Instinct & Reason (Why Competition Sucks)

As we continue down our path of intentional empathy, the inner caveman will inevitably have some complaints. He’s also great at getting us to listen to our basic instincts without stopping to ask reasonable questions. We don’t want to just shut him up, though. He still occasionally has some valuable input related to our survival, after all. So I think it's worth asking the question: What's wrong with relying on our instincts? That's part of what evolution is supposed to be improving right? 

As our prefrontal cortexes have evolved, our understanding of how our choices impact others has too (ie. our empathy). It's getting harder and harder to pretend that our actions don't affect the other people we share our planet with. We've begun to recognize the uncomfortable fact that instinct and reason don't always align. In fact, our most unempathetic, and ultimately self-sabotaging choices usually originate from the inner caveman’s tribalistic “us versus them” mentality.

To our instincts-driven friend, people are divided into two easy categories: those who are with "us” and those who are "others". Whenever he faces a complex problem, he's learned that he can gain a sense of control by first simplifying the matter as much as possible. First objective: Quickly determine who is the ally and who's the enemy. Objective number two: Dominate or destroy the enemy. End of plan.

This oversimplified strategy, though often gratifying, backfires any time the inner caveman's perception of who the enemy is isn’t 100% accurate. Since we can only ever see the world through our own narrow perspectives, the domination strategy ends up backfiring quite a lot. At the end of the day, adaptive and empathetic decisions will almost always require us to push beyond the inner caveman’s gut feelings.

That's why one of the greatest parts of being human is our ability to combine both instinct and reason. That's how we make adaptive decisions; how we keep evolving. Without either of these two vital components, our choices will eventually become dysfunctional. Too much reliance on our instincts leads to chaos, hoarding, and violence. Too much reliance on our cognitive reasoning leads to ambivalence, anxiety, and emotional repression. 

Our best chance at collaboration (and ultimately, survival as a species) is through finding a balance between instinct and reason to inform our decisions. Michael Karlberg articulated this well in his 2012 TEDx about the problem with having a society built on competition. He says, “the culture of contest undermines our efforts to solve the increasingly complex problems we’re facing on this planet. Solving these problems requires the highest degrees of cooperation among people with diverse insights, experiences, talents, and capacities. The culture of contest sets such people against one another. In the process, it confounds our ability to solve complex problems together. So the culture of contest, for both of these reasons, is inherently unjust and unsustainable.”

Racism, nationalism, sexism, and really any of our major societal issues, clearly demonstrate our "culture of contest". Although loving and protecting one's own group can be admirable, the inner caveman’s obsession with drawing “us versus them” lines in the sand takes protection to a frightening extreme. By fixating on archaic notions of supremacy, our inner caveman doesn't see other people groups as equals, but as rivals.

Despite mounting evidence that cooperation is essential to our collective survival (see climate change, world wars, water insecurity, etc), many of us are still clinging to the inner cavemen’s outdated dog-eat-dog mindset. Peaceful coexistence seems laughable when we're stuck in our brutal, hunger games-esque competitions to see who will come out on top. Annoyingly, we keep doubling down on rivalry when any reasonable person could see that competition and hierarchy is exactly what's tearing us apart.

Humanity’s collective origin story is all about us having to fight for our survival. That self-empathy can help us understand why the inner caveman is so obsessed with establishing dominance. His competitive urges are explainable, true, but they're no longer adaptive. As we collectively keep pretending like we're competing to be the ultimate ninja warrior, we’re missing out on the next evolutionary step that our species could be taking.

Fortunately, we are not slaves to our instincts or to our inner caveman. Our gift of reasoning has given us the ability to evolve. Listening to our instincts AND our reasoning is the only way to push beyond these maladaptive habits and finally find out what might be possible. So when are we going to quit acting like cavemen?

The Inner Caveman

In comic books (and in the over-abundance of movies based on them), both heroes and villains alike are given origin stories. They offer the reader or viewer a peek into the character’s troubled past, setting the stage for present-day drama. A lot of characters have surprisingly traumatic back-stories, the more heart-wrenching the better. Some are orphaned in a horrific way, falsely imprisoned, or their dog is killed by a home invader. Sometimes they just fall into a giant vat of acid.

Regardless of the details, an origin story’s purpose is to explain that character’s motivations. Their beliefs and choices, justified or not, can be understood more deeply once you’ve learned their origin story. Often, characters you wouldn’t have connected with emotionally become more endearing once you discover their tragic backstories. It explains why they are the way they are.

With intentional empathy, our first task is to learn the origin story of the person or group that we’re trying to understand. Since all humans have the same ancient origin in common (sorry, evolution deniers), let’s begin there. Investigating humanity’s origin story is to ask the question: Why are we the way we are?

One of my favorite authors, David Eagleman says in his book, Incognito, “Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. [...] There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior.” One of these competing representatives, who often plays an antagonistic role in our modern-day functioning is a guy I like to call “the inner caveman.” 

The inner caveman represents a vital part of our humanity that has been passed down from millennia to millennia, keeping us alive with his primal instincts. Sigmund Freud called this primitive part of our minds the “Id”, an unconscious drive toward sex, aggression, and survival.

I picture the inner caveman as a rather unintelligent chap who likes to grunt his advice on how to solve our problems in the simplest way possible. He's impulsive, aggressive, and easily provoked because his only focus is on meeting our basic needs for safety, food, and shelter. Oh, and satiating our compulsion to procreate find things to dominate. I hate to say it, but he pretty much invented sexism and racism.

Unsophisticated though he may be, our inner caveman is the one who alerts us to our primal needs. In fact, he gets a lot of the credit for our survival as a species (so far). Unfortunately, his gloriously simple approach to life hasn’t adapted very well to the modern world. The threats and challenges that humans face have changed dramatically since the inner caveman was in his prime. 

Today our survival relies less on hunting, mating, and defeating rival tribes, and more on our ability to communicate complex ideas and collaborate with other tribes. Humanity’s new survival strategy looks drastically different from the inner caveman’s. "Many woman, much meat, more war" isn't going to hack it anymore. Nowadays the inner caveman is often irritable, stubbornly trying to use his ancient strategies in a world that is exponentially more complex.

Fortunately for us, the inner caveman is capable of adapting. Even if it does take him a lot longer than we would like. The poor fellow has had a rough couple of centuries, what with women being allowed to speak, no one wanting to be slaves anymore, and things like violence and rape being generally frowned upon. Since we can’t just delete the inner caveman from our DNA, and ignoring him isn't working, we need to learn how to work with him.

Eagleman’s democracy of brain representatives I mentioned earlier symbolizes our ability to acknowledge the inner caveman’s impulses while also listening to voices of reason. No single representative, including the inner caveman, has control over our choices. That’s great news! When the inner caveman grunts for us to give in to our base instincts, other representatives (maybe our inner scientist, inner accountant, or inner nurturer) have the chance to offer alternative perspectives.

If you think you’re pretty good at empathy, you have either (1) learned how to negotiate well with your inner caveman, or (2) you’re completely delusional. False dichotomies aside, the truth is we can’t just deny that we have an inner caveman. No matter how hard we pretend, he still hasn't transformed into the hot prince at the end of Beauty and the Beast. He’s here. He’s queer-phobic. Get used to it.

Before we can collectively create a culture of empathy where we can start working together to survive, we’ve got to address the reality of our inner caveman. As long as we refuse to admit that we have a racist, sexist, warmonger fused into our DNA, we’re sabotaging ourselves. Ignorance keeps us stubbornly justifying our outdated intuitions. If we give ourselves permission to acknowledge that the inner caveman exists, however, we can start actively choosing not to be so swayed by his vote. 

How do we accomplish such a thing you ask? Hint: It's what this blog is about. Stay tuned.

- Anna

Sources: 

https://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/dp/0307389928 

https://www.amazon.com/General-Introduction-Psycho-Analysis-Sigmund-Freud-ebook/dp/B00N14R3B6

Anxiety and The Apocalypse

The end of the world sure has come with a lot of new anxieties. Global catastrophes used to just be the theme of the fiction books I enjoyed reading. Now they’re the theme of my regular news feed (and nightmares). This is probably why the number of people getting diagnosed with anxiety disorders, depression, and OCD has skyrocketed in recent years. Then again, every generation before mine insists they had things just as bad, if not worse.

Generational gaslighting aside, one of our most collectively debilitating anxieties in this post-apocalyptic landscape is our fear of conflict. As existential problems have multiplied, so have strong, polarizing opinions. This has set us up to dread discussing anything of substance with friends and family. In the good old days, one only had to conform to cisgender/heterosexual norms and Judeo-Christian morality in order to remain safe from societal rejection. Not anymore. We’re tiptoeing through a minefield of delicate issues, hoping to avoid all of the topics that could set off a relationship bomb.

Whether I’m meeting someone new, posting on social media, or having a family dinner, there’s a sick feeling in my stomach that comes up when the conversation turns to politics, religion, social issues, or anything in between. If I express an opinion, the best-case scenario is I’ll get unfollowed on social media. Worst case scenario is having a miserable confrontation that causes a permanent rift in a relationship. Many of us, myself included, have already experienced both of these outcomes.

The internet, both a blessing and a curse, has polarized us even more. While our access to diverse ideas and perspectives has increased exponentially, we also now have unlimited access to misinformation and unchecked prejudice. It’s disturbingly easy to get sucked into an extremist rabbit hole online that regurgitates and amplifies any belief, factual or not. These self-fulfilling forums are echo chambers that do nothing but reinforce the reader’s pre-existing biases.

Moderation, once a virtue, has taken on a connotation of cowardice or apathy. If you aren’t dealing with high blood pressure and regular panic attacks, do you even care about “what’s going on in the world”?? I can’t help but wonder what this growing minefield of outrage means. Have we collectively chosen to discard empathy in favor of intolerance and nuance in favor of false dichotomies? I recently read an unnerving article that said Americans are exhibiting the early signs of an approaching civil war. How the hell did we get here?

Numerous psychologists, philosophers, and religious leaders have been speculating. I think the culprit is our tribalistic “us versus them” thinking; in other words, our lack of empathy. As humanity faces complex new challenges, we've gotten comfortable in our echo chambers that reinforce that anyone who hasn’t come to our exact same conclusion is an enemy. "They" aren't reasonable human beings but a faceless, evil opponent. Our othering has pushed us double down right when compromise is essential.

Meanwhile, progress on our most pressing issues has slowed to a crawl because no one is willing to listen, compromise, admit fault, or change. The death toll of the COVD-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine are two sobering examples of how many lives can be lost when we refuse to keep communicating beyond a disagreement.

I suspect that poor conflict management skills are a big contributor, but on an even deeper level, our resistance to evolving into a more empathetic human race is what’s blocking our progress. In the midst of bitter rivalries, reason would push us to take a look at our own contribution to the problem and empathy would help us recognize the understandable motives of those with whom we're in a stalemate. Unfortunately, the hip thing to do is to dig in our heels deeper and wait for the “other side” to come to their senses.

We face a pivotal fork in the road right now. Empathy isn't a luxury anymore, it’s a necessity to our survival as a species. If we want peace and hate war as much as we claim, all of us will have to intentionally choose to evolve. Stretching our capacity for empathy means learning how to actually listen to and tolerate other perspectives. We desperately need some common ground. Our only alternative is continuing to alienate everyone we disagree with, mutually ensuring our own destruction through endless stalemates.

You might be thinking, “Obviously! Everyone needs to get with the program!” You're right, but there’s one major problem: Nobody is personally willing to admit that we are bad at empathy. We all feel intuitively wise and can't imagine that we might be contributing to intolerance. It’s easy to preach the gospel of empathy when looking at other people’s stubbornness, but when our own values are questioned, a blind spot becomes quickly apparent.

As a therapist, I've witnessed first-hand the denial that most of us are in about our prejudice and biases. We automatically exempt ourselves whenever sober self-examination is called for. And it's understandable. We all need to be the protagonist of our life stories so when the evidence contradicts that, we opt for denial instead of willingness to change.

I've got good news, though. Empathy isn't a trait that you either have or don't have. It's a teachable skill that can melt our rage and cultivate true compassion for people who see the world differently. 

If you’re a natural skeptic like me, this may sound like a lofty goal. Despite my chronic nihilism, though, I believe in humanity’s capacity to continue growing as an ever-evolving species. If we're intentional, we can push our evolution in a more adaptive direction that could spare us (and hopefully our descendants) a whole lot of pain. 

In future blog posts I'll share my personal story of learning how to empathize, offer a fool-proof formula for empathy, and address the major barriers that tend to block our way. Stay tuned.

Sources:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02143-7/fulltext 

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/02/11/rise-of-intolerance-are-we-moving-backwards/ 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/27/1043161/why-being-online-felt-bad-2021-political-polarization-social-media/