Our involuntary fluency with hierarchy

Humans, as social primates, have evolved a psychological affinity for the subtleties of social dominance relationships.   But the kinds of power relationships that derive from the forced mechanical associations of civilization are quite different from those found in nature.  In fact, seen through the lens of our evolved sensitivities, the hierarchical systems imposed by the institutions of civilization are entirely arbitrary, and quite unnatural.  A person’s standing within a corporate system can have little or no relation to their physical, intellectual, or creative capacities.  Or if it does, the relation is in terms of the capacity to navigate the artificial corporate system itself.

A recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that we have a latent psychological preference for hierarchical social systems over more egalitarian situations because hierarchical relationships are easier for us to process cognitively.  The authors of this study suggest that this explains why we continue to participate in—and actively promote—steeply hierarchical institutions even while we claim that we want democracy, increased equality, etc.  

It is just a small step from this to the claim that we need hierarchy in our lives, and that we need to be embedded in oppressive systems of dominance and submission: we need the 1% in order to satisfy our natural psychological predilections.

But there is a much more reasonable interpretation of the results of this study.  Because we have more experience thinking about things that we are frequently exposed to, we have a tendency to prefer those over things that we come across less frequently.  This is why we like a song better the more times we hear it (the mere-exposure effect), and why we tend to develop deeper friendships with the people who inhabit our local environments (the propinquity effect).  Because hierarchy is so ubiquitous in our culture, we have become fluent at processing hierarchical relationships.  Add to that our culture’s fetish with efficiency and the resulting premium placed on speed and fluency.  When offered the choice between a hierarchical situation and an egalitarian one—within the artificial context of a psychology experiment—the preference for hierarchy is not surprising.  And it says nothing about our natural predilections other than that we have learned to prefer things that are easier to think about over things that we have to work at.  

Another study published earlier this spring in the journal, Psychological Assessment, looked at something called involuntary subordination.  Involuntary subordination is exactly what it sounds like.  It is a potentially adaptive process “in species that compete for resources as a mechanism to switch off fighting behaviors when loss is imminent (thus saving an organism from injury).”  As an adaptation, it is designed to be a temporary posture.  However, the arbitrary hierarchical institutions of civilization force us—involuntarily—into long-term subordinate relationships.  This study confirmed that the side-effects of long-term involuntary subordination include major depression, anxiety, lack of confidence, and (no surprise here) increased submissiveness.    

Psychologically speaking, hierarchical systems appear to be self-perpetuating.

Zitek, E. M., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2011). The fluency of social hierarchy: The ease with which hierarchical relationships are seen, remembered, learned, and liked. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, doi:10.1037/a0025345

Sturman, E. D. (2011). Involuntary subordination and its relation to personality, mood, and submissive behavior. Psychological Assessment, 23(1), 262-276. doi:10.1037/a0021499

Overwhelming force part 2 (from the UC Davis Chancellor, with love)

An excerpt from a letter sent to UCD alumni from Chancellor Katehi:

“After a week of peaceful exchange and debate, on Thursday a group of protestors including UC Davis students and other non-UC Davis affiliated individuals established an encampment of about 25 tents on the Quad. The group was reminded that while the university provides an environment for students to participate in rallies and express their concerns and frustrations through different forums, university policy does not allow such encampments on university grounds. […] Driven by our concern for the safety and health of the students involved in the protest, as well as other students on our campus, I made the decision not to allow encampments on the Quad during the weekend, when the general campus facilities are locked and the university staff is not widely available to provide support.”

Apparently the students were pepper-sprayed and beaten out of concern for their "safety and health."

Overwhelming force

Learned helplessness is ubiquitous in civilized humans, and perhaps the most significant psychological threat to meaningful resistance.

The machine nurtures learned helplessness by exercising a complete monopoly on violence.  Those at the top of the power hierarchy reserve the right to use overwhelming force against any act of rebellion that threatens the integrity of the status quo.  The entire resources of the US National Guard will be employed to deal with a single resistant individual if need be.  The message: “The machine’s directives will be followed. Resistance is futile.” 

Minor forms of protest are allowed as part of the need to maintain a minimum level of friction in the system.  All machines need some resistance to function properly.  But protesting has to be kept within strict limits, and when it approaches these limits—which are a moving target that changes with cause and political climate—it will be met with violent and potentially deadly force.  If a threat to the system is detected, it must be removed regardless of the cost or consequences. 

So in one sense the recent police action in Oakland is good news.  It is evidence that the Occupy Movement is starting to be viewed as a potential threat to the system.  The bad news is that the machine has no off switch, no mechanism that allows it to back away from the use of overwhelming force once the process has been engaged. 

I suspect that things are about to get real ugly.

More on the delusion of progress

Imagine you are in a sinking boat and you are trying to bail out the water using a leaky wooden bucket.  And further imagine that, unbeknownst to you, you are making no progress whatsoever because the water you toss overboard is blowing right back into another part of the boat.  

Suppose that someone comes along and gives you a better bucket, one without leaks, so that you are able to get more water with each scoop.  Then, a short while later, someone else comes along and gives you an even better bucket; this one is ergonomically designed, lightweight, and has a special shape that allows you to scoop faster and collect twice as much water.  

When you think back on when you started bailing with your leaky wooden bucket, it sure seems like you are in a much better situation now with your high tech bucket than you were before. The problem, of course, is that you are focused in on the immediate situation: how much water you can scoop and how fast, and not getting the bigger picture.  You can’t see that whatever bucket you use, the boat will sink just as fast.

When we scrutinize a specific technological innovation, our evaluation is usually limited to the set of conditions or problems that that technology was designed to deal with.  The physical operation of the technology itself often restricts our perspective.  Within this limited focus, it can appear that a new technology is a clear improvement over preexisting conditions.  The task at hand can be accomplished faster, or more efficiently, or more elegantly than before.  What we frequently don’t see is how peripheral conditions are affected.   

We see our green weed-free lawn and not the algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico that results from the fertilizer that washes into the gutter.  We see our growing list of friends on Facebook and wonder at how socially barren life must have been prior to the internet, as we sit physically isolated and alone in front of a computer screen. 

Technological progress is a mirage.  And we fall for it again and again like thirsty dogs baked senseless by the desert sun.

Reify Wall Street

Try telling zealous patriots or ardent fans of a professional (corporate) sports team that their feelings of loyalty and allegiance are misplaced. 

Once an institution is reified and bestowed (linguistically or legally) with person status, it then becomes a potential target for our sympathy, empathy, respect, affection, and our anger and derision as well.  All of these psychological postures are misplaced, of course.  Institutions are conceptual constructions: organizational technologies designed to facilitate the coordination and direction of human behavior toward nonhuman ends.  They can neither appreciate nor return our feelings. 

Enter occupy Wall Street.

Who or what is the target of the protest message? There are numerous specific individuals “occupying” positions of power within the machine’s organizational structure who deserve the guillotine—or worse.  But the protest—at least in my corner of the occupy movement—seems to be directed primarily at abstractions such as “the corporate system” or “greedy banks” or “capitalism” or “rich motherfuckers.” 

It is clear to just about everyone that “the system” is the source of the problem.  One would think, then, that the obvious solution is to eliminate the system. 

One would think. 

But this thought appears to remain sequestered in the minds of a few anarchists.  The majority of the occupiers want to reign-in corporate power, apply various patches and tweaks to the wealth-distribution process, and then get on with business as usual.  The emphasis on nonviolence and non-engagement with the police is open genuflection to the status quo: the system itself must remain in place.

Slaves begging their masters for a little more meat in their Christmas gruel.

What if we actually treated corporations as if they were human beings? What if we acted as if they could actually bleed, actually suffer feelings of grief and insecurity—actually experience all of the physical and psychological pain that they generate for real people? What if we considered all forms of corporate-owned property as the exposed appendages of their physical bodies? What if broken windows and burned delivery vans and shattered computer monitors and severed power lines hurt? What if blocked shipments and crippled communication conduits caused them to feel actual frustration? What if the defacement of a corporate logo on a billboard or building caused them to feel actual humiliation? 

The loss of self-control

Civilization employs numerous devices for channeling human behavior, mechanisms for redirecting us away from our natural inclinations and toward activities that serve the needs of the machine.  Much of this redirection involves the intentional erosion of self-control.   Self-control is the clay out of which true resistance is molded.

Research on self-regulation has found that self-control operates very much like a muscle: it appears to be a limited resource that can be depleted and requires rest in order to reestablish its strength.  Self-control reflects the ability to inhibit behavior or override competing urges.  The exercise of inhibition is effortful, and inhibiting one set of urges leaves less energy left over for a subsequent set. 

People fail to exercise self-control following recent situations in which their self-control has been taxed or when there are multiple demands on self-regulation.  For example, a dieter who has to inhibit the desire for the delicious chocolate chip cookies in the lunchroom is more likely to binge on cheesecake at home later on.  Or the menial employee who has to submit quietly to a verbally abusive boss all day long on the job is more likely to lash out uncontrollably at his or her teenage child at the dinner table in the evening.

A wide variety of factors, environmental and psychological, can tap into our inhibitory resource and reduce the ability to maintain self-control, including noise, coping with stress, regulating mood and moderating emotional expression, delaying gratification, dieting, and engaging in activities that require physical or attentional stamina.  One study found that just the anticipation of a future demand on self-control can deplete the inhibitory resource. 

It is a fairly straightforward matter to trace the myriad ways that our self-control resource is overtaxed by life in modern techno-culture, with its continual stress, competing demands on attention, enticements, distractions, and a plethora of situations in which our natural emotional responses must be held in check. 

True resistance, then, requires an almost super-human level of self-control simply to overcome distraction and competing demands long enough to realize the extent to which resistance is warranted in the first place, let alone to meet the self-regulation demands of planning and executing effective courses of action and coping with their consequences.

What we really need, then, is—Wait!  I need to tweet about this…

No respect

Another way that the mismatch between our genetic expectations and civilization manifests is in the lack of consistency between our inborn tendencies regarding dominance and submission and the machine’s artificially-imposed hierarchy and demand for obedience to arbitrary authority. 

All social primates show some degree of social stratification according to dominance.  For humans, nature divides dominance among a variety of context-dependent categories, physical strength, prior experience, personality, and natural leadership ability, for example.  Civilization partitions dominance additionally according to mechanical role in the hierarchy, sometimes in a way that overlaps with natural categories, as when a person with a personality predisposed to leadership is assigned a dominant role.  Frequently, however, the match among natural leanings, assigned role, and context do not comprise a coherent package. 

Consider in this context the phrase, “Have respect for authority.”  This common parental admonition is an example of how reification can be used to take an existing psychological tendency, in this case a natural sensitivity to dominance relationships among individuals, and yoke it to a mechanical requisite of civilization, in this case, the need to coordinate with an artificial power hierarchy.  Authority is not the kind of thing that could possibly be the target of the cluster of psychological postures that are subsumed by the word respect.  You can respect individual people who hold a position of authority, but the only possible responses to authority itself are obedience and compliance.

And, of course, their opposites.

Blame it on evolution

Here is a piece that looks at the relationship between the environmental crisis and human psychology: The Human Nature of Unsustainability.  The main premise of the article is that human evolution is at least partially to blame for the destruction of the biosphere.  Natural selection as hunter-gatherers has endowed us with certain predilections that, while quite adaptive in the Pleistocene, are not working out so well for us today.  Specifically, it turns out that our evolved environmentally-hostile tendencies are being reinforced by our modern “technological prowess and addiction to continuous material growth.”

I’ve seen this before: the underlying message is that the damage caused by modern industrial civilization is an emergent property of human nature.  We can’t help ourselves.  It’s just part of who we are as a species.  Termites build termite mounds, humans build planet-devouring civilizations.

Our unsustainable global situation, according to the author, is a result of growth-oriented economic views that are enhancing our evolved expansionist drives: “The entire world today is in the thrall of a particularly powerful ‘meme complex’ whose effect is to reinforce humanity’s K-selected expansionist tendencies.  The global community shares a socially constructed vision of global development and poverty alleviation centered on unlimited economic expansion fueled by open markets and more idealized trade.  This growth-oriented mythic construct has shaped the lives of more people than any other cultural narrative in all of history.”

There’s no denying that.  But even ignoring his reification of “global community,” this “meme complex” has attained dominance only because other memes have been systematically annihilated through 10,000 years of conquest and genocide.   And it has to be continually “reinforced” and maintained through the regular application of violence and massive doses of oppression.  This “shared vision,” to the extent that there is such a creature, is not an emergent property of our evolved human nature, and would very quickly evaporate if members of the global community were left to pursue life on their own terms.   

To add insult to injury, the author doesn’t even get evolution right: “Part of the reason [for the unsustainable nature of civilization] is the incomplete evolution of human consciousness—Homo sapiens is very much a work in progress.”  Apparently we are only half-baked, and as a result we are a “conflicted species” because our consciousness has not fully integrated our instinctual emotional drives with our rational moral sense.   

I thought the New Age went extinct in the early 90’s.

The author is clearly right in claiming that part of our problem is the dramatic mismatch between our evolved psychology and the urban-industrial lifestyles that are currently being forced on us.  But he is wrong in blaming evolution for the planet-wide destruction caused by the machinations of global civilization.  Global industrial civilization is not an emergent property of our biology.  Industrial civilization is an unlikely and unpredictable outcome of very specific historical circumstances (a Black Swan).

 

He ends the article in an all-too predictable way by suggesting that the solution to the problem of civilization is to apply more technology: “All the world community needs is a commitment to a collective solution, unprecedented political will, and the creative engagement of communication technologies!” and then we will be able to “socially reengineer ourselves.”

We have the power to repair our evolutionary defects through collective commitment and an unprecedented act of political will (read: massive centralized power and control), and the obvious first step is to friend each other on Facebook.

Anti-primitivist memes that never die

Here is yet another one of those “anarcho-primitivism is dumb" screeds.  Absolutely no new ideas here—the same pseudo-arguments about how there are too many of us now to readopt hunter-gatherer lifestyles, and besides, life in the Pleistocene really sucked anyhow.

This claim in particular is becoming cliché:

“Estimates of how many people could live on the Earth as hunter-gatherers based on the amount of food that would be available to them suggest a carrying capacity of around 100 million [link removed]. How the global population would be reduced to this figure has not been adequately explained by any anarcho-primitivist, but I’m not sure that would be possible without starvation and suffering on an unheard of scale.”

OK.  What if we spent a couple generations of sharply negative population growth?  No, I don’t know how, practically speaking, it would be possible to convince 7 billion people to severely curtail their reproductive activities.  But, then, a few generations ago, I would not have known how, practically speaking, it would be possible to get 7 billion people to relinquish what little remained of their personal freedom and acquiesce to the permanent defacement of the natural world for the benefit of multinational corporations.  Every five-year-old eventually learns that just because you personally can’t think of an answer doesn’t mean there isn’t one.  

And then, of course, the “massive die-off” cliché assumes that there would be less of a massive die-off, less starvation and suffering, if civilization continues.  If we end civilization today, almost seven billion people will die.  If civilization is allowed to continue for another three or four generations, that number rises to over 10 billion.  Our inaction today sentences an additional three billion people to starvation and suffering—and that doesn’t include the billions who will suffer and starve anyway, as a function of the grossly unequal access to resources that is a defining feature of all civilization. 

And while we are on the topic of gross inequality, the author of this screed—who, to his credit, appears to have strong anarchist sympathies—claims that capitalism is the source of this inequality, and that our technology will save us once we direct it toward human ends:

“Only once scientific research and industry have been brought under the control of the masses can the technologies that we use be adjusted to meet human values.”

Statements like these demonstrate a complete ignorance both of what science is and how it works, and of the basic nature of the industrial process.  Both science and industry require division of labor; they involve specialization and expertise: the unequal partitioning, distribution, and isolation of knowledge—which is entirely at odds with even the most superficial kinds of “mass control.”    

But where this guy really takes the boat of the edge of the map for me is when he lists all of the disease vectors that hunter-gatherers, both past and present, have to contend with, diseases that the miracles of modern medical technology have either eradicated completely, or relegated to statistical rarities.  The meme being tapped here is that civilization has made life progressively better.  I have devoted several previous posts to dispelling this myth in its various forms.  It is probably sufficient at this point simply to suggest a cost-benefit analysis of modern medical technology that includes the prevalence of iatrogenic illness and other side-effects, as well as externalities such as the health-destroying features of the global industrial machine itself—the presence of which serves as a precondition for the very existence of modern medical technology. 

Technology is a zero sum game.  This is an empirical fact.  But the costs are sometimes hard to see, overshadowed by the proximal benefits because we focus narrowly on the specific problem(s) that a technological innovation is designed to address, and ignore the preconditions for that technology’s existence and the peripheral and long-term consequences.

A New Odyssey

The modern myth of civilization is an epic tale of progress.  It is a story of the inevitability and ultimate beneficence of technology.  It is a legend in which civilization is our manifest destiny as a species, the shining jewel at the pinnacle of our evolutionary trajectory.   It is also patently false, a delusion. 

Unfortunately, delusions are notoriously difficult to dispel.  They are impervious to logic and conflicting evidence.  By definition, a delusion is a state of belief that is resistant to the intrusions of reality.  Those who operate under the influence of a delusion are adept at dismissing inconsistencies among their beliefs and reality, and easily navigate through mountains of competing evidence with the aid of a variety of very effective defense mechanisms.

But the real problem with the myth of modern civilization is not that it is false, nor that it is unresponsive to countervailing facts.  It’s that the conceptual frame it provides leads us to act on the world in ways that are counter to our best interests—and to the best interests of every other life-form on the planet!  A patently false system of belief that served as the grounding of a truly human way of life would not be a problem, despite its lack of veracity.  The modern urban legend is a problem, but not because it is false.  The modern myth is a problem because it provides validation for the ravenous consumption of the planet in much the same way that belief in divine kingship provided a source of justification for the destructive and oppressive activities of the first civilizations in Sumer and ancient Egypt.

The causal arrow between the emergence of civilization and the development of a mythic rationale for its existence points in two directions.  Thus the problems of modern civilization are not going to be solved by simply weaving another kind of story.  Nevertheless, it is an interesting exercise to consider what kinds of stories we might create as we reframe our situation in more human ways.  What kind of mythic legend might we tell about our eventual rejection of civilization in favor of more authentic modes of living?     

Perhaps we can look to the original legends of civilization, the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Homeric tales, as a template.  The legend of Odysseus, if I can be granted a wee bit of allegorical license, provides an interesting pattern for a new kind of epic legend: a story of how the human species, after uncountable years abroad, eventually regains its place in the world.   Odysseus’ leaving home and going to war represents our species’ transition from its evolutionary basis in foraging band society to lifestyles based on domestication and conquest, and all of the misery and strife that transition caused.  Now, lost and under the beguiling spell of modern civilization, we find ourselves shipwrecked on an island with a powerful nymph, where life is a superficial paradise and yet we suffer chronic discontent.   For Odysseus, Calypso’s island was a very empty place, and, of course, he was being held against his will.  Despite its virtually unlimited array of momentary pleasures, modern techno-culture is hollow and unfulfilling; the island of civilization is not our home, and we are, like Odysseus, held hostage and forced to attend to desires that are not truly our own.  And, like Odysseus’ voyage home, our journey back to a life that is consistent with our human nature will be fraught with obstacles.  There are storms on the horizon.  And even if we manage to find our home shores again, ultimate success is not guaranteed.  Things have changed since we left all those years ago.  Our fortune has been squandered and our castle is crowded with men of bad intent.  But we are not alone.  We have our tirelessly devoted wife—the all-providing natural world which has never abandoned us.  And we have our son—our genetic connection to the past—who has been abused, but is strong and itching for a fight.  And, despite overwhelming odds, we yet possess the strength to string the bow and the steadiness to send the arrow on its narrow path. 

               

But first we need to free ourselves from our seductress.  We need to leave the island.  Odysseus was able to break free only by enlisting the sympathy of his patron goddess, Athena.  Athena no longer has ears for our kind.  She is a goddess of war, and as such her sympathies are with the power complex of the machine.   

Who, or what, is our patron goddess?