Summary

It seems to us as if our feelings and moods are fantastically complex, too complex to fully understand and explain, and yet the underlying motivations are actually quite simple, indeed much of our behavior can be tracked back to two simple competing drives that emerge from the natural selection imperative (maximizing grandchildren).

The first is our FEAR, our inner insecurity.  Natural selection pairs the stag’s vicious antlers with a temperament that encourages their use (they would not be very helpful otherwise), and it has given us a similar pairing.  For humans our key survival trait is our brain, which allows us to come up with new survival strategies overnight (while most other animals have to develop them through evolution over many generations), giving us the facility to thrive outside of a single environmental niche.  The woolly mammoth had to slowly evolve thick fur to emerge from its equatorial environmental niche into more chilly climes, whereas humans cheated and expanded into the same niche one afternoon by simply stealing the mammoth’s coat.  Just like with the stag, natural selection paired our brains with the drives to use them, foremost of which is our fear, our nervousness about what the future will bring, a drive that encourages us to build food stocks, to make weapons, to prepare.  Confidence is all very well for the lion, who sits comfortably in an environmental niche where the threats are stable and unchanging (threats which natural selection has fully armed it to face), but, for the early humans, struggling in a wide range of environments, confidence would lead to death (at the bottom of a glacier, in the belly of a tiger, or on the ocean floor surrounded by the remains of a boat confidently built from rocks and mud). For humans, in diverse habitats, with diverse and unpredictable dangers, the correct emotional stance is a perpetual fear about what is going to hit us next, to worry that we are not good enough for the trials ahead, that we do not have enough food, or money, that we should make ourselves stronger, and learn more. It is this fear that drives us to use our brains to prepare for those dangers and challenges.

If this is the case, then why is it not obvious to us?  Why do we not wear our fear on our sleeves and congratulate each other on how worried we are about the future?  Because that would be a disaster from a natural selection perspective; we have to not only survive but procreate, and the mating game is a highly competitive one. To explain, each of us seeks the very best genes to pair ours with, to give our children the best chance of thriving.  The problem being that, even in this day and age, bringing along a DNA sequencer can terminate a first date before it has got started, so how can you judge the genetic worth of a potential partner?  Obviously there are many things that we look for: physical appearance (symmetry, lack of disease, strength, beauty), a sense of humor (a sign of intellectual capacity, and a good grasp of the workings of the world), and so on, but we also look for confidence, because this is a sign that they believe their genes are good (and, after all, they know vastly more about themselves than we will ever know). Despite what rom-coms would like us to believe, we all know that total honesty on a first date is about as successful as requesting blood for that DNA test. When romancing we are all trying to give the very best impression of who we are. Now this does not seem at first glance to lead to any deep inner conflict: after all we can be internally fearful as long as we are externally confident, but there is another twist, because the very, very best way of convincing a potential partner of your worth is to believe it yourself. A much studied and well-demonstrated facet of our behavior is our capacity for self-deception; if we can convince ourselves that we are demi-gods then we can much more convincingly present an impression of genetic worth to others and succeed in  the mating game that is central to natural selection.  We have to create a FACADE (a Mask) of competence and confidence and we have to believe that the facade is who we really are, even to the extent of denying our inner insecurity.

This, then, is where the conflict (central to the human condition) comes in: we have evolved to be inherently insecure, but must convince ourselves (and thus others) that we have no reason to be, that we are amazing. We are fearful creatures and we create masks to hide that fear by building narratives of our strengths and successes.  Acquiring wealth, building supportive friend groups, educating our minds and strengthening our bodies will obviously help us survive and thrive in and of themselves, but there is a particularly human way that we go about these activities: we do them conspicuously (buying flashy cars, having wild parties, displaying our certificates, engaging in extreme sports, and so on) so as to demonstrate to ourselves as much as others just how good we are, and to convince ourselves that we should be confident.

The underlying simplicity of our drives is concealed from us partly because of the complexity that emerges in the way that our FEAR and our FACADE interact, but also because we are so reluctant to admit our inherent fearfulness to ourselves, even to the extent that we see our fears as a failing, rather than as an essential, and beneficial, part of our evolved make-up.

It would take a lengthy discussion to make these statements truly compelling (a discussion that can be found in the book Fears and Facades), but the majority of human traits can be traced back to these two simple drives, in which case Occam’s razor can be invoked since we should (if there is no other evidence that would help us decide) adopt as our default belief the simplest model that adequately explains the facts.

Process

Underlying axioms and provisional beliefs:

• Evolutionary Psychology
  • Evolutionary psychology underpins the concept of primal beliefs
  • It is also the basis for the concepts of FEAR and the FACADE