, this effect diminishes. However, the anguish is perfectly understandable. Some of the most basic emotional functions exist to ensure the wellbeing of offspring. They most directly serve the most gigantic of biological imperatives – the perpetuation of genes. It is, therefore, no surprise that the sound of one’s own baby’s crying elicits a very strong emotional response. (This was originally written before my child was born. I can now personally attest to this.) What is surprising, however, is how much our emotions are involved in our thought processes.

The second implication of the brain’s organization has to do with the cognition versus emotion question. The fact that all cognitive processing happens after emotional processing means that we can’t really be sure about the state of our processing system for any given stimulus (or situation). We can’t be sure how much of the processing that is going on is emotional versus cognitive. In other words, how much of how we are evaluating the world and responding to it is because of what we’re thinking versus what we’re feeling? As much as we would all like to say that we can usually answer that question accurately, the fact is that we really can’t. The odds are against us – for two reasons.

For one thing, emotional processing happens much faster than cognitive processing. Consider the fact that emotions evolved to deal with life and death situations. They facilitate split-second responses when necessary. Cognitive processes, however, are in no hurry. If something is important enough for you to need to respond almost automatically, you can bet there is a basic emotion mediating it. So, emotions are involved first, and they work fast. In the real world, this means that by the time we get around to thinking about something, there’s no telling how much emotional processing has occurred. We can all recall situations where we have reacted emotionally, but denied it vehemently, only to come to our senses and apologize later.

The odds are also against us because of the sheer magnitude of tasks handled by emotions versus those handled by cognition. The brain’s cognitive faculties are evolutionarily new, and they have been built on top of the ancestral emotional infrastructure we share with other animals. We are capable of handling tasks, such as finding food and shelter and responding to threats, with our emotions entirely. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that our animalistic emotions are involved in our daily lives a lot more than we think they are. They’re always on duty; that’s how the brain is wired.

So what does all this have to do with the nature versus nurture argument? It establishes the scientific basis for the idea that what we observe in nature (the phenotype) is the result of a combination of both forces – genes and the environment. More importantly, put this together with the ideas that we share much of our emotional infrastructure with animals and that other animals (primates, big cats, elephants, etc.) have basic emotions that lead to seeking status, anger, jealousy, and so on, but do not have our cognitive faculties, and you can reasonably conclude that a big part of our emotional repertoire is hard-wired. This is not to say that we are doomed to a predetermined existence. The diagram depicted shows quite clearly how the cognitive loop feeds back into the emotional loop, which means that even the most genetically controlled systems can be cognitively manipulated. That really is the scientific basis for the notion of enlightening the caveman in all of us. Am I getting through to you dualists out there?

Footnotes –
1. Some of the info on the wiring of the brain comes from Joseph LeDoux’s The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (Touchstone, 1996).
2. Aspects of the discussion on the evolutionary origins of emotion come from Descartes’ Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio (Avon Books, 1994).

I Fight Authority…Authority Always Wins…OK, Not Always

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Original Post (with comments)
One of my close friends, a cycling buddy, is what I would call a born contrarian. He has a knack for putting his finger in the wind, determining which way it’s blowing, and then concluding that we should ride into it, not with it. If there’s a mainstream trend brewing, he’s aware of it early, and he hates it long before it ever makes it to prime-time TV. That’s his personality, and it makes him a cutting edge, cool guy to be around. I’m more of a self-made contrarian.

Given the choice to follow the crowd or make my own way, I’ll always prefer to make my own way unless…I don’t perceive an agenda or a lemming-like mass movement mentality. (Sometimes, the masses are right. Not too often, but sometimes.) In any case, these are, in my view, the two primary reasons why erroneous and/or worthless ideas get traction in our society. Erroneous ideas, like what is fashionably and musically in, are great examples. In so many cases, those who have authority in our culture, celebrities, set the agenda. They do something out of the ordinary and whamo, a new fad emerges. But hey, it’s cool to be different, so the lemmings get on board, only to ultimately end up being carbon copies of one another. Fortunately, the harm done here is purely aesthetic, for the most part. Agenda-driven ideas, on the other hand, do considerable harm.

Take, for example, the global warming debate. In case you missed it (click here), the recent evolution versus creationism debate veered off into this territory. My argument is that there is a vast conspiracy among academics to support the notion of human induced global warming. This is because the issue is so far from definitive that the political aspect of the debate has clouded the judgement of many reputable scientists. As we all know, academia is replete with left-wingers. In short, there is an agenda behind this fraud. I, therefore, despite the arguments of my critics that those in authority cannot all be wrong, dissent.

The point of this is to suggest that we are ill-advised to take the word of so-called authority figures simply because they are “reputable.” This is nothing more than the “question authority” concept. To say that something such as human induced global warming is true because a preponderance of credible academics say it is is to stand at the precipice of a slope that is dripping with 30-weight motor oil. Once you use this rationale to buy into something, you’re far more likely to do it again and again. But, given the obsession of this blog, I would argue that there is a genetic component to this.

We are driven to pursue status in our interpersonal endeavors. This makes us particularly vulnerable to being duped by those who have it. Given the choice between believing an idea put forth by someone we believe to have high status and believing an idea put forth by someone with questionable status, our genes will push us to the former. This is true when it comes to everything from religion to politics to economics, but it need not be this way.

I am a constant advocate of critical rationalism because I think it gets us out from under this problem. We have to consciously choose to put our status-oriented biases aside and consider matters in critically in terms of evidence. And we also have to be aware that our best efforts at objectivity can still be confounded by our caveman emotions. That’s why it is so key that we understand them – what they were designed to get us to do and how we can go about compensating for them. From this emerges the self-made contrarian, the one who thinks about the mass mind as flawed and not to be trusted, the one who rides against the wind, not with it.

Airplane Chatter and the Bar of Belief

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Original Post (with comments)
I very rarely get chatty with people on airplanes. I am generally nose down in a book or I’m crashed. But this afternoon, for some reason, I got to talking with the guy next to me, and we ended up talking for the entire 80 or so minutes we were in the air. He noticed that I was reading (still reading – it’s taking forever, for some reason) Susan Jacoby’s, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, so he asked what secularism was. I never got the guy’s name, so we’ll call him Jimbo (He seemed like a Jimbo to me.).

Jimbo said that he watches “The O’Reilly Factor” and that O’Reilly regularly talks about the war between Judeo Christians and the secularists. He said he’d been wondering what it was and that, since I had a book on it, he figured he’d ask me. So, I explained to him what it meant to be a secularist, and I expressed that I thought O’Reilly’s fear that a secular world would be a moral vacuum was overblown. I really expected him to be a Christian, but Jimbo said he wasn’t religious, that he just concentrated on being a good person. My kind of guy. So we proceeded to discuss all kinds of topics, and it quickly became apparent to me that Jimbo was two things:

  1. An alcoholic
  2. Not very discriminating in determining what he believes

I counted five beers on the short ride from Atlanta to Memphis. Now, far be it from me to call someone an alcoholic without cause, but five beers in 80 minutes by yourself on a Sunday night before a work day raises a red flag. Then, after I explained that my wife is in the medical field, he went on to reveal that his doctor told him he has a fatty liver. Yikes – that’s the condition that precedes cirrhosis. Anyhow, it was Jimbo’s reaction to this news (“Doc says I should stop drinking, but I don’t really drink that much.”), along with his comments about several other things that led me to believe that he believes what is comforting to him, rather than what makes sense.

For example, Jimbo only drinks “purified water.” He says it is “ionized, deionized” (whatever that means). Jimbo says it means they inject extra oxygen into it, which, as everyone knows, is good for you. I asked Jimbo what made him think that was better. I asked him what he thought the primary oxygen in-take mechanism in the human body is. He correctly noted that it was the mouth and the nose. OK, Jimbo, after that. He looked a little puzzled so I helped him out. It’s the lungs, buddy. The blood that courses around the lungs is picking up oxygen. The blood cruising around the stomach isn’t worried about oxygen, I said. One thing I really liked about Jimbo was that he didn’t ever feign certainty. To my comments, he just said, well maybe there’s something else going on there. Wisdom comes out of nowhere sometimes.

Jimbo also told me that he has been doing a lot of reading (on the internet) about homeopathic medicine. He explained that pharma companies aren’t interested in curing anyone because it cuts into their profits. As I happen to consult in the pharma industry, I took the opportunity to probe a bit further. It seems that Vitamin C is the cure for cancer, but the drug companies have managed to successfully keep that information from the public. So, I asked Jimbo how he came to find out this well-guarded secret. He said he just looked around on the internet. So, I asked why he thought Rathergate exploded through the internet while the cure for cancer sat there, with very little public awareness. He just gave me a quizzical look. I told him that I believe that the personal benefits that await any individual associated with curing cancer would render the cure all but inconcealable. Quizzical again, he said, “Yeah, I guess it’s really hard to know what’s true and what’s not.” There’s that wisdom again.

When we initially started talking, talking about religion, I explained that believing in religion is expensive, because it forces people to go to a lot of trouble to live a certain way, a way that does not come exactly naturally. I said that if I was going to buy in, it’d take a lot of convincing. He was on board with that. So, as the plane was about to land, I remarked to him that just about any belief has a cost, and that some of things we’d discussed have very serious ones (He said he didn’t have much use for regular doctors, especially the one who told him about his fatty liver.). I think he agreed with this, at least in principle. As we parted ways, I asked Jimbo to promise me that, if he ever got cancer, he’d see a doctor AND eat his vitamin C. He smiled and nodded his head as he walked into the bar to catch the last two minutes of the Atlanta/Philly game. Nice guy. Misled, but nice.

As I walked on, all I could wonder was how many Jimbos are out there. How many really cool, really friendly, really ethical people are saddled with an inability to tell truth from fiction? How many people have the best of intentions, the discipline to do what’s right, but lack the wisdom to know when their minds are choosing ideas that give them the illusion of control in a chaotic world. (Vitamin C? Purified water?) Whatever the number, it’s too high. My quest is enlightenment for the Jimbos of the world. I wonder if he’ll think about what we talked about. I know I did.

Hope, Despair, and the Need to Believe – An Argument for Reason

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Original Post (with comments)
I want to follow up on a comment about the post from two days ago. Michael Gersh (of Zero Base Thinking fame), has this to say about the opinions of many of secularists who come off more as anti-religious than agnostic:

Maybe I have missed something here, but isn’t religion, or at least the need to believe in that which we have no logical answer for, hard wired into the human brain, by the same forces of evolution that shaped the rest of our ouvre? Smug secularists posting here might believe themselves to be above this basic human need, but I think that this is a distinction without a difference. While many so-called rationalists might disbelieve the Bible’s miracles, they merely believe in something else. Maybe global warming, or other environmental belief, that Michael Crichton has so presciently perceived as akin to religious belief. Maybe it is some sort of overreliance of other human constructs, such as the social contract, or even the supremacy of rationality itself.

None of us are immune to this human tendency to believe in some specific explanation for an essentially unknown, and perhaps unknowable condition.

I don’t think we necessarily have an inherent need to believe in the inexplicable so much as we have a hard-wired need to explain our environment, if for no other reason than to connect cause with effect. Before we can associate a certain set of conditions with a certain outcome, we have to be able to identify and categorize what we perceive. If a caveman witnesses the mauling of a fellow tribesman by a lion, his mind notes the existence of a furry and ferocious entity. It then categorizes it as an entity that can kill humans. The next time he sees one, even if it looks a little different (perhaps it’s female and the first was a male), he will generalize that he is in danger. This is key mental adaptation for survival, one that is well distributed throughout the animal kingdom. But with humans, there is a layer of cognition that does not come installed in the brains of our animal brethren. This is where the belief problem comes from.

In my view, non-human animals, though driven by emotion, are supremely rational in their perception of their environment – water is wet, always. They cannot be otherwise. Humans, however, have the free will to choose to interpret their world irrationally. A human can decide that a cobra is not dangerous, even when his animal emotions drive him to act as if is. Though this free will undoubtedly serves us well, it has a downside. We can fall victim to false hope.

In a paper called, “The Evolution of Hope and Despair,” University of Michigan professor of psychiatry and psychology, Randolph Nesse, lays out the idea that hope and despair are simply emotions driven by our appraisals of whether or not our environment will favor or disfavor the realization of our goals. Like other emotions, they serve to drive us to do things that will keep us alive long enough to reproduce. They are sort of the uber-assessors of our surroundings. If we find ourselves in circumstances that bode well for us, we have hope, so we stick around. Alternatively, if our circumstances look grim, we feel despair, which pushes us to change our situation. But what happens when we cannot explain our environment? What happens when we have no categories for the phenomena we witness?

As an absurd example, suppose a caveman stumbles upon a spaceship. Neither he nor any of his tribesmen have ever seen anything even remotely like it, so they are perplexed, to say the least. But uncertainty does not make for decisive action, which, in harsh times, is an utter necessity. Indeed, in a heated competition for survival, prolonged contemplation of the unknown is often a grave mistake. Conclusions must be drawn so that decisions can be made. The human mind, given the choice between choosing an explanation for the unknown, even if it’s a bad one, and choosing to leave the matter unsettled, will, therefore, choose an explanation. But how?

Our rational animal perceptions will provide us with competing explanations for what we observe. Then, we will decide which one to believe – by choosing the one that offers the most hope. Just as we’re emotionally drawn to situations that give us the warm, fuzzy feeling in our stomachs, so are we drawn to hopeful situations. So, while I’m not prepared to say that we have inherent need to believe in irrational things, I will say that our need to explain our world coupled with our attraction to hopeful situations sets us up to fall victim to irrationalism, and not just with respect to religion.

The lottery is one of the ultimate examples of false hope. We’ve all seen poor people in line at convenience stores spending money that would more intelligently be spent elsewhere on scores of quick picks and scratch-off games. In fact, on more than one occasion, I’ve heard people say, “When I win the lottery, I’m going to…..” Now, it’s one thing to say this in jest; it’s quite another to believe it. Many people really do, and this is a shame because I am convinced that this false hope removes much of the necessity to recognize reality for what it is and to act accordingly.
It is a fact of life that many people are born into terrible circumstances. Those who rise above them are the ones who see and accept their plight for what it is. This acceptance is the first step in determining how to overcome whatever impedes their achievement of their aims. False hope blurs reality and fosters inaction, or worse yet, useless action. The same is true of irrationality.

I think there are two types of secularists – the ones who apply rationality to all things, including religion, and the ones who happen to be rational about religion, but have no particular allegiance to it in other matters. I am one of the former. Michael, I think the smug secularists you refer to would find themselves among the latter. In any case, there is one staggeringly straight forward fix for the problems that come from the need to explain and the attraction to hope. It is called critical rationalism.

We start by admitting that we can be certain about nothing. Nothing. Then, we decide to put everything into one of three categories – things we believe, things we do not believe, and things we choose to leave unsettled. To determine what we believe and what we do not believe, we demand evidence, and we favor evidence that disproves assertions over evidence that proves assertions (since we can never really prove anything). We weigh the evidence for possible explanations and decide what to believe and disbelieve, and when the evidence is not compelling one way or another, we abstain. We are not cavemen, which means ambiguity is not dangerous for us. We do not have to act or die. This means that we can (and must) become comfortable with uncertainty. If we are successful at being critically rational, we are immuned from the perils of false hope and irrationality. But rationalism for the hope-addicted mind does not always come easy.

At the end of the day, each of us must decide how we will think. If we do not, we will vacillate opportunistically between rationality and irrationality – invoking either one based upon personal convenience. But deciding to be rational at all times is like deciding to be nice all the time. It’s an aim, an intention. We will, from time to time, falter. However, as long as we recognize the value of rationality, we will get back up and keep moving forward. That’s life. It’s best if we focus on our own journey and leave the arrogance to the certain, who always learn sooner or later that nothing is certain.

Your Genes Want You To Drive A BMW

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Original Post (with comments)
Given some of the mail I’ve received of late, perhaps its time to go back to basics…

Your genes want you to drive a BMW. They also want you to be thin, tan, and to have a lovely smile. Your genes want you to be the life of the party – perhaps a musician or an artist or a celebrity of some sort. “What?” you say. That’s right. Though you probably don’t realize it, humans are genetically inclined to be aware of who’s at the top of the social totem pole, and more importantly, to emulate whatever it is those people did to get there.

According to evolutionary psychologists, our genes build our minds to pursue status in social groups. This is because, long ago, when humans were still cave-dwellers, status meant the difference between life and death. Being among the best hunters and warriors was a sure way to obtain food when food was scarce. Therefore, Mother Nature, ever the tinkerer, discovered that humans who were genetically driven to pursue status would outlive those who were not. Thus was born the status-seeking gene, and it has been with us ever since. (In truth, it is a gross oversimplification to assert that there are specific genes for this or that attribute. It’s just an easy way to say that a trait is largely genetic.)

In any case, Robert Wright chronicled this and other insights into the evolutionary history of the human mind in his 1994 best-seller, The Moral Animal. As astounding as the book was, a decade has passed and most folks still don’t know anything about why they think and feel the way they do. This is a real problem, unless of course everyone can have a BMW, and assuming that having a BMW is really all it’s cracked up to be.
It breaks down like this. From a genetic perspective, modern humans have the minds of cavemen. As soon as humans could organize sufficiently to protect themselves from nature and other humans, and could consistently procure food in mass quantities, natural selection no longer had an easy task of separating the fit from the unfit. Fitness became more a function of luck or circumstance than strength or skill, at least when it came to living long enough to reproduce (which is the only real goal of our genes). The process that had been shaping the human mind for eons suddenly ground to a halt. This is believed to have happened somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 years ago. Since then, the genes that code for our minds have not changed significantly. They just get reshuffled again and again, generation after generation. And here we are, dozens of millennia later, mostly unaware of the degree to which the environment of our ancestors affects our day-to-day lives.

Seeking status in ancient times was a survival necessity. In modern times, it is a fool’s errand. This is because what counts for status today has nothing to do with survival. Who’s at the top of the social totem pole these days? Celebrities. Whether we’re talking about sports stars, musicians, actors, business tycoons, and even religious figures, one thing is certain – the masses are paying close attention to what they do, and, in many cases, they are following suit.

Those who get the most attention in our society are the role models, whether they like it or not. They set the cultural agenda. It has always been so. From Elvis’ sideburns to Madonna’s material girl get-up to the current obsession with “bling,” it is instantly apparent how much popularity equals status in our modern world. From shows like Entertainment Tonight and magazines like Us and People, we can see that America’s obsession with stars is a multi-billion dollar industry. But doesn’t anyone ever wonder why so many people across such a diverse land would share such a shallow proclivity?

As we learn more and more, it becomes clearer and clearer that it’s genetic. But that doesn’t mean we have to give in. As they say in the world of addiction, admitting that there’s a problem is half the battle. Like it or not, we currently find ourselves in a battle for sanity, or at least emotional stability. How many among us are dying to drive a BMW, not because it is a superior automobile, but because of how it will be perceived by friends and acquaintances? How many are depressed when they look in the mirror because they don’t resemble the celebrities they so desperately envy? More generally, how much of what we do is for show rather than for substance? It doesn’t have to be this way.

If we’re going to make any more progress as a species, we’re going to have to recognize that our minds are constructed from the genetic blueprints of our cave-dwelling ancestors, blueprints that were designed for a world that no longer exists, blueprints that are at work every day pushing us to obtain status in our social endeavors. That’s our starting point. From there, the fix is within our reach. Indeed, many have overcome their genetic imperatives.

As a species, we have a long history of taming our genes. Birth control, monogamy, the rule of law, capitalism, and gene therapy are all examples of mankind overruling genetic influences in favor the conscious desires of human beings. A cursory look around reveals that there are many who have rationally concluded that society’s value systems are fickle at best, and demented at worst. Some folks have taught their genes not to want a BMW, at least not simply because the possession of a BMW means they’re somebody. They have deliberately concluded that wealth does not necessarily equate with value as a human being, nor does physical appearance or the ability to excel in sports or in the arts. Though any one of these things may (and often should) be admired by society, at the end of the day, none matters in and of itself.

John Kerry jokingly said during the campaign season that he and George Bush had “married up.” That a statement like this is categorically unremarkable is a testament to how much the awareness of and quest for status imbues our collective perspective. If we are to keep our genes from having their way with us, the time has come to start recognizing when our concern for status is getting in the way of our enjoying life. In other words, what do we have to give up so our genes can have a BMW? Asking questions like this is the first step in enlightening the caveman in all of us.

Musing Between Theory and Practice

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Original Post (with comments)
Yesterday’s column raised some eyebrows. I got a few notes from folks who felt it was totally out of character and even somewhat irrational. They were concerned that I was standing atop one of the slipperiest slopes known to man. Indeed, they were right. I am, but it’s no cause for alarm. It seems to me that the difference between conservatism and liberalism is often the difference between theory and practice, and predictably, I come down somewhere in the middle. I really think it’s possible to be a compassionate hard-ass.

Bertrand Russell is my favorite philosopher – hands down; it’s not even close. The things he observed and codified about humanity were so prescient that it’s somewhat eery to read them this many years later. One thing he harped on a bit was the treatment of criminals. In a brilliant little book entitled What I Believe (1925 – I have it as an essay in the book, Why I Am Not A Christian – 1957), he wrote:

I merely wish to suggest that we should treat the criminal as we treat a man suffering from the plague. Each is a public danger, each must have his liberty curtailed until he has ceased to be a danger. But the man suffering from the plague is an object of sympathy and commiseration, whereas the criminal is an object of execration. This is quite irrational. And it because of this difference of attitude that our prisons are so much less successful in curing criminal tendencies than our hospitals are at curing disease.

Now, Russell was not so naive as to overlook the valuable deterrence that comes with criminal punishment. His point was, however, to say that, “The vindictive feeling of ‘moral indignation’ is merely a form of cruelty.” This is where I’m coming from in suggesting that even the most economically conservative among us should be careful in simply dismissing the bad decisions of the poor and ignorant as “their problem.”
The liberal theory, the one that underlies much of Russell’s thinking (he had serious socialist tendencies), is that it is unfair to hold people responsible for all of their actions if there are mitigating circumstances. The conservative practice is that this is exactly what we must do if it is an orderly society that we seek. I think there’s middle ground here.

What often gets lost in these kinds of discussions is the fact that the history of the human condition has been most characterized by Mother Nature and social groups holding individuals accountable for their actions, regardless of circumstances. Either you provide for yourself or you die. This is the harsh reality of our animal heritage. And while it is a true that it is now possible for people who do nothing toward their own self-preservation to survive and even prosper, we should only see this as an achievement if it does not unravel the system that gave rise to it. This is where practicality rules the day.

It is clear that the rule of law is the tie that binds a free society. If we lean too far left, it is the rule of law that perishes, even as the wards of the state (and the guilt-ridden achievers) applaud the victory of theory over practice. When we distort the nexus between actions and consequences with proximate causes, we subvert the role of our criminal justice system and invite chaos into order. Practicality, therefore, requires us to be compassionate hard-asses when it comes to attitudes about economic stratification.

We should think of our economic system as an anonymous one – anonymous in terms of individuals operating within the system and anonymous in terms of the forces that shape the free market (the invisible hand). Capitalism, by taking advantage of human nature, is based upon this very idea. We recognize at the outset that there will be winners and losers, but we also recognize that our system produces more winners than any other ever devised. The question is what to do when anonymous losers become real people with real problems.

Lefties will, whether they know it or not, advocate changing the system to eliminate losers entirely – this is the vision of the welfare state. It is, quite obviously, impossible, which is why liberals are so often accused of living in fantasy land. My recommendation is that we come up with a means by which we deal with losers once they appear on our radar screen. We should consider it an ancillary benefit that capitalism will alert us to the existence of those who are not faring well under it, not as indication of its cracked foundation. We cannot control a person’s starting point in life, which means we will inevitably come upon folks who cannot make the wise decisions that are the prerequisites to economic success in a free market society. This is not a bad thing. It’s a reflection on reality. What we do next is what matters.

I am vehemently against handouts of pretty much any sort, except in extreme cases. I think a good quid pro quo beats a handout most every time, so despite my compassion towards those who are hurt by our system, you’ll never hear me argue for more welfare benefits. The solution, I believe, starts with separating the truly needy from the able but mentally unprepared. The truly needy, the insane and disabled, are the exceptions to the handout rule. If they cannot reciprocate, compassion dictates that we help them anyway. It is the able but mentally unprepared who have no business getting handouts in my book.

This is where the time horizon of maturity concept comes in. If we can say that the primary feature of being mentally unprepared to thrive in a capitalistic society is being unable to envision and internalize the consequences of future actions, and I think we can, then disdain has no place in these discussions. “Their problems” are our problems, in more ways than we think, which means it is incumbent upon us to try to solve them…without disturbing the economic incentives that underlie our system.

We must introduce a quid pro quo function into the provision of welfare benefits, and I’m not talking about means testing. Means testing will tell us if someone needs help, but it will not tell us why, and it will not tell us what kind. The trick is to provide benefits that sustain life, but with a catch – they diminish unless educational milestones are met, but not just involving traditional concepts of education. The curriculum must, first and foremost, be designed to resolve the time horizon problem. This is the first filter, so to speak. We can’t forget that among the losers in our society, there will always be able-bodied individuals who do not possess the time horizon problem but simply will not act on their own behalf. (If we must dole out disdain, and I’m not saying we must, it is to these souls that it should be aimed.) I am convinced that most people, if properly grounded in the actions/consequences concept, will rise above their plight. The right kind of education is the first step.

The test will come when we then become hard-asses, forcing them to do what it takes…like everyone else. Those who pass, meaning they take responsibility for their lives, get to become anonymous again. Those who do not then go through another evaluation to determine if they’re really needy or just shiftless. The needy get the handouts; the shiftless get to experience the consequences they care so little about. It’s not perfect, but it’s ethical and, most important, it’s fair – we can’t change the system for a few bad apples, but we can at least be rigorous in the separation.
The tricky thing about straddling the line between theory and practice is that solutions often come out half-baked. I’ll admit that this one is. But it’s still better than considering the non-achievers among us as losers without a second thought. We’re better than that, so I’ll hold out hope that a fully-baked solution, one that embraces compassionate hard-assism (please add another hokey coined phrase to my credits), avails itself in due time.

Being Poor is Whose Fault? The Time Horizon of Maturity Reprise

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Original Post (with comments)
Neal Boortz, my favorite radio guy, is fond of saying that poverty is a mental disease, that poor people are poor because they keep doing things that make people poor. It’s all about choices, says the talkmaster. I tend to agree, but there’s more to it than that. I concede that making bad decisions is the fastest way to get poor and stay poor. However, the question on my mind has to do with the culpability of people who consistently make bad decisions. What if the reason so many folks make consistently bad decisions is beyond their control? Then what? Then is it reasonable to advocate a social system that dooms these truly unfortunate souls to the perpetual motion machine of poverty?

I can almost hear the gasps. Here I am, one who pleads regularly for more personal responsibility, taking the blame off the individual. Allow me to elaborate. As I’ve mentioned before, a major component of human development is what I call the time horizon of maturity. This basically refers to one’s ability to project him or herself into the future to actually envision the consequences of actions that are being taken in the present. Children have a very short time horizon, and this is mostly a function of their limited understanding of the concept of time in general. As they grow up, however, they come to understand time, and if they’re raised in the right kind of environment, they come to be able to imagine themselves in the future. This is the key to making good decisions.

Many liberal-minded people think of conservatives as heartless because conservatives don’t often display a great deal of sympathy for people who have had the chance to do something with their lives but they simply haven’t. Indeed, as I myself have said many times, I went to public school. I could have kicked back and lived the high life (literally) every day , but I wanted a future that would not allow it. How is it fair that someone should be rewarded with part of my success (in the form of benefits that come from my tax dollars) for doing nothing, for contributing nothing? Though it has been a bit discomforting, the idea has been steadily dawning on me over the last year or so that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the libs have gotten this one right…at least partly right – they’ve correctly identified the problem.

Imagine an 8-year old white boy named Jimmy. His father left shortly after he was born. His mother, Lila, has tried to work but she’s been fired again and again for poor attendance – some due to looking after Jimmy, some due to looking after herself a little too much. Now she’s on welfare. She gets food stamps and a check every month. They also live in government housing. Jimmy’s neighborhood is tough, even for 8-year olds. Most of the kids hate school and ditch it whenever they can. Jimmy is no different. When the school calls home to notify Lila, she’s too engrossed in daytime TV to care. Besides, she never exactly liked school herself. Now, the question, the one I can’t shake is this: when 20 years goes by and Jimmy is a derelict in his neighborhood (if he’s still alive), was it his fault that he never got his act together?

The answer revolves around whether or not he possesses the ability to see the future…with himself in it. I am more and more convinced that most people in poverty simply do not. If you say to someone, “You must study for this test in order to pass this course,” it means nothing if passing the course means nothing to that person. Passing a course is not an end in itself. It is the means to an end. In order for one to be motivated by this line of reasoning, he or she must be able to internalize the personal significance of passing the course. More importantly, the significance has to be more powerful than whatever immediate gratification must be foregone in the studying. So you can’t just pound home the platitude that you have to stay in school to succeed in life. It’s like a foreign language to one who cannot see the future, and we cannot hold this person responsible for not speaking a language that they have no experience with. This, more than anything else, is the poverty problem, and our society is not addressing it at all.

What are we to do? This is the big question. Here, I must side with my fiscally conservative brethren in saying that income redistribution is not the answer, at least not as it is done today. You can’t give money to someone who lives for today and expect them to do anything but spend it as fast as possible. This is the phenomenon that explains the staggering number of lottery winners who end up in jail for failing to pay taxes on everything they buy and for defaulting on massive debts. No, money is not the answer. We need widespread prognostication education.

One way or another, we have to get to the people currently in poverty and teach them to envision themselves experiencing the consequences of their decisions. We have to teach them to teach their children the same thing. We have to go back to basics. It’s all about action and reaction. As we do when teaching anything complex, we must start small and work our way up. We need to be able to diagnose where people are and then get them in a program to see further and further into the future. When we have a nation of amateur prognosticators, we can feel justified in holding them accountable for their actions. Until that time, we should be careful with our judgement. We should thank luck and circumstance that it is not we who see tomorrow so much fuzzier than we see today.

From the Mailbag – One Reader Objects To His Genes

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Original Post (with comments)
I got this email recently in response to the “Is Man Inherently Selfless?” article. It is chocked full of object lessons in how not to think about this stuff, so I figured I’d take it apart piece-by-piece.

One thing I read over and over again from evolutionary biologists is how men are genetically programmed to want to impregnate as many women as possible. Men are genetically predisposed agains monogamy. This is totally false. I am not programmed that way. It’s certainly not because I have rid myself of my bass desires through mental discipline. And the reasoning for it isn’t particularly enlightened. It’s quite simple and tied to other unenlightened caveman values. Status. Your offspring are much more likely to achieve status if they are born into a monogamous relationship than if they aren’t. And whereas I certainly could enjoy having sex with 70 virgins I would be highly unlikely to cheat on a monogamous mate because of feelings of loyalty which can override sexual desire. Especially if you have kids, from what I’ve heard people’s sex drive gets noticeably weaker once they have had offspring.
I knowingly embrace these caveman values of mine.

Let’s start with the biggest red flag of them all – “This is totally false. I am not programmed that way.” I see. So if this person had six fingers on his left hand and I stated that humans have five fingers on each hand, would he say that that also is totally false? It’s false for him. Exceptions to rules do not necessarily negate them. We can’t think of ourselves as archetypical representatives of our species. Some combination of genes and culture could easily produce a person who displays almost no “caveman-like” behavior. That doesn’t mean our ancestors were not cavemen, and it does not mean that the biological facts of reality are not still in play.

The facts I’m referring to have to do with the size of our sex cells. Males have many, many small ones; females have relatively few large ones. The size and quantity of sperm cells in males means that males have plenty to lose – there are millions more where they came from. In females, however, eggs are very precious. This is the reason for the divergent reproductive strategies of males and females. Males have shotguns; females have rifles. It’s that simple.

“Your offspring are much more likely to achieve status if they are born into a monogamous relationship than if they aren’t.” Sorry. Wrong again. The notion of monogamous relationships is very modern – as in, it has only been around for a few millennia. When our genes were being shaped by natural selection, it is doubtful that anything resembling monogamy existed, at least nothing very long-term. You can’t think so digitally about this. There are more than two options. Your genes, which are all that matters here, are best served if you have hundreds of kids by impregnating hundreds of women who already have mates, and then having those mates raise them. In fact, it is widely believed that jealousy emerged to keep males from being cuckolded (where they unknowingly raised another male’s child). If this is true, then we can think of monogamy as a cultural analog to jealousy – both exist to see that any time or resources a male invests in his offspring are not actually being invested in someone else’s offspring.

“And whereas I certainly could enjoy having sex with 70 virgins I would be highly unlikely to cheat on a monogamous mate because of feelings of loyalty which can override sexual desire.” Your feelings of loyalty to your mate have been installed by your environment, I can assure you. This is easy to see because you don’t have to teach kids to tell lies and be selfish. You have to teach them to tell the truth, even when it hurts. You have to teach them to share. And when it comes to sex – look at what goes on in the least educated, most ignorant places in the world. Rampant male promiscuity is the order of the day. Just look at America’s inner cities. Very few mothers are married, yet most males have children. The flip side is to look at affluent and educated people. Fewer kids, more marriages. I suspect that you grew up closer to the affluent educated side of the spectrum than you did the poor ignorant side. That, more than anything else, explains your “loyalty.”

“Especially if you have kids, from what I’ve heard people’s sex drive gets noticeably weaker once they have had offspring.” Sex drive toward the male’s mate may get weaker, but take away any culturally-installed inhibitions and put him in the back room of a strip club with a dozen prostitutes and then tell me about his sex drive.

Let me shout this point from the rooftops – IF YOU ARE MONOGAMOUS AND FAITHFUL, IT IS BECAUSE YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCES HAVE TAUGHT YOU TO OVERCOME YOUR GENES. The job can be done so well that you never even know it happened – just like how kids raised in devout religious environments never even realize (at least not until they get out into the world) that it’s possible to go through life without ever believing in God. Early indoctrination of the human mind is every bit as powerful as genetics, which is why we should be using it to do good, not to promote superstitions and nonsense. Those of us who have risen above our genes have much to be proud of, but as long as people continue to deny the dangers of our natural tendencies, we’ll never realize the vision of a truly compassionate and rational society.

This is a classic case of recognizing the problem being half the battle. Those who insist upon romanticizing humanity will consistently fail at this. Too bad. How do we justify telling a kid after catching him in a lie that he’s programmed to be good, but that somehow he has turned against his nature? And we wonder why so many people have inferiority complexes.

Is Man Inherently Selfless?

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Original Post (with comments)
Scientific American is putting out a new quarterly magazine called Scientific American MIND. I picked up what they’re calling the premier issue (although there are letters to the editor regarding the previous one – go figure) and found an interesting article on a topic I’ve written about before. That topic is altruism. My thesis, the one I’ve gotten from evolutionary psychologists, has been that altruism doesn’t really exist, that seemingly benevolent actions are really just selfish acts with less obvious payoffs than usual. The article, entitled “The Samaritan Paradox,” argues that this thesis may be flawed. The authors, Ernst Fehr (an economist from the University of Zurich) and Suzann-Viola Renninger (a journalist educated in biology and philosophy, also in Zurich) put forth the notion that humans may indeed be endowed with genes for selflessness and truly altruistic behavior. Hmm. As much fun as it might be to be debunk the prevailing scientific wisdom, I don’t think these two are up to it.

Their argument is full of holes, which is understandable – them being Swiss and all. (Get it?  Swiss cheese…) It rests on what they deem to be the perennially intractable problem with the selfish gene theory – the presence of people who give and give with no hope of ever getting – people like Mother Theresa and volunteers who rush to the aid of perfect strangers after natural disasters. They write,

Such sacrifice does not follow the rules of evolutionary biology. If the immediate family does not profit and if neither reciprocal aid nor aid aimed at improving reputation promise future advantage, then selflessness gains nothing. Worse, it is costly in terms of resources, health, or money. By this logic, there really should not be any good Samaritans. Yet they clearly exist.

Well, I guess that settles it. Sarcasm aside, I think this is a good example of how evolutionary theory gets contentious. These two authors have pitted themselves against the master himself, Richard Dawkins, in suggesting that his elegantly simple theory may be overblown. The problem is that they cannot see the forest for the trees. Instead of considering the simple (and obvious, at least to me) solution, they run off on a long tangent about “punishment” games. Fehr and Renninger attempt to prove the exception to the selfishness disguised as altruism concept by citing games which show that “many people – even when facing high monetary stakes – are willing to penalize others at a cost to themselves to prevent unfair outcomes or to sanction bad behavior.”  This proves nothing.

In my mind, it is obvious why we see selfless acts that clearly have no payoff. It’s the caveman mind in a modern world problem. We can’t forget that our emotions evolved to motivate us to do things that would see to our survival. As I’ve mentioned before, sympathy has been referred to as nature’s bargain hunter. It works like this: a caveman walking along stumbles on a guy who’s down on his luck and hungry. This caveman, all of sudden, starts to feel this twinge of emotion that is discomforting. Looking for some way to assuage his tortured mind, he offers some meat to the hard-luck character. Voila – he feels better. The consequence? He gets back more meat than he gave at some point down the road, or he has a new ally in the dangerous game of making it to the next day. All other things being equal, the caveman with this emotional proclivity has a better chance of surviving than the caveman who ignores the guy in trouble – he gets a large return on a small, insignificant investment. But, though we have the same genes, we are not cavemen.

The crumbling of the false hope that mankind is at his core benevolent hinges on the idea that our minds, and therefore our emotions, were designed for an environment that no longer exists. This explains why they should be going haywire, so to speak, in modern times. In caveman days, life was not as anonymous as it is today. In a tight knit social environment, bargain-hunting emotions flourished because they led to actions that benefited the individuals that had them. In this world, however, it isn’t inconceivable that those emotions (since they are today what they were back then) could lead to acts that would result in no benefit whatsoever. Emotions are powerful, and sometimes we humans do whatever they command – like running into a burning building to save someone we don’t know, dying in the process. In my view, it’s more likely that selfless acts are indicators of miscalculating anachronistic selfish motives than they are of some inherent selflessness in mankind. Given the countless other ways our ancient emotions steer us wrong, this just makes the most sense. The good news is, however, that these ill-fated emotional tendencies need not be attenuated.

Just as love is not achieving its original aim – getting us to pump out as many offspring as possible – neither is sympathy. But far from being cause for alarm, this is cause for celebration, for it means that we are not doomed to operate as robots blindly following our emotions, as our cave-dwelling ancestors were. We can, instead, harness them for our own enjoyment of life, clinging to the ones that make us happy and discarding the ones that weigh us down – we need only understand them. Furthermore, considering that the prevailing theme throughout the history of mankind has been the struggle for power between the haves and the have-nots, is it not reasonable to conclude that we are naturally selfish, but that a few, the enlightened, have consistently raised the bar of compassion in human society? So to Fehr and Renninger I say, nice try, but you’re fired.

The Myth of the Better

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I’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing the role of social status in our lives today. The prevailing theme has been that we are genetically programmed to pay close attention to where we stand in the hierarchy and to take actions that lead to an elevation of our status. Moreover, this genetic influence is causing us more harm than good. What may surprise you is that I really believe things are not now as bad as they have been in the past. That, however, is not to say that there is nothing more to do to eradicate this negative influence from our lives. But first, a little history.
Status hierarchies in caveman days were true indicators of who would survive long enough to reproduce. Those at the top got access to the limited resources that provided for survival in the most inhospitable environment our species has ever seen. Those at the bottom, and their genes, disappeared, never to be heard from again. As time went on, however, humans learned to conquer their environment to the point that living and dying had less and less to do with status. Nevertheless, with the caveman genes intact, the quest for status lived on (and still does).

Bands of humans grew into tribes, which eventually grew into full-blown societies. An interesting feature of these societies is that status came to become codified, so to speak. In the Victorian era, for example, all people, at least all sane people, generally knew how things were. In those days, there definitely were some folks who were “better” than others, and this meant something concrete. It meant that the better did not have to treat lesser men with respect. This is mainly because the success of the lesser man was economically connected to the whims of upperclassmen.

Let’s think of ourselves, for a moment, as commoners in Victorian England. Suppose a Duke decides that we will no longer serve as a domestic in his home (where we have been making next to nothing, but we have a roof over our head). He need not offer a reason or be in any way conciliatory. We simply have no recourse. The government isn’t set up that way. And make no mistake – the consequences of being disfavored by the upper class are serious. If we can’t keep our job, we’re likely to end up on your own, trying to eek out a living in the parts of town that don’t see many members of the royal family. No, our only hope for remaining in the employ of a member of the noble class is to adhere to some very specific interpersonal rules. The kicker is the first – we are our class and will never rise above it. Next, our class says that we are to be seen only when needed and heard only when addressed. We must answer their questions; they need not even acknowledge ours. That’s how it is, and if things get rough on occasion, that’s how it is, too. No one said life would be easy.

Now, admittedly, we could resist, and certainly some folks do. However, we can look in the gutters at the remains of plenty of those who’ve resisted and failed. It isn’t pretty. We keep concluding that our best bet is to accept our lot in life and get as much out of it as we can. If we can’t be royalty, we might as well live for and in the presence of it. If anything, this takes a lot of the unpredictability out of life, which is quite an achievement in itself.

One of the hardest things about being a commoner is the fact that the ebb and flow of necessary resources, such as food and shelter, can be excruciating. There are quite a lot of people clamoring for many scarce things. The early bird definitely gets the worm, when there is one. The bottom line is that it’s a lot of scratching and struggling for a meager reward, but the reward is sustenance, at least for a while. Getting on board with the social structure established by the upper classes provides an avenue to the stable provision of life’s staples – food to eat and a safe, reliable place to stay.

Now let’s come back to reality. I cite the Victorian era as an example of how social structures became implicitly understood, but England isn’t the only example. Indeed, I can’t think of a single lasting society that didn’t arrive at a similar type of social structure. The real story is the societies that managed to take these anachronistic notions of status and place them on the sidelines. The United States stands out as the brightest instance.
On the matter of human rights, America’s philosophy came about via a strong reaction against the idea that some people are better than other people, simply by virtue of their birth. The laws of the land were built around the idea that all men are equal in the eyes of the law. The result has been the most powerful force for good that has ever existed on this planet. Never before had common men been given the chance to become uncommon, and this, it turns out, has made all the difference. But, regardless of the success this concept has spawned from an economic perspective, the past is still a bit of an open wound with many folks in this country, and the negative effects are constantly reverberating through all of us.

“He thinks he’s better than me.” We’ve all heard that statement come out of someone’s mouth. Not referring to anything in particular, just an overall sense of better. This, I believe, is a reflection on the quasi-caste systems of the past. Those who are on, or grew up in close proximity to, the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum are not, mentally speaking, far removed from the days when the mindset of their ancestors was that of the commoner in Victorian England. They had accepted their lower class lot in life. And, to their chagrin, as generations went on and they were emancipated, they continued to occupy the lower class of the free people, the people supposedly all created equal. Though they knew that the formal notion of better people was gone, they still experienced the same struggle in life that they did as commoners. Nothing much changed. That is, except for the creeping grip of resentment.

To be emancipated and yet powerless breeds contempt, contempt for the unjust system and contempt for the souls who, by the luck of the draw, benefit from it. This is the mindset of too many people nowadays. The thing is that it need not be this way. This notion of being inherently better or worse is utterly vacuous. Gaining a new lease on life, for these, the afflicted, is as easy as rejecting it.
It’s important to us all that these folks get their heads straight. It’ll instantly take a lot of the seething anger out of our society. After all, if you think someone unjustifiably thinks they are better than you, it isn’t hard to find yourself doing things to try to one-up them. It is, in fact, very easy to spend a lot of time trying to prove them wrong. It can get so out of hand that your entire self-opinion and ability to be happy revolves the status of this dispute over your worthiness. Now this may sound childish, but I can absolutely guarantee that a heck of a high percentage of today’s adults can relate to it.

To get around the rat hole that is the lingering concern over social class, one need only commit to rejecting any comparative discussions that do not adequately define terms. The word better is meant to provide information about the relationship of one thing to another, with regard to some characteristic or characteristics. If you don’t say what characteristic you’re talking about, the word “better” has no meaning. Therefore, when the words “better” or “worse” come up, they are considered seriously only if the object of discussion is identified sufficiently. Whamo! Problem solved.
“But, but, but…” they’ll say. No buts, I say. It really is that simple. The foundation of this reasoning is two-tiered. At bottom is the fact that our legal system is egalitarian – laws allow all people equal opportunity to own property and to pursue professions as they see fit. Above that is the fact that individuals from all imaginable backgrounds (even the worst) have successfully navigated our system to find success and happiness in life. Basically, if they can do it, it’s doable. We need only refuse to allow the unqualified notions of better or worse to have any impact on the opinions we form (of ourselves and others) to solve the problem.

The bottom line is that we have indeed come a long way baby. We do not live in a time when status is determined at birth and the chances of rising above are slim to none. We live in a time when the barriers to success are minimal, relatively speaking. More importantly, for the vast majority of Americans, the likelihood of getting over those barriers is primarily a function of their own actions and the decisions they make. This is the key. The idea that some people are inherently better than other people is useless, despite the fact that it is supremely powerful. It is a game with few winners and many losers. The good news is that there is absolutely no reason that anyone should play. I am convinced that the majority of hindrances to any individual’s progress are created in his or her mind. If this is true, then the solution is simply a matter of escorting these deleterious thoughts from one’s consciousness. Though it may be hard at first, it’s worth it, and it gets easier over time. The point has come for those who are playing this terrible game to quit and get on with their lives. We’ll all be better off for it.