Amerika

Future generations will regret that we ever took humanity seriously and accepted its words and ideas at face value instead of viewing them as social gambits designed to advance individual survival.

People are no different than mice. If you asked a mouse what it was doing, it would spin you a big fat yarn about APE (altruism, pacifism, and empathy) while it busily stored all the seeds that it could in its cheeks.

In the same way, humans manipulate each other into doom. You can buy off anyone by telling them that reality is not real, therefore they are free from the rules, and therefore, they are akin to gods wandering among the mortals of a mundane Earth.

Why would you con someone else? Mostly you want them to leave you alone, but you also want them to extend to you goodwill so you can rely on them to help you when you need their abilities or energies.

By portraying yourself as not just a good guy but a victim, you convince other people that you are harmless and also deserve their sympathy. You make them feel better for helping you. You make them think you have risen above others and have found something of real importance.

When groups exist, they all manipulate each other, and individuals imitate other successful manipulators, so you get a herd of imitator-manipulators who are all projecting onto each other fanciful and unrealistic visions. No wonder dying societies go insane.

At that point, people defer to the Crowd. This is not political, religious, or cultural; it is psychological. People seek stable mental states, therefore fear doubt, and therefore both fear the herd and crave its approval.

Through a process known as externalization, people give up on not just their own goals but having goals entirely, and either accept or react against popular opinion, ensuring that any future discussion is defined by that initial opinion.

We can see externalization in effect through the impact of internet searches on creativity:

While the study found no statistically relevant difference between the creativity of individuals with access to internet search and those without, as those individuals were clumped into groups, internet search appeared to stymie their production of ideas.

“This appears to be due to the fact that Google users came up with the same common answers, often in the same order, as they relied on Google, while non-Google users came up with more distinct answers,” wrote lead author Danny Oppenheimer, a professor in CMU’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences.

Instead of starting with a blank page, these people are branching out from whatever their internet search returns and only gradually inching their way back toward a neutral perspective. However, they experience greater psychological comfort from deferring to the group and accepting its protection.

No wonder most human societies involve warlords who give out favors in return for obedience. This mimics our approach to social groups: you give the group your allegiance and in return, it protects you and keeps you safe from other individuals.

People seek out contrarians because these people seem to have worked past the limitations under which most of us labor, which makes them either wise, lucky, or favored by the gods. Our modern antihero idols are examples of contrarians:

Even though Eastern and Western cultures often differ in many cultural attitudes, cool people were universally perceived to be more extraverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.

“Everyone wants to be cool, or at least avoid the stigma of being uncool, and society needs cool people because they challenge norms, inspire change, and advance culture,” said co-lead researcher Todd Pezzuti, Ph.D., an associate professor of marketing at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile.

Again, you either accept the herd opinion like a conformist or rebel against it as a contrarian, but either way, you are building within the house defined by the herd opinion, so you are a known and controllable quantity and therefore a threat to no one.

But who wants to be a threat? The opinion is the tool of the psychological need for belonging, not the other way around. People construct political and religious views to flatter and entice others, not because they think these things might be actual, real, or even desirable.

This explains why millions endorse dualistic religion or socialist humanism. These things are gibberish, but people like them, so as products they succeed in the marketplace and economy of popularity, where whoever offers the most widely appealing product becomes a thought-leader.

Thinking of this in Darwinian terms, social acceptance conveys adaptive fitness because those who are socially anchored are more likely to survive genetically:

A new study of wild eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) from Gombe National Park shows that female chimpanzees who were more socially integrated with other females in the year before giving birth were more likely to raise surviving offspring.

Social networks are so important that we create cognitive models of them and inherently program ourselves for a hierarchy of socialization (not its natural enemy, the hierarchy of competence), using mental maps:

“People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them,” wrote Eric Feltham, Laura Forastiere and Nicholas A. Christakis in their paper.

Many individuals believed that family members spent more time with each other than they did, while friendships and non-family ties appeared to be more accurately represented in their internal “maps.” Moreover, people’s judgements about others’ social ties appeared to be more accurate when these others shared their same religion or had similar levels of wealth. Interestingly, the researchers also found that middle-aged, well-educated and well-connected people internally represented the connections between others more accurately.

Much of our activity, like socializing and gossip, consists of us sounding the depths to ascertain these hierarchies and cognitively map our social topography:

The human ability to make these calculations hinges on a mental process called cognitive mapping. In a paper published in 2024, FeldmanHall and Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences (Research) Apoorva Bhandari established that humans replay memories of daily social interactions while sleeping to build a mental map of their social network.

Even though people do not consciously recognize the relationship of every person in their social network to every other person, FeldmanHall said the maps they unconsciously create serve as reliable guides for whom to spread gossip to, whom not to spread gossip to and how gossip will travel.

Unfortunately for us, this mapping influences our biases because it makes us prone to repetitive behaviors instead of seeking to verify our assumptions:

In many cases, humans are known to make decisions that they think will maximize the rewards they receive while minimizing their losses. Sometimes, however, people’s choices are guided by automatic processes that they are unaware of and can be adversely impacted by so-called biases, systematic tendencies to fall into specific patterns of thought or behavior.

The computational modeling performed by the team and the results of their analyses suggest that when humans make sequential decisions, they can be swayed both by the rewards they expect to receive and a tendency to repeat action sequences they have performed before. Interestingly, however, the team found that the extent of this repetition bias varied significantly between participants, with some appearing more prone to follow habitual patterns of behavior.

Humans generally act toward rewards, but there is an inverse gambler’s fallacy — the notion that if the last few dice rolls were not in your favor, the next might be so you might as well keep going — which has us rely on repetition of what worked in the past.

This means that if socializing works for us, it rapidly becomes pathological, and we do it whether or not it is to our benefit.

Humans tend toward a type of flocking behavior where, since our aim is to maintain a pleasant mental state, we flee from ideas that convey risk and fear, which causes us to jockey for position in the space outside of those realizations.

Since socializing helps us banish those dark fears, we become dependent on it, and quickly adopt a tendency to repeat those action sequences, at which point we are no longer acting toward a goal but toward the positive feelings that come from the perception of safety in our action sequences.

In the bigger picture, however, this serves our goal, since our goal is not in reality out there but in our minds in here, where we seek to maintain a stable and pleasant mental state so that we do not have mental breakdowns as mortal humans in a much bigger and tempestuous world.

Tags: crowdism, externalization, flocking behavior, gambler's fallacy, herd behavior, mental maps, peer pressure, socializing