Amerika

What the hell is wrong with people?

When you distill any of the big issues in our time down to their essence, you find an unsettling creepiness about humanity. Not just the fact that we are basically monkeys dressed up in suits and technology, but that we seem to be constantly in the grip of one pathology or another.

In a world of sane people, you do not have strip clubs, endless fast food, tent revival churches, abortion clinics, pornography warehouses, diversity, and flag-waving nitwits jumping around telling us about wars for democracy and Jesus/Israel.

While our literature and films like to portray our world as being in the grips of the jihad by the Have-Nots against the Haves, it is more accurately a crusade of every person against all others, nature, and logic. Everybody wants to rule the world. They seek control like a drug or sexual experience.

It seems hard to figure out whether human individuals are more interested in seeking power for themselves, or merely sabotaging others. This can be explained by recent research that shows when people do not perceive a risk-free big win for themselves, they make sure that no one wins, at least more than a mininmum:

In the Base Game, each player has two actions to choose from. There are four combinations of actions, each with expected payoffs to both players. Each player chooses to maximize their own payoff.

However, if another set of options is added that introduces the chance that the other player would get nothing, along with an option of a very small payoff for both, the mutual small reward becomes more appealing — a form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which two “prisoners” can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner for individual reward. In other words, more “knowledge” can lead to worse overall outcomes.

Perhaps this explains our addiction to socialism. We can all win big in nature, but there is risk of failure. People fear that, so they would rather have a subsidy-state, and if that means that no one wins big but everyone gets an equal share of whatever pittance can be cobbled together, psychologically this has the lowest impact.

This would imply that what is wrong with humans above all else is that we are looking to manage individual mental state at an emotional level by discarding risk of failure and focusing instead on the easily achieved in the short term. When people talk about hope and happiness, they mean this kind of contented mediocre oblivion.

Deep in individual consciousness lies buried the realization that humans pursue hybris, or an individualism that denies wider reality, in the same way we pursue sugar, gambling, casual sex, and intoxication: for the thrill of getting away with something and for those few moments, feeling more powerful than the world which makes us insignificant.

We also tend to project our mental state onto others, which really means assuming that they think exactly like us. Projecting feels good because then we understand the world as well as we think we understand ourselves, which is to say, through our “outer selves” comprised of desires and fears (“carrot and stick”).

Humanity is facing a turning point. We got away from being pure materialists with the end of the Age of Idols, but now the Age of Symbolism has given us better methods of hiding our inner crazy. Until this species makes a concerted effort to escape its mental health struggles, all the good that we do will be wasted and temporary.

Tags: base game, hybris, individualism, prisoner's dilemma, socialism