Contents
Four Important Aspects of Our Nature
A Useful Breakdown (with Film Illustrations)
This page is a work in progress; more sections will be added based on feedback on the site.
Four Important Aspects of Our Nature
There are four aspects of our evolved human nature that are worth highlighting since they are key themes in the following discussion:
1. We are Innately Fearful Creatures
In the harsh African savanna environment that we evolved in, we needed our big brains to come up with strategies to survive (being the only advantage we had). We evolved natural fear and insecurity as motivators to use our brains (fear is a stronger motivator than inquisitiveness or eagerness, just as pain is a stronger motivator than pleasure). In that world, arrogance and complacency would lead to death. There is a natural tension between our inner insecurity and the need to appear outwardly strong and confident so that we can successfully compete with others for the best mates.
Signs that we Really are Innately Fearful Creature
All of our neuroses and phobias are signs of this inherent fear. Lack of confidence is a vastly more common issue than overconfidence (and the latter is often just overcompensation for an inner insecurity).
2. We See Differences more than Similarities
Our brains are wired to discriminate between different individuals. Much of our evolutionary development was devoted to developing our complex social environment, for which analysing similarities is a waste of scarce brain processing power; we instead need to be good at telling the difference between nice and nasty, beautiful and ugly, healthy and unhealthy (especially for the all-important task of picking mates).
Signs that we Really do See Differences more than Similarities
Sexism, ageism, racism, and so on, are so rife because we focus on differences (looking for reasons to exclude someone from our social group).
In any group, we always try and identify the smartest one, the prettiest one, the strongest one, not look at commonalities. The least beautiful of a group of supermodels may feel depressed even though every one of them is utterly gorgeous on an absolute scale.
3. We Create Personal Narratives
Our personalities are fluid, continually created by our experiences, or more accurately our interpretation of our experiences, so we generate a narrative that allows us to boost our confidence (so that we can effectively compete in the mating game). We try very hard to interpret events in such a way that we seem unique, nice and in control.
Signs that we Really do Create Personal Narratives
After any significant event in our lives we relive it, thinking about it and trying to make sense of it. This is the process of narrative creation. We are arranging the pieces of our experience so that they fit our model of who we are (and how the world works), often tweaking history to put ourselves in a better light (I was rude to him but I had had an awful day so it is excusable).
Our internal models have taken a lot of time (a lifetime) and effort to develop and we only modify them with great reluctance (it is a terrifying thing to question the most fundamental of our beliefs).
4. We Aren’t That Smart
Our minds use a lot of tricks and short cuts to maximize the processing power that we can get from our limited brain capacity. These tricks and short cuts are so deeply embedded in our minds that we are unaware that we are using them, and we can often feel as if we are doing some deep analysis when really we are just using guesses (educated guesses certainly, but still guesses). We think that we are smarter than we actually are.
Signs that we Really are Actually Pretty Dumb
For example, we might be terrified of horses, and it feels right to us that we are terrified of horses, but we are probably not doing any deep analysis about the threat of horses compared to say, for example, the threat of bulls. We have just developed a short cut in our minds (horse = danger) based on a long-forgotten childhood incident involving a scary horse.
A Useful Breakdown (with Film Illustrations)
The Examples page presented a number of primal belief categories:
Generating grandchildren
Building our confidence
Making us feel special and comforted
Fitting our world model
Bonding the group
Interaction with the world
If these are indeed useful, fundamental ways of cataloging our belief preferences, then they should also be key themes in our lives in general. Indeed we should obsess about them, looking for ways to improve our performance in these critical areas, and this obsession should be reflected in our culture. For example, these areas should be key themes in our literature, since literature is simply a mechanism by which we can present, digest and discuss strategies and influences that will affect our performance in the ongoing quest to have lots of grandchildren.
In this case, resisting the temptation to pick and choose (since any argument can be justified by careful selection), we will just look at some best picture Oscar winners and see if their main themes fall nicely into our categories of primal beliefs.
Spotlight
Generating grandchildren: A key theme is protecting our children
Bonding the group: A key theme is getting everyone to conform to our common morality
Birdman
Generating grandchildren: Father daughter theme
Building our confidence: He is trying to find his identity, building his confidence through conspicuous success on Broadway
Making us feel special and comforted: He is seeking comfort through external confirmation of his acting skills
Fitting our world model: In his world model he is a good actor. He is seeking confirmation from others
Interaction with the world: The belief that he is a good actor drives him to be successful
Other aspects: Personal narrative (“Am I really a good actor?”)
12 Years a Slave
Generating grandchildren: His drive is to return to his wife and children
Building our confidence: His confidence is continually battered by his experiences
Making us feel special and comforted: He is driven out of his comfort zone
Fitting our world model: There is a paradigm shift between attitudes then and now (challenging the world model)
Bonding the group: The audience bonds over how our shared morality has changed since those days
Interaction with the world: If he changed his belief to be that he is a slave he would better interact with the awful world he finds himself in, but he is pursuing a greater truth
Other aspects: The film revolves around his personal narrative (Am I a slave or a free man?)
Argo
Generating grandchildren: The fear that we have over the characters’ survival originates in our evolved concern that their genes will be lost before they have children and rear grandchildren
Building our confidence
Making us feel special and comforted: The audience is comforted by a happy ending
Bonding the group: Nationality and revolution issues stem from the in-group / out-group conflict (who is on your side?)
The Artist
Generating grandchildren: Love themes are interesting to us because of the drive to have grandchildren
Building our confidence: He is having a crisis of confidence
Making us feel special and comforted: He is leaving his comfort zone
Fitting our world model: His world model (silent films) no longer fits the new world (talkies)
Other aspects: Personal narrative (“How can I change to fit the new world?”)
The King’s Speech
Generating grandchildren
Building our confidence: He needs to increase his confidence to speak clearly
Making us feel special and comforted: The film comforts us by showing that failings can be overcome
Bonding the group: His speech is needed to bond the country as they go to war
Other aspects: Personal narrative (“Am I fit to be King?”)
The Hurt Locker
Generating grandchildren: The fear that we have over the protagonist’s survival comes from our concern that his genes will be lost and that he cannot care for his family
Building our confidence: He is more confident in war where he has a strong, well-supported personal narrative
Bonding the group: Is his group the family or the army?
Other aspects: Personal narrative (“Am I warrior or husband?”)
Slumdog Millionaire
Generating grandchildren: The desire that we have for their relationship to work comes from our hope that their genes continue through their children and grandchildren
Building our confidence: The protagonist’s confidence is increased by a belief in destiny
Making us feel special and comforted: Competitions are drive by the belief that the prizes will increase comfort
Fitting our world model: We want to believe in fate because it appears to be a hidden guide for how to interact with the world (and it encourages us to pursue success even if the odds are against us)
Other aspects: Personal narrative (“Am I a winner?”)
No Country for Old Men
Generating grandchildren: The fear that we have over the characters’ survival comes from our concern that their genes will be lost before they have children and rear grandchildren
Building our confidence
Making us feel special and comforted: Wealth is believed to increase comfort
Fitting our world model: The changing world no longer fits the sheriff’s model
Bonding the group: The protagonists challenge society’s shared morality
The Departed
Generating grandchildren: The fear that we have over the characters’ survival comes from our concern that their genes will be lost before they have children and rear grandchildren
Bonding the group: The dilemma is which group should he bond with? Should one bond based on shared experiences or background?
Other aspects: Personal narrative (“Am I cop or criminal”)
More Thoughts on Happiness
Excerpt from “Fears and Facades”
3.8.1. Seek and Ye shall not Find [Happiness Is a Journey, not a Destination][1]
(Why we remember and anticipate happiness more than we experience it)
One thing that philosophers, psychologists, and pretty much everyone else agree on is that we all seek happiness (2 p. 37; 207). Natural selection has made us seek happiness to guide our behavior; it is the lever that natural selection pulls to get us to increase our fitness, making us seek food, company, comfort, sex, and so on. What is odd, though, is that often, even when we get those things, the things that we seek to make ourselves happy, we are not as happy as we thought we would be. Why is this? Why is it so difficult to achieve true happiness? After all, we want to be happy, and humans have a mastery over our environment greater than any other species. We can shape the world to an amazing degree, so why can we not shape it into something that will make us happy[2]? One answer is that if we enjoyed all of our interactions with the world, we would not be very successful in the competitive quest for scarce resources and the best mates. Making us miserable is the mechanism by which natural selection goads us into getting off our backsides and improving our fitness. Contentment and achievement are natural enemies. Indeed perpetual contentment is a shortcut to the extinction pile. Natural selection has designed us well, then; there is no fitness benefit to be had from achieving happiness (and resting on our laurels); it is much better if we continually seek new ways of making ourselves happy (and thus continually increasing our fitness). We are not designed to be happy. We are designed to know (or to believe that we know) what will make us happy, to strive endlessly to be happy, and to remember back to when we were happy (if only we realized it at the time), but we are not designed to be happy. At least not for long.
3.8.1.1. Just one More Yacht [Money does not buy Happiness]
(Why more stuff does not increase happiness; why we compare ourselves to others)
Money is a good example of the elusiveness of happiness. As we have already mentioned, happiness and standard of living are not correlated; in a survey of the industrialized world, the levels of happiness had not increased over four decades of economic growth; people had more stuff, but were no happier as a result (208). We strive for money and yet it does not actually make us happy (2 pp. 239-240; 209). This is not surprising if the driver that evolution has given us is not “be happy,” but “seek happiness.” Natural selection looks for the simplest way of achieving its goals (it is lazy); if you want to ensure that a creature has enough stuff to ensure its survival, then it is easier to just give it a strong drive to continually acquire things, and to keep on acquiring things, than to give it some difficult-to-quantify target of “just enough stuff” and to aim for it. After all having too much food, money, too many clothes or friends, is not going to decrease our survival chances, so why bother having strong emotions that make us feel bad when our fridges, wallets, wardrobes or address books are full?
An extreme illustration of the way that our drives are geared towards continual acquisition rather than obtaining a sufficiency can be found in a fabulously unpleasant experiment on the fly, an animal that is pure drive. It has a driver telling it to eat, and a driver telling it to stop when its stomach gets full. These are two balancing drivers, it is not one drive that says eat just the right amount. We know this because, if the nerves that give the fly information about its stomach are cut, the fly eats and eats and eats until it bursts (210). Now clearly we are a bit smarter than a fly, but our drivers operate in the same, simple way. We have a strong drive to acquire, and only weak drivers telling us to stop acquiring; having too little is a much bigger problem than having too much.
There is another reason why money does not buy happiness, though, because, as we have discussed, our brains work through pattern recognition and so judge things by comparison, rather than by absolute quantity. We always compare ourselves to others (211), because in the Pleistocene we were continually competing with those others for mates and other scarce resources. Today we can always find someone richer than we are, someone to be jealous of. This is a secondary effect, though, and, even if a crumbly, old multi-billionaire can attract a better mate than a crumbly, old millionaire, in neither case is happiness guaranteed. We pursue wealth because our genes tell us to, not because doing so will actually make us happy.
These are the underlying factors that make us naturally greedy. There are also some balancing factors that stop us trying to acquire everything in the whole world, mainly that we do not have the power to do so. What about all of those noble emotions, though, that we like to think prevent us from being greedy (letting us know that really seventy pairs of shoes is enough) such as generosity, a concern for others, or guilt? We will speculate in Chapter 10 that these emotions, emotions that derive from our empathy, are just manifestations of our underlying concern that our status will suffer if we are seen as too greedy.
[1] Father Alfred D’Souza (? – 2004)
[2] It is also frustratingly difficult to shape ourselves into someone that is happier with the world, even though we try very hard to do so.