Today we will discuss a very popular set of misconceptions, backed by data from ethologists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, and the like—researchers who, studying animals, the human brain, or artificially modeled situations, draw conclusions about people.
Whatever the scientific data, these conclusions are always the same, which is why we group them together. The conclusions are that people are rare bastards. And for this reason they cannot do without a caring boss (variant—they will always have a boss, because that is how our brain is wired, or because our psychological experiment showed it, or because that is how bees live).
At one point I was interested in these arguments and even read a bit of Lorenz, whom Hayek called his friend (Keynes, though, he also called that). But then I understood that all conclusions of this sort are simply logical or methodological errors. You don’t even need to know the subject matter of the science in whose name they are made to see that they are meaningless.
In fact, in all these cases we are dealing with variations of the same error. In all these conclusions, we are talking about a spherical human in a vacuum, and then extending the conclusions to social man. Neurophysiologists, who study brain reactions to stimuli and draw conclusions about society and the social person; psychologists with their artificial models—all are talking about non-existent people. The main error of ethologists is the error of identity and similarity, but there too we find a spherical human in a vacuum, used as an intellectual technique to extend conclusions to “society.”
Look what bastards people are—we conducted an experiment: we put two people in a cage, didn’t feed them, and after a month one killed the other and ate them! Well yes, we say, such a bastard is what a person becomes in such conditions. The thing is, the vast majority of us do not find ourselves in such conditions, and in particular because “society” (that is, habits, behavioral patterns, and the reactions of other people) does not allow it.
If you want to extend your research to society, then study not a spherical human in a vacuum, but a social human, directly acting in society. Only then can one speak of any validity in your research. This is like finding a Mowgli in the forest and drawing conclusions about the social person and “society as a whole” from his behavior (wow, how everything has been neglected!) on the grounds that physiologically Mowgli is a human.
The social human is a person who does not simply react to stimuli and irritants, but chooses from alternatives in implementing their plans, which exist in the form of steps, and moreover not just “arranged in time,” but existing exclusively in the future.
How far most are from understanding this is well demonstrated by the story of the “experiment” involving Joshua Bell—a famous virtuoso violinist. I think the reader has seen this experiment on the internet and read the tearful accompanying posts about what idiots and imbeciles people are, and where we are all heading, oh my. For those who haven’t seen it, I will say that it happened in Washington, where in a metro station in the morning, disguised as a street musician, the famous Joshua Bell plays the violin, who in the evening gives concerts with tickets costing from 100 dollars. And so he plays and… oh horror! People “indifferently walk past”! This fact is considered a disgrace, testifying to what it supposedly testifies to.
Meanwhile, such behavior of people is absolutely normal and rational. This is the behavior of a social person, who, unlike an animal, does not live by instincts and reactions to stimuli, but makes choices from alternatives and lives within certain plans. I won’t dwell on the obvious flaws in the experiment, such as—how many people passing through the metro station love violin music and how many of them are capable of appreciating the mastery of the playing (a few, judging by the sum of 32 dollars that Bell earned from this concert). Let’s assume that quite a lot of people can do all this. But this doesn’t at all mean that, upon hearing Bell play, they should stop and listen, since they are faced with the choice “be late for work” or “listen to the violinist” (those who are not in a hurry can stop and listen, which some did). Moreover, some of those who walked past (and possibly recognized the player) will go to this violinist’s concert in the evening and pay 200 bucks for a ticket, and this will be absolutely rational, since their actions do not exist in a vacuum, in which the instructive journalist evaluates them, but are part of plans, goals that are achieved sequentially and each step has its own value. And of course, choosing from alternatives as a guide to action has not been abolished. “Being late for work right now” for many is worth more than “200 bucks for an evening ticket.” And that is normal.
Psychoneurophysiologists, ethologists, and others make another error when they try to present society as a simple set of individuals. “Look,” they say, “look what a bastard—ate his fellow, and he had only been in a cage for a month, he could have waited! And how do you want to build a bright future with such people?” they more or less say to us. But society is not a simple aggregate of separate individuals. Each of us is certainly stupid, greedy, and aggressive, and our brain is primitive, and its reactions are no different from those of some hamadryas. But “society” is precisely what allows us to manage this, and even turn it to our advantage. Animals adapt to the environment, while people adapt to each other, a person’s main source of wealth is other people. Our evolution “took a different path”—those who used nature remained hamadryases, and those who learned to use each other became humans. And “society,” in its individual aspect, is the answer to the question “how should one behave in order to use other people?” Accordingly, in order to regularly receive something from them, one does not need to eat them, kill them, and torment them, however much our “animal essence” might want this. Human evolution is not the evolution of individuals, but of group survival; this is the evolution of interaction practices, not of some properties of the brain. What is required of the brain here is merely to be capable of learning, and that, you must agree, is not so demanding.