Amerika

How does one get ahead in life? Avoid big issues and find emotional issues instead, and champion those with easy answers. That gives everyone the message they want to hear: do nothing except this token thing, and all problems go away so you can go back to sleep and stop thinking.

People love easy answers, which is why they vote like morons. They want government to do everything! If not that, they donate to a charity with the issue in its name. Once the check is written or the lever pulled, they go right back to sleep, because changing our thinking is very difficult.

It turns out that manipulating the herd through symbols has some pitfalls. In particular, humility is enforced by the herd, so bragging on good deeds can backfire unless that is part of your day job:

Across five studies, the researchers demonstrated that people believe that they would feel worse telling others about their good deeds, such as giving to those in need, than if they kept the news to themselves, or told others about their personal achievements, like getting a job promotion.

The participants said they’d feel more ashamed and embarrassed telling friends about their good deed and posting about it on social media. But they’d feel more proud and happy about sharing a personal achievement.

“Our suspicion is that people are just aware of the fact that, if they talk about these good deeds that they’ve committed, people might think that they were motivated by the social credit, the reputational boost, that they would get,” Richardson said.

However, you can always brag about what you have done to benefit yourself, like getting a promotion. In the collective of individualists, getting what you want is always seen as a positive, and jobs are the only non-controversial way to do that since we live in an egalitarian workers’ paradise!

On the other hand, bragging online can fool people, probably because they view influencer status as like a job, so good deeds advance your career:

“In our research, prosocial behavior refers to any action that benefits others at some cost to oneself, all within the broader scope of societal sustainability.”

The findings reveal that posting about good deeds online can significantly strengthen a person’s digital reputation. Sharing prosocial behavior not only makes someone appear more trustworthy but also encourages others to connect with them.

“Contrary to the ancient wisdom of keeping good deeds private, we found that in the social media era it actually helps to share them publicly,” said Özpolat.

Prosocial behavior, like socialism, signals a willingness to subsidize the team at a cost to oneself, but as the cynics note, it can also be purely manipulative. That is, there is an implicit quid pro quo where the prosocial person is rewarded for their sacrifice.

It may be simply that people are wary of excessive self-interest, represented in our lexicon as narcissism, because the narcissistic worker tends to throw others under the bus:

Teams high in narcissistic rivalry performed worse than others, making around one-third less progress in the escape challenge. They solved fewer puzzles, reported less unity and generally found the experience more frustrating.

Why? Rivalry undermined team cohesion: the sense of unity that keeps people working towards a shared goal. Under pressure, rivalrous people tended to withdraw, dismiss others’ suggestions or hold back information. They didn’t always start arguments, but their defensiveness quietly slowed the group down.

In other words, the charisma that first impressed others soon wore thin once teamwork required genuine give and take. It’s the office classic: the confident self-promoter who dazzles in the meeting, but frustrates everyone by the project’s end.

It turns out that people learn to be manipulative early in life. Enough manipulation and the person will become wholly dedicated to that method, a condition resembling narcissism, since it works to get ahead in life. When someone breaks the prosocial compact visibly, however, this alarms the herd.

Children who learn to be prosocial adopt that technique for life, but sometime around puberty, this turns into a opportunistic form of manipulation:

“People who were popular as children often behave in a more ‘pro-social’ manner as adults. This means, for example, that they behave in a friendly manner or actively try to involve others in conversations. People who were popular as adolescents do the same, but this group also exhibits more coercive and sometimes aggressive behavior.”

By the nature of equality, we all start with nothing, and must manipulate our way to some niche where we feel comfortable. This teaches us to become opportunistic narcissists from an early age, and through seeing how easy others are to manipulate, eventually encourages us to treat them as disposable.

Socializing in itself may be the source of our downfall. Like jobs, it instructs us to treat life as a means-to-an-end, ignoring all that it offers, and to view other people as a competitive enemy. In the end, those who want to rise will become horror humans because that method works, and we all suffer for it.

Tags: narcissism, prosocial