A few reflections on humankind's seemingly irrational motives

I am now at a turning point in my life. This requires me to make several crucial choices that will irrevocably determine my future endeavors. However insignificant in the greater order of things, my current status inevitably draws me towards making a number of conclusions about life in general and about my own trivial self.

Ever since adolescence, I’ve held a sceptical conviction towards other people’s motives. A headstrong attitude if you like. The traditional expectations, hopes, and beliefs of others have never corresponded to my own somewhat divergent point of view. One such important default behavioural trait of ordinary people is the need for attention.

It comes as no surprise that most dysfunctional people commit the cruelest of atrocities due to a lack of acknowledgement of their existance by others. Humans crave a mirror that reflects and confirms their being. Without it they lose their frame of reference and run the risk of going berserk. It is no mere narcissism; rather a way to position themselves in their environment. As humans are essentially social creatures they feel the need to ‘fit in’ lest they be rejected and fail to survive - the absolute and fundamental underlying purpose of our genetic code. This characteristic can be observed in many aspects of life. Salespeople and communication experts widely agree on the beneficial effect of copying a client’s posture when engaged in negotiation. Likewise, affirmative linguistic usage when taking menu orders or summarizing a client’s wishes and/or point of view similarly results in better tips and higher rates of success. It is so ubiquitous that it manifests itself throughout an entire lifespan. One might even suggest it fuels our life, since without the desire for confirmation human relations as we know them would be completely different, unimaginable even.

The unbridled ambition of people illustrates this wonderfully. Ambition is a means to get attention, respect and widespread recognition by other people. The 20th century invention of celebrities epitomizes this point especially. Celebrities thrive on their fame to stay successful, despite their countless gaffes or offenses in life. This ostensibly paradoxical situation whereby people interest themselves in people higher up on the hierarchical ladder (cf. royalty) can simply be explained by the attention-whoring of said celebrities. People react positively to it, and the celebs know it well enough. These observations lead me to consider the deeper cause of the affectionate desire for recognition, being evolution. Exactly like apes humans try to survive in group environments. Because it is more efficient and more beneficial to group survival, individuals are not on equal levels. Each one receives its proper amount of attention, status and level of reputation, whereby the individuals more fit to lead (and procreate) rise up the ranks. Similarly in our society, the intrinsic value of a beggar is no more than that of a king as they both play a role in a world we all perceive more or less in the same way; nevertheless, we devote more attention to the latter, and nobody really disputes it. It’s human, and therefore accepted.

This focus on attention in a human’s life is apparent in the desire to start a family, to have kids, a good job, house and a spotless reputation. A spouse and kids by default offer unquestionable affirmation. All these possessions lead to a ‘good and comfortable life’. Throughout most of mankind’s history and in nearly all cultures, tradition ensured that everyone was able to achieve this to some extent. Of course, people brought up in humbler societies could not aspire the same targets as offspring of the nobility. People gauge their success relative to their starting positions. A farmer becoming a foreman will be equally happy as an aristocrat becoming chief engineer of a large factory. Nowadays in western society, with the stress on taking life in your own hands, offering more opportunities but also more responsabilities and risks, recognition is less ensured than it was before. Michel Houellebecq describes this eloquently in most of his oeuvre. People in western society desperately lack love and a tender carress (symbolizing, at least in my view, absolute recognition of eachother). It preludes the downfall of our culture. While I’ll not venture in his realm entirely, he does have a point: many people find it hard in this rapidly changed world to ‘fit in’. Adolescents attempt to adhere to the latest fads, people cling on to idolatry of celebrities and royalty while they writhe away in misery and pointlessness themselves. Their search of attention and recognition masks their meaningless life. Either they’re too ignorant to grasp the idea or they don’t want to face this consciousness.

Life itself is meaningless. Realizing this scares a lot of people. Subconsciously people have a profound desire to give meaning to life because it is hard to accept your own insignificance. If it were to be a default understanding, people would find it harder to try and survive - due to the lack of a raison d’être. Evolution dictates we can’t have that since it automatically selects the optimal survival strategy in a given situation and environment. Having evolved to be sentient beings, a new layer of complexity is therefore added to ensure we do our utmost best to find the best mate and procreate. Caring and attention had already evolved to provide for small children when humanoids were not yet sentient like we are today. Evolution decided that we would improve our chances of survival if we generated more brain mass. In contrast the offspring needed more time to grow since the size of the head compared to the rest of our baby body resulted in humanoid babies becoming easy prey for predators. The family unit was the logical consequence. As our brain grew more complex, our understanding of the world and ourselves greater, and our consciousness evolved towards our current status, the need for a meaning to life increased. The process of a complex system of attention and recognition thus became a side-effect of an evolution that was started by the need of something else - larger brains and more caring in order to survive. This theory of a side-effect has been proposed elsewhere with respect to religion by Richard Dawkins (in ‘The God Delusion’) and I subscribe to it wholeheartedly.

To illustrate his theory on how religion originally evolved, using the evolution theory, I’ll shortly elaborate on it here. Religion today is a very complex matter, and it seems to be hard-coded in the human brain. Just about every culture and tribe in the world has some sort of religious tradition. This does not entail religion being true per se; rather it suggests that it evolved into religion as we experience it today. Because it is so ubiquitous, we need to search for a time and place when all humanoids were still interdependent (so religion or God couldn’t have originated 6000 years ago, because Aboriginals in Australia for example became isolated from the rest of humanity many thousands of years before. This implies the common emergence of religion is much older, since Aboriginals too have a sense of religion). Simultaneous with the evolution towards larger heads and more caring and attention, children were required to listen to their parents. As they were weak and defenseless, they had to be protected by their elders. The only way to do this was to make sure children did what they were told. So they were told fictional stories to scare or to inspire them, to find ways to make them listen to parents or tribe elders. As a side-effect to this trait in children, religion gradually came into being. Parents invented a narrative for the children, and these children passed it on to their children and so on. Incidentally, this effect proved useful for individuals to keep the group together; as I have pointed out earlier, like individual evolutionary processes exist alongside group evolutionary ones. As they benefited the group, these feelings in children were transplanted towards adults after generations and became religions. Nowadays humans have evolved so much that religion is absolutely benefical to a group, even if there are apparent disadvantages such as religious wars, labour intensive support to organised religion and so on. The advantages of religion clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Of course this evolution was stretched out thousands and thousands of years if not more. In present day societies however, religions come into being very easily and extremely rapidly. Cargo cults in Polynesia for example started out when white colonists arrived with technological marvels (in the eyes of the locals). Some charismatic whites became Jesus-like messiahs of which locals expected a widely anticipated return. In the course of a few decades these cults arose (and died out), often having created a mythical image of said white prophet. Starting out as a short, nearly bald male, they could be remembered as tall, fair-haired demi-gods after only a few decades. Asked whether they really believed such a messiah would return (with technologically advanced bounty in great store) they replied that if christians awaited the return of Jesus for nearly 2000 years, they could certainly wait a few more years too.

The whole point is that the need for attention, or the need for religion for that matter (they are closely related by the way), is merely an evolutionary tool to fool us into thinking our death is not meaningless. Humans as sentient creatures fear death above all. It is a hotly discussed topic in religion, ubiquitous in art around the world and always present in our minds. As religion promises us that our life is not in vain and that we shall live on in eternity after death, our quest for recognition gives meaning to our present lives as well as promising us that we shall live on after our deaths either through offspring, in the minds of others or imprinted in the annals of history. It is a genuinely positive effect and we may be grateful of the evolutionary principle having bestowed upon us such a great gift. However, it is a shallow façade. It is easily pierced - if only you are to broaden your perspective and unveil the cloth blocking the expanse of your vision. Sadly, the danger people fear most is that they will lapse into depression or that the world will turn into a hedonist den of anarchy. That is to deny that atheists for example cannot enjoy life because they do not feel consoled by the presence of the Lord God Jesus. As this is demonstrably false (there is hardly any statistical evidence that atheists and agnostics are more or less happy than theists or deists) it also doesn’t apply to the understanding I have mentioned above.

If we come to think of our existance as a short dot in the cosmic span of time, it might makes us more humble, and less egoistic; less bent on ambition and self-gain, we could possibly realize that we were dead before we were born, and dead long after we die. Our current presence on earth is merely a short intermission of that endless state. In a way, we are not the same person we were during our infancy. First of all the molecules or atoms that constituted person x have all been replaced by others. Like Herakleitos’ stream of water that will never be the same, we too are never the same. On a less abstract level this also applies to our personalities. We change daily since our many experiences mold us into someone we can’t choose to be. It is no call for a defeatist attitude towards life, but to a more humble point of view. The American mantra that a man only hits what he aims for is no absolute truth. Not all people have the same options. Not all people are born equally, despite our desire and wish that it may be so. Note that intrinsically people are all of equal worth, but people ‘themselves’ are far from equal - a notion that is growing more popular as over the past years being politically correct is heavily under siege.

My point is, quite simply, that we oughtn’t fear death, but rather embrace it as a final stage in life. We have no need for religion or attention to defer the true consequences of it. Like birth, adolescence and other milestones in a person’s life are essential stadia, death is but one of those milestones. With this attitude in mind, taking your own life, or having euthanasia performed on yourself becomes less of a shocking decision. Many people refrain from taking action because they fear the reaction of ‘others’, in other terms: their reputation. This is because they neglect to dismantle the wall our need for recognition has constructed.

In a way, the understanding of the meaninglessness of our life can be extrapolated to many aspects of life. Realizing this simple point of view has immense consequences. Michel Houellebecq applies it negatively in his novels, because he fails to see the freedom such understanding entails. The consciousness of it all rather provides him with a deplorable view on the lack of love and caring in present day society. Humans in a default situation naturally crave this love indeed, and without it grow depressed. However, transcending that superficial, hollow and feeble reason of life and realizing the modesty of my point of view overcomes the trap of insanity, relativism or depression. Granted, it is not an obvious task, but if one is willing enough, it is an chain of thought one is recommended to adopt.

PS: I wrote this piece of drivel while listening to Red Sparowes’ 2006 album ‘Every Red Heart Shines Towards The Red Sun’. Very inspirational tunes; well recommended!

The legacy of George W. Bush Jr.

I came across an amusing and refreshing review on Bush's two presidency terms in the New York Times. Pretty much spot on says I.

January 4, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

A President Forgotten but Not Gone

By FRANK RICH

WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”

The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.

Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.

The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”

This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”

“The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like an eternity today,” he says, “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of the thousands killed and maimed during that multiyear “moment” as Bush stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.

The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal. But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American people are surely relieved to hear it.

With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”

Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.