Adelphiasophism
Apathy, Obedience, Optimism: The Human Syndrome
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
Existence and Technology
The omens are that mankind is heading for extinction. The human race persists in its willingness to destroy itself and most other higher organisms for selfish economic and ideological reasons, all of them short term.
The vertebrate biomass is concentrating into a few highly populous species, just as it did when the dinosaurs went extinct. Mankind breeds the few species at the expense of the many. Genetic variation is narrowed by breeding and environmental destruction until it virtually will not exist. It is genocide. Without the genes to cope with the slightest stresses, the remaining species will die off too.
Do we suffer from an affliction common to all intelligent life forms—a self-destructive syndrome that accompanies intelligence? If the answer is “"yes",” we are doomed. Even if we can see the fault in ourselves, are we powerless to change it? Where is the will to change our behaviour? Where is the mechanism to do it? This is the seriousness of our task.
From psychology, we can attempt to piece together the elements of the human syndrome, to see why warnings of doom have had no effect—why people do not want to know. There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned as Jeremiahs.
There is something strange about the way we perceive things. Small disasters in terms of numbers of dead that occur suddenly, unexpectedly, visibly, shock us. But huge disasters dispersed in space and time, we hardly notice.
The crash of a jumbo jet attracts media headlines, but no headlines shout out the death of a jumbo jet full of children every 20 minutes, the rate of child mortality in the Third World. Yet, the cost of a can of beer every three months to the citizens of the First World would stop this carnage by providing money to implement immunization programs and to prevent diarrhoea in infants.
And besides the millions who die every year of disease, starvation and suicide, in the last 200 years perhaps 100 million people have died in warfare. Yet, we are totally indifferent to it. We are indifferent to the deaths of our own species as well as to others. Why?
Why are we so perverse? Why are we apathetic about our destruction of the environment and the threats to life we are creating? Why do we allow rapacious industrialists to contaminate the earth? Why do we accept the rule of governments that allow them to do it and, through accumulating dangerous armaments and adopting threatening postures, endanger the world in their own way? Why do we retain such an obtuse optimism that we revile those who do warn us of the dangers. Why is it so much more virile to accept the status quo rather than criticize it? Why do we do what we are told even when we know it is wrong?
Maladapted Instincts
There are human characteristics that once were valuable to survival but which, through the speed of the evolution of advanced society, have become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological humans that they now threaten us. Technological society has emerged so quickly it has created conditions quite different from those in which instincts evolved. It has happened elsewhere in nature.
Migratory birds like swallows that have a late brood are likely to abandon them to die at the end of the summer if the migratory instinct switches on before the young are mature enough. At one time (perhaps when weather was warmer), they could comfortably raise two broods but now they cannot, and so two instincts conflict. There is a maladaptation. They feel no remorse, have no conscience, indeed no memory of their action. They just forget the brood when the greater urge presents itself. The swallows did not even recognize what they had done. Are we similar?
Instincts sometimes conflict. When intelligence evolves these conflicts become conscious posing moral dilemmas. The intelligent creature resolves them by inventing rules, laws and morals. With the growth of society, the rules themselves condition our behavior. So far, so good, but the original code of ethics, made in primitive societies, might not be forever correct. If we have built on behavior maladapted for modern conditions, we shall find that our mores, rules, norms and habits—our very ways of thinking—are leading us to disaster instead of giving us guidelines for a better existence.
Are the now redundant side effects of our own evolutionary history not only inappropriate but also actually lethal? This is the "Extinction Theorem."
Man + Technology = Extinction.
Extinction can be avoided only if we get rid of technology but technology cannot be disinvented, so our only chance is to change the nature of humanity. We must change to falsify the “Extinction Theorem” or technology will prove it. Erich Fromm, the social philosopher, wrote,
The Falangist motto, “Long live death”, threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.
In our mechanized, urban societies, we have lost the knowledge of our relationships with the rest of the biosphere, with the Goddess. Instead, we are obsessed with mechanical devices, our cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and mechanical analysis of the interrelationships between ourselves—our hierarchies, social symbols and selfishness. Not only are we unaware of the stench of death around us, in some unconscious way we seem to revel in it.
Selfishness
Selfish interest might be one characteristic that was valuable in some evolutionary contexts but is no longer. Other motives that developed in evolution to balance against excessive self-regard perhaps fail to operate adequately in our coddled environment.
The thing to be lamented is, not that men have so great regard to their own good or interest in the present world, or they have not enough; but that they have so little to the good of others,
as Bishop Butler put it—selfishness is not excessive self-love, but indifference to others.
Obsessive selfishness seems to overwhelm all other feelings—all obsessions do. Ultimately the obsession destroys even the obsessive. Initially selfish, the behavior eventually contradicts self-regard by being self-destructive! It becomes a death wish. Necrophilia! Long live death!
Our society depends upon highly specialized people—experts—who have to be obsessive in their field to succeed. Our society selects for obsessiveness. Entrepreneurs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Scientists—successful people must be obsessive! They must be necrophiles!
We have a very odd civilization indeed! Through maladaptation, we have become necrophiles—and the most necrophilous of all are the experts.
If the human syndrome comprises a catalogue of maladaptations inclining us toward death, analysis of the human psyche is needed to tease out its elements. There might be many components but among them are apathy, obedience to authority, and the dominance of the left brain and its link with obsessive optimism.
Learned Helplessness or Apathy
Frustration occurs when a person or a thing blocks our goal. Animals and humans react to frustration in different ways but aggression and apathy are two common reactions. Inherent aggression stemming from a killer instinct might be part of our problem. But the opposite is also a problem. People can learn to react aggressively or apathetically.
If aggression in the past (perhaps in childhood) has habitually led to a goal being achieved then aggression is likely to be the learned response to frustrating situations. If aggression has not worked in childhood then people may feel “"helpless"” to do anything about achieving their objective and become apathetic or depressed. Experimental studies of both humans and animals have shown that “"helplessness"”, the inability to predict or, especially, to control the environment is psychologically highly damaging, yet helplessness can be “"learned"”.
Dogs are put into a cage where they get electric shocks to their feet. The shocks are unavoidable and, though unpleasant, eventually the dog learns to endure them. The dog is now put in a cage with a second, stress-free compartment accessible simply by jumping a barrier. When given electric shocks, it makes no attempt to escape even though it could easily avoid pain. It has learned to be helpless and to do nothing but endure its torture. It has learned to behave apathetically.
Dogs given shocks in the double cage from the beginning quickly learn to escape over the barrier, yet many of the apathetic dogs will not learn how to escape even if the experimenter attempts to show them by physically lifting them into the other compartment.
But is it the electric shock that traumatizes the dog? Two rats were wired to get shocks in their tails but one rat was given a signal first and then by running a treadwheel faster could delay the shock. This rat had some control over its environment but would, through complacency or tiredness, occasionally fail to pedal and would get the shock anyway. When it did, the other rat got a shock as well. Thus both rats got the same number of shocks but one only had any control over when it got one.
The situation was stressful for the animals and after running the experiment for a long time the degree of stress could be determined by examining the rats for internal lesions and ulcers. The interesting result was that only the rat that had no control was noticeably stressed. The other animal was physically perfectly healthy. Both had received the same number of shocks so helplessness had produced the stress.
Humans have been tested in similar experiments. In one, subjects saw color slides of people who had died violently. They could change the slide by pressing a button, but a another group had no such control and were obliged to look at the slides for as long as the first group were willing to. Both groups were monitored by measuring skin resistance. It was the group with no control of the situation whose anxiety was highest.
Another experiment subjected people to the stress of a loud noise. Again the group without control were worst affected. A refinement of the last experiment showed that even when control was not used, the belief that it was available still lessened stress.
The point is that we are in stressful situations every day, whether at work or participating in normal society. At work, for example, we are the slaves of our air-conditioned offices and factories. If 70 Celsius is just right for most of us there are still large numbers for whom it is too hot or too cold. The same goes for relative humidity, cigarette fumes, solvent fumes, draughts, microorganisms, etc., all the constituents, in fact, of a “"sick"” building. You cannot change things unless sufficient people complain, but, because the conditions are designed to suit the majority, the majority is content. You therefore cannot persuade your bosses that you are being adversely affected. You are helpless.
It goes without saying that, rather than be dismissed, you often have to do jobs at work that you do not like. That too can bring on the apathy of helplessness.
In the UK, statisticians in the civil service, under pressure from the executive, had to manipulate their data to show the government in the best light. The statistician values objectivity. It must really hurt to cheat with the figures. What do they do? Lose their jobs and their pension? Or shrug their shoulders and learn helplessness?
We have elections in the belief that governments will carry out policies we want, but our favorites lose, or join a coalition with another party whose policies we do not want, or on election they simply adopt different policies from the ones we voted for. Is it surprising that 30 to 50 per cent of the electorate commonly do not vote. Yet in comparison with totalitarian countries we make failure to vote into a virtue—it proves how free we are.
Many people are resigned, like the dogs and rats, to being punished. They have become passive and often despairing, believing that they cannot influence events so there is no point in trying.
We know the planet is dying but we feel helpless about it and so have become apathetic about our fate. It is time to stop being helpless.
At least in democracies, we can change our leaders. But why do we only too often elect ones that make life unpleasant, that subject us deliberately to stress? One reason is our sense of guilt. Most of us are inculcated with a sense of morality from childhood. Bad behavior is punished by angry parents applying age old codes of ethics. Later, if we do things that we shouldn’t, we feel guilty because we have an inbuilt parent—our conscience.
That seems straightforward. But, oddly, guilty feelings arise if things go too well. Periods of success and well-being are followed by a need for atonement. In political terms this feeling is frequently expressed by the choice of a leader who offers to relieve our guilt by making us take the medicine. The mood of the electorate can unpredictably swing after a period of affluence from tolerably equitable governments to more extreme ones.
At present, human beings, at least in the advanced countries, seem to be obsessed with maintaining their own lives at higher and higher levels of luxury, yet as Fromm says,
Life mainly concerned with its own maintenance is inhuman.
In subconscious atonement for the guilt of our selfishness, are we preparing to sacrifice our lives and maintain in death the humanity that we can see we are losing? Do we justify our drive for this luxurious existence by subliminally accepting that we are committing gigasuicide, self-effacingly cleansing the earth of the parasite that we have become?
Obedience
According to Professor Stanley Milgram, obedience is “"a fatal flaw which nature has designed into us and which in the long run gives our species only a moderate chance of survival"”.
Milgram carried out experiments to test whether there was any truth in the pleas of Nazis like Eichmann that they were only carrying out orders in sending millions to the gas chambers. Milgram wanted to find out if people would unquestioningly carry out orders to do something contrary to moral conscience.
He advertised for people to help him with experiments on memory. The volunteers had to give the subject simple memory tests—if the subject made a mistake the volunteer had to administer an electric shock and then proceed to the next test. The volunteers briefly saw the subject strapped in a chair, and Milgram demonstrated to them the nature of the punishment by giving them mild shocks of 45 volts. He then took them into the next room where they sat in front of a panel with a set of levers marked with voltage levels up to 450 volts. The top levels were marked “"danger—extreme shock."”
In reality the apparent subject was Milgram’s accomplice; the volunteers were the true subjects of the experiment. Milgram, whose voice was, of course, the voice of authority, sat behind the volunteers firmly urging them, if they hesitated, to apply the appropriate shock lest they spoil the experiment.
The results were astounding. When they could not hear the victim, the volunteers blithely pushed the voltage up to the maximum. When they heard the accomplice curse, object and cry in pain (all simulated), a few refused to inflict further punishment. Some others obeyed but showed signs of distress.
With the accomplice in the same room as the volunteers, fewer people went to the maximum. When the volunteers had to physically push the accomplice’s hand on to the electrode, fewer still obeyed. But when the volunteers took on the role of the authority figure instructing someone else to apply the shock, even more of them were willing to go to the maximum.
Milgram’s experiments on obedience might be considered by many of us to have been invaluable revelations about the way we, as human beings, behave. Yet, criticisms by psychological experts were severe. These critics found other psychological studies on human subjects perfectly acceptable, but they did not dig at the foundation of “"civilized"” society—obedience—the cement of our hierarchical structures.
The volunteers mainly supported Milgram, commenting that he had discovered one of the most important causes of the trouble in the world, that people should avoid harm to others even at the risk of violating authority.
Many, perhaps most, of us could have been Eichmann. But the general public dupes itself. People think they would stop at about 150 volts. Only four per cent believe they would go as far as 300 volts and only one per cent to the maximum. An unpleasant truth for us was that the women tested were all willing to push the voltage up to the maximum when instructed by the authority figure. Women seem easily dominated by the voice of authority.
We think we are much more willing to defy authority than we are; authority therefore has much more power over us than we think!
At Mi Lai in Vietnam, all-American young men butchered 500 old men, women, children and babies. Their officers had ordered that, to improve morale, the Viet Cong in Mi Lai had to be engaged at all costs. If Viet Cong guerrillas had been in the village, as the US generals supposed, they were elusive enough not to be there when the US troops arrived. But the generals insisted those still in the village were enemy combatants—they were defined as a Viet Cong soldiers. So, the GIs killed them. Only a handful of the young soldiers refused to obey!
By yielding to authority, we can absolve ourselves of guilt. Like Eichmann, we are doing our duty, only obeying orders: it is not our fault! Furthermore, those who give the order also absolve themselves from guilt: they do not have to do the dirty work themselves. A chain of command or a technological device (like a B52 bomber) diffuses the responsibility, reducing guilt more.
Aggressive behavior within species evolved because it increases fitness to reproduce, but, in the vast majority of animals, it is ritualized to minimize injuries serious enough to weaken the species. The weaker of two animals vying for food or a mate, at some point signals its surrender and the fight is over. Hostilities cease promptly because the combatants are in immediate contact.
In human society, passing the buck to those lower in the hierarchy, and the intervention of technology, allows fighting to be done at a distance. Then there is no compunction and no surrender. Who cares about the fate of those you cannot see? Young Americans dropping vast tonnages of high explosive bombs from B52 bombers six miles high would not have suffered the guilt feelings even of the ground troops killing face-to-face at Mi Lai.
The same applies to those who pollute the environment and rape the world. We feel the benefits but see little of the carnage. We are removed from the outcome. We are absolved of guilt!
It is time we stopped obeying leaders who tell us there is nothing to worry about as long as the stock market indices are rising. We know there is!
Left Brain: Right Brain
The brain has evolved into two distinct halves connected by several bundles of nerve fibres, the largest of which is the corpus callosum. Normally messages that initially reach one side of the brain pass to the other along these nerve bridges so that both halves of the brain work together. This bilateral division of the brain occurred very early on in evolution.
The division possibly arose as a safety device: if the animal damages part of its brain, it can still function using the other half. It might also, like the multiple computers on the spacecraft, Challenger, have provided fail-safe checking, both halves having to agree before a tricky decision was taken.
The two halves in human beings have now developed some functions that are quite different from each other, although each half can take over functions from the other half when necessary. People suffering brain damage in one hemisphere can regain many lost abilities as the undamaged side of the brain learns them.
Broadly speaking the left brain manages language, mathematics, logic and detail while the right brain manages imagination, creativity, dreams, spatial conceptions, recognizing patterns and relationships, intuition and seeing the “"whole picture"”.
People differ in the degree to which they use the right hemispheres. Those who make more use of the right brain are divergent thinkers, imaginative, spontaneous and intuitive compared with those who stick with the left hemisphere who tend to be more coldly logical, analytical, keen on organization and concerned with detail.
In short, the left brain is generally responsible for rational thinking and the right brain for intuitive. Yet not all right brain inspirations are significant. To determine which ones are, they have to be scrutinized rationally by the left hemisphere. Effective discovery requires both.
The dominance of the left brain peobably began only about 3000 years ago. Until then social rules of behavior had emerged from the right brain which processed a welter of experience and returned its findings as dreams or hallucinations, thought to be sent by the gods.
Hierarchical social organizations, writing and the development of technology put paid to all that and substituted left brain directives and regulations formulated by priests and politicians. Selfless irrationality yielded to selfish rationality. In the modern world, the left hemisphere’s rationality increasingly suppresses the intuitive side. Witness the hostility of orthodox thinkers to original thinkers.
Yet, intuition is more likely to give advanced warning of impending problems. Reason cannot accept that anything is wrong until the full chain of logic is evident. Try to question experts or warn politicians—express sensitivity to matters such as the environment, mad cows, GM food, the plight of the deprived or the dangers of mass destruction, express right brain values—and out come the establishment assassins.
Since the left brain concentrates on detail rather than seeing the whole, one manifestation of it is ignoring the welfare of the mass in favor of the welfare of self, even when self is part of the mass and inevitably must suffer with it—obsessive selfishness. Purveyors of pollution ignore its effects on themselves and their own children.
Industrialists in time past happily sought absolution at church while the infants they employed were crippling their bodies and lungs pulling coal trucks deep underground, or working looms in cold satanic mills. The poor immigrants to the USA described in Upton Sinclair’s “"The Jungle"” were literally rotting in chemicals in the meat processing factories in Chicago while the nouveau rich Mr Tycoon sheltered Tycoon Jr in gracious living. They saw only themselves: left brain logic told them to ignore the wider picture that the right brain attempted to thrust on to them.
Now we are “all” Mr Tycoon! We Westerners want to preserve our material possessions and demand ever higher standards of living even though continuous economic growth must inevitably destroy the planet. We all lose, not just those who are obviously exploited. John Donne’s bell is not tolling only for the unfortunates starving in The Sahel—it is tolling for all human kind!
Today’s industrialist or politician cannot be squeamish about a little atmospheric pollution, a few dead animals or the destruction of more primitive but more sensitive cultures than our own. Their left hemispheres tell them we need more efficiency, higher productivity, greater economic growth and less interference in their right to manage.
The irony is that it is the left hemisphere that is truly illogical: it will lead to our deaths. It can, with intensity and interest, analyze in academic detail the tiger’s fur, tail, muscles, camouflage, claws and teeth. It can debate endlessly about their functions and which are more important than others. But it cannot see the whole animal licking its lips! Only the right brain sees the whole tiger and the danger it poses!
Better adapted animals than humans would know when to stop trying to work things out rationally from inadequate information and depend upon their intuition instead.
We need to create the conditions for mobilizing the love of life, which is the only force that can defeat the love of the dead. Fromm.
Misplaced Optimism
Death—extinction—stares us in the face. We can expect no sensible response until that is accepted. Yet, we remain ludicrously optimistic about future outcomes until the first blows jolt us, like sleepy drunks, into reality and a hasty and often inadequate plan.
Optimism preserves our peace of mind by evoking positive expectations of future events and a false and deceiving euphoria about possible outcomes. It smacks either of overweening arrogance or of a fear of the outcome that has to be mentally shielded from us—we think that the future will be that which is most preferable to us.
Delegates to the Vienna conference on the Chernobyl accident arrived in a thoroughly gloomy and depressed state of mind. Complacency had been shaken. Pessimism! Five days later, the gloom had lightened. Optimism! The world’s nuclear experts, had convinced themselves there was nothing to worry about. Instead of realistically assessing the implications of Chernobyl, they had thought of lots of reasons why disasters like this were rare except in Russia. They left cheerful and elated.
We all do it—we are all doing it! What is the source of our baseless optimism? None other than the left brain. The two halves of the brain can be selectively disabled by drugs leaving only the other half functioning.
An unchaperoned left brain, the right brain having been drugged, leaves us excessively euphoric: the left brain takes the optimistic, cavalier view by focussing on something familiar, something we can add up or write down, something we “"understand"”.
An unchaperoned right brain, the left having been drugged, on the other hand tends to leave us anxious and pensive: it sees the whole situation, its complexity, the hazards, not just the petty details that take our fancy—it scares us, we feel uneasy.
The right brain is the entropic brain. It sees the whole results of our actions not just the immediate results. That is what makes it more sensitive and caring.
The right brain is mute and can only give images, mystical impressions and dreams. Nightmares about monsters coming to get us could be the right brain’s way of saying that there is a real monster taking over. Apparitions, hauntings, UFO contacts and the menagerie of paranormal creatures that loom out of the night, might be right brain warnings of a threat from something unrecognisable because it is ourselves!
