Amerika

Arthur Schopenhauer argued that all of existence consists of a formless Will expanding in all directions. Nietzsche, a pragmatist, shifted that to the idea of Will to Power, or each organism attempting to have power over its situation and future.

As a nihilist, I reject these orderly ideas. Nature expands in all directions as part of natural selection. Its only will is benevolence. The power people seek is in fact something far simpler, a will to fear.

Organisms live in fear because of the fragility of mortal life. Death only has to win once. Organisms fetishize fear because it is both an unpleasant sensation and the only thing that really makes them feel alive, relevant, and important.

The worship of fear gives us the ability to feel as if we are gods. We have named our enemy, and we can exert power over him by banning his name and using our power to limit his presence. This keeps the fear intact, so we can still fetishize it.

Fear rules the world. It makes people think of themselves as part of something larger, a process in which they are the center of the universe, and instead of them adapting to their environment, it adapts or at least reacts to them as if they were the point of life itself.

For example, people fear loss more than they aspire to seize opportunity:

People make financial choices to avoid losing money or experiencing regret, rather than simply balancing expected monetary returns with their tolerance for financial risk, according to a new study led by Lisa Posey, associate professor of risk management in the Penn State Smeal College of Business.

We might call this lowercase-c conservatism: fearing the loss of what you have, or falling behind what others have, instead of looking at what you could be doing with the same time, energy, and focus.

This represents a view that life is not just a finite quantity, but a past quantity; it cannot be expanded, because that requires positive action, but we can divide up what is there already that we assume is not needed for the next growing season!

Humans are oriented toward the negative because that which they could have does not exist yet, so it is intangible; that which they do have is tangible, which means that they can register it in their senses and emotions and defend it.

By insisting on the tangible, they are forever looking backward in time, and the greater tangibility of memory over imagination creates a reward circuit in order to emphasize repetition of successful actions:

The brain processes motivation and reward through a network of specialized regions that communicate via chemical messengers. Dopamine is the most prominent of these messengers. It is produced primarily by a cluster of cells known as the ventral tegmental area. When a person or an animal encounters a rewarding stimulus, these cells release dopamine into other parts of the brain, reinforcing the behavior and encouraging the individual to seek out that reward again.

Researchers have extensively studied how addictive drugs interact with this system. Nicotine, the primary addictive substance in tobacco, closely resembles a naturally occurring chemical messenger called acetylcholine. By mimicking acetylcholine, nicotine artificially stimulates the dopamine producing cells in the ventral tegmental area, initiating the cycle of addiction.
The mice that had been drinking nicotine exhibited exceptionally high motivation. They pressed the active lever many more times and reached much higher breaking points than the animals in the control group. The nicotine exposed mice also showed shorter pauses between their bouts of pressing, indicating a frantic and highly vigorous pursuit of the food reward.

If a mouse pulls the lever and feels a positive emotion, it will keep pulling that lever. This has a safe zone of operation where it is a production enhancer but then can become pathological at some point if there is too much reliance on methods.

On the other hand, the pursuit of dopamine/pleasure increases the desire for more pleasure instead of having us focus on risk/safety as most people who are backward-looking and fear loss more than they seek pleasure tend to be.

Perhaps this is the prototype of the transcendental: when we seek pleasure more than safety and the tangible, we are moving forward into time, instead of looking backward. We have goals instead of things we defend against. We have purpose, orientation, and time-awareness.

That in turn gets us out of the envy loop where we are looking at what we have relative to what others have, versus what we are trying to achieve relative to what we have now.

Interestingly, meritocracy seems to be a Schrödinger’s Cat type situation: people believe in it if it makes them more equal, but once others pull away and rise, they see it as another lottery.

When the gap between rich and poor widens, belief in meritocracy declines. The findings suggest that in highly unequal societies, personal success is more likely to be interpreted as the result of individual effort, thereby reinforcing belief in the meritocratic system.

They demonstrated that increases in income inequality lead people to perceive societal conflicts more intensely. This effect can be observed across almost all social groups — with the exception of the upper middle class — and contributes to greater polarization.

They found that people living in comparatively unequal societies are more likely to feel that they have little political influence and that policymakers do not listen to their concerns. As a result, trust in politics declines and feelings of political powerlessness increase. While this pattern appears across the political spectrum, the effect is stronger and more immediate among left-leaning individuals, for whom reducing inequality is a central political objective.

Interesting that the upper-middle class are immune, mostly because they live by a particular meritocracy: the ability to be good at education, to be analytical in reading, and of course, to lure in clients and customers through prosocial behavior.

For people who live by inherently competitive rules like that, the question of meritocracy is moot. Achievement rules over everything else, and people who orient themselves toward achievement end up getting there faster.

As it turns out, what we look for — our Kantian filter — out there in the world determines what we find; what we focus on creates our experience. This is part of the reason why people have wildly different mental maps of the world:

Researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of California, San Diego, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), had 61 people put on virtual reality headsets and freely explore 100 immersive, 360-degree scenes, places like airports, auto shops, and public pools, while eye-tracking recorded every glance. Two people looking at the exact same scene often looked at very different parts of it, and those differences were not random. Each person’s pattern held steady, showing up again across completely different environments and across testing sessions days apart. Each viewer, it turned out, had a personal way of exploring the visual world, a stable “attentional fingerprint.”

One broader idea, which researchers say has been studied little, is that each person moves through the world with a private map of meaning, a set of priorities about what things are and how they connect, quietly steering attention from the moment they step into a new place. Where the eyes land depends less on what stands out in a scene and more on what already matters to the person looking.

Not surprisingly, those living in fear/safety modes of tangible backward-looking thought find more of the same, and their lives do not “grow” as a result, but stay stuck in a risk-avoidant position, at which point they have nothing and fear inequality. They worship fear.

Others worship beauty. They are willing to view their position as temporary but increasing, and therefore be open to orientation toward achievement, including mental achievement like the transcendentals (the good, the beautiful, and the real).

Equality makes people live in fear/safety mode because instead of being oriented toward reality, they are oriented toward the risk of losing position, which makes their outlook toward the world be retaliatory and envious.

After all, in a society where everyone is equal, “meritocracy” means not losing what you have, and nothing new can be created, because then you rise above the herd and become a target. No wonder this species lives in constant fear.

Tags: dopamine, envy loop, inequality, map of meaning, mental map, meritocracy, risk, safety