August 30, 2023

It is time for me to engage in some misanthropism

I am now going to dip my quill into my inkpot and mess up some parchment about the wickedness of mankind outside my sealed off and secure little world. I really have become something like a monk these days. Thus I can be a little above all the crap going on.

And it is pretty bad out there these days. As a result, people are doing more crazy things. Some people ask what is happening to Toronto, once considered by many people inside and out of it to be the capital of politeness.

However, mad and bad behaviour seems to be increasing everywhere. There are theories as to why that is. Almost inevitably, they turn into forms of misanthropism.

I have my own theory about why people are so bad; my own version of misanthropism. I will make it clear in the course of this essay. However, what has motivated me to flow electrons about it is a particular trope of misanthropism I am encountering a lot.

That is, that there is a design flaw in the human species which cannot be corrected. A fellow blogger I occasionally interact with is often focused on psychological studies of negative human behaviour. Recently she again lamented the failure of most people to respond to an emergency.

She referred to studies showing that in a crisis, only thirty percent of people react appropriately. Ten percent react hysterically, ten percent try to deny or minimize the situation, and half sit around waiting for someone to tell them what to do. She believed that this applied to crises developing over the long term, not just immediate ones.

The problem here is that she uses as an example the “climate crisis”. Unfortunately she buys into that, but most people do, these days, or pretend to. That in itself could be seen as a symptom of a design flaw.

I have written enough about this phony crisis. Find my best and most recent here. When a crisis is being declared which is not really obvious, and it is declared that the only solution is for everyone to do something which will mean starvation and death to much of the population, it would be a good idea to hold off reacting to it until it is more apparent what is really going on.

Seen this way, such a tendency in humans would not be a design flaw, but a salient feature. It might prevent us from being stampeded into mass suicide. However, it is correct that modern people tend to react poorly to a crisis; milling around while the threat develops, until it is too late to escape.

The real problem is the lack of effort to actually investigate threats and possible escape routes. But this cannot be an innate flaw in humans. If it were, our ancestors would not have survived the Pliestocene but been eaten by all the packs of giant predators.

Tribes of hunter gathers did not, and do not, act like this when danger was present. They form up around the chief and go to investigate the threat. Higher social mammals usually handle trouble in the same way.

I recall a study of different elephant herds in Africa. One had been a composite herd formed after aggressive hunting had decimated herds in the area and killed off all the leaders. Thus it lacked all social cohesion. In the other, the herd was long standing and secure, and the normal social order among elephants was intact.

When an apparent threat, a loud noise, was introduced into their environment, the first herd responded by milling about in confusion, then fleeing in disorder. The second simply formed up around the dominant elephant and marched to investigate the threat. Similarly, with a normal tribe of baboons, when a stuffed leopard was introduced in their location, the females grabbed their kids and headed for the trees while the males attacked, led by the dominant male.

There is a famous example of soldiers imprisoned by an enemy army. Their captors were able to spectacularly demoralize them. They kept them in small groups which changed frequently, and executed any leaders who emerged.

In this is the reason why groups of homo sapiens tend to react poorly when the wildfire is approaching, or the earthquake has struck. First, they are all strangers to each other. There are no recognized and competent leaders.

But there is more to it than that. People in urban, industrial societies do not learn to lead or to follow the right leader. They are conditioned from an early age to blindly follow ‘rules’, or to be led around by the nose by people they do not know, or do not really trust and respect.

Anyone with experience at trying to build ‘community’ in this society has found that it is very hard to do. Some will blame it on ‘techno fascism’, but it is not a recent phenomenon. Yeah, unto ye medieval times, most people were serfs of feudal lords.

I have heard ‘civilized’ people called ‘domesticated’, as with domesticated animals. But this is usually not an irreversible condition, if individuals are removed from domestication and ‘rewilded’. In animal species returned to the wild, and in human populations removed from oppressive systems, this takes one generation.

Thus it is seen, that the dysfunctional human behaviour concerning some people, including the above cited blogger, is not a design flaw in the human species. We are not ‘made that way’, presumably by genetics. We are conditioned that way from birth.

This leads me to another blogger, this one concerned with ‘community’. What she is really describing is the lack of community. She finds a difference between ‘latent’ community and what she calls ‘active’ or activist’ community.

She considers herself a community activist who is frustrated that all attempts to get active community going are frustrated by the latent community it has to operate within. She calls this latent community ‘techno fascism’. However, suppressive social environments have existed long before technology or fascism came along.

She notices that whenever techno fascism breaks down in any sort of emergency, active community breaks out. This contradicts my first blogger referent, who says that people break down when the social framework around them collapses. This would be a classic perception problem rather than any real contradiction.

Once a group of domesticated people are suddenly released from control mechanisms, they will go through a short period of anomie until they sort themselves into some sort of social structure. They learn who the competent leaders are and learn to follow them. Just as important, they learn who the pathogenic characters are and exclude them. They create real communities.

So, if dysfunctional human societies are a result of the latent structures built around them, we must ask what is the cause of these structures. We go to behavioural experimentation again. The rat trainers discovered that when they put rats into isolated environments, they could get ‘behavioural sinks’ in which the rats eventually killed each other off or stopped reproducing.

However, as they refined their rat runs, they learned how to design them so that the rats created stable societies within them. The question then is, why are humans unable to create favourable latent environments for stable human societies? We are the critters capable of speech and abstract thought, technology, and so on.

The answer is that these structures are imposed on humans from above. Most human societies are oligarchies or class systems. The livability and viability of such systems depends on the intelligence and intentions of the ruling class.

Ruling classes are usually effective at cresting and managing social structures so as to disrupt natural human society. I say “effective” because they are persistent at it, never really good at that or anything else. A good description of one of their methods is in “Elite Capture” by Olufemi O. Taiwo, which describes ‘identity politics’ as a cunning technique for keeping the two legged rats isolated in their own’ rooms’. 

Now comes the question of why human societies developed in that way and why people fail to revolt against them even when they are able. This can be a huge topic, but very simply people usually submit after conquest, to avoid being killed. After a few generations people became so conditioned to such an existence that little force is needed to keep them in line.

There are other psychosocial reasons why basically dehumanizing social relations are kept in place. The philosopher Hegel articulated it in his “lordship and Bondage’ essay.

Hegel lived in what was still a semi feudal society. He found that the lords ruled the serfs not because they were more intelligent, but because they were in many ways more stupid. If they could not live off the serfs by force, they would not be able to support themselves and would sink to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Thus, the lords would do anything to remain in control because to them, loss of dominance was death. The serfs wanted to go on living, so it was hard for them to fight against someone with that mindset. So they put up with the lord’s impositions as long as did not threaten their actual existence.

Another aspect of social ‘design flaws’ that is expressed by many people in different ways is the role of psychopathy in human societies. It seems that societies go in cycles where corrupt and incompetent elites rise to positions of power and then create their own downfalls. My favourite work in this genre is “Political Ponerology” by Andrew Lobaczewski.

Ponerology means ‘the study of evil’. Lobaczewski does not think humans are innately evil but some members of society do evil due to mental illnesses. What is good about his work is that he recognizes that mental illness is mainly caused by brain defects, sometimes due to injury but also often to genetic inheritance. You could question whether congenital psychopathy is a genetic defect since it seems to give these people an advantage.

One of Lobaczewski’s points is that in dysfunctional societies it is hard for people to recognize psychopathy. Psychos are often seen as great leaders and get into positions of power. However, they always bring about anomie and collapse, after which a new cycle begins.

This certainly describes the present situation in western countries. The governing institutions have been taken over completely by the worst kinds of psychos and grifters. It is becoming impossible for the population to maintain a decent life.

Yet most people are so badly influenced by propaganda campaigns that they are in a kind of hysteria. They cannot conceive a way out of their situations, like lab rats caught in a behavioural sink. It seems the situation will only end in collapse.

So if there is a design flaw in the human species, it is in the difficulty in creating and maintaining good governments or social systems. It is not a flaw in the way individual humans are wired. It is a flaw in the way human societies work once they reach a certain degree of complexity.

Humans have little experience at living in this way. Technological civilization is only a few generations old. Clearly, a meritocracy of some kind is needed to run such a society, but it is unclear how that would be achieved.

So now I get into pure rosy coloured speculation. I ask how a meritocracy will emerge from the present pathocracy, rule of the pathogenic. Some sort of ‘vanguard’ class would have to emerge to take control away from the pathocracy, isolate them somewhere, and educate a new generation to be the perfect new people.

The problem may not be as daunting as it appears. The pathocrats are good at getting and keeping control, not at actually running anything. Things are run by a fairly small class of ‘technological’ people who were partially excepted from the usual education processes and have some ability to think and to solve problems.

The technical class have the ability to get rid of the pathocracy and reorganize society to meet human needs. What inhibits them is that they still largely buy into the pathocrats narratives about how things work, though that is changing. As well, the inclination of pathocrats to blow up the world before they give up anything.

Lobaczewski’s idea of handling the pathocrats is fairly pacifistic. He wants them sequestered from normal humans, so they can be protected from their own follies and the vengefulness of newly freed underclasses. I suspect that getting the pathocrats thumbs away from the detonators will likely be a much more violent task than this.

Research into those holding wealth and power shows that these are mainly inherited. The skills and the genetic characteristics which enable control over normal people would also be inherited. So now, this rosy vision of an easy path to an ideal world gives way to more sober visions of what it will take to achieve it.

The most disturbing fact about oligarchic classes is their extreme violence and vindictiveness when their power is temporarily removed or restricted. The word ‘revanchist’ was coined to describe this type of behaviour. Such people really do believe that they have a Divine or inherent right to rule over everyone else.

This is why it is such a dangerous thing to try to do, to remove a ruling elite and the systems they have established, and set up a substantive democracy. Those movements which have survived and succeeded in this have usually done so by taking a “kill or be killed” approach to their ruling class. However, these days because there are more examples of non oligarchic government and remaining oligarchies are becoming weaker, it may be possible to achieve this less brutally.

You could make the conclusion from this that the claimed design flaw in humans is not a part of human genetic makeup. That is, the generally poor response to emergencies and crises, and other obvious problems. Rather, along with other design flaws cited by various people, such as reluctance to help other people, it is a kind of social construct.

But the social construction is created by a ruling elite who do seem to have a design flaw. They seem to have a genetic predisposition to lack of empathy for those not in their narrow circle, and willingness to use them like cattle. Yet since this behaviour enables them to gain advantages they could never have otherwise, it could be seen as an advantageous trait, not a defect.

I have encountered cynical misanthropistic people who claim that civilization was invented by psychopaths. Some even say we would be better off if civilization had never come about. But that is getting outside the bounds of this blog post and needs an essay of its own.

I would conclude that it is civilization itself which has the design flaw. We need a skilled elite capable of running things, but this leads us to be taken over and damaged by pathocracy. We need to look into how civilization developed, how it has both harmed and benefited us, how it keeps going wrong.

That would give us insights into how to solve the present crisis in Western civilization, and engineer something better. Then perhaps we can breed better humans, more satisfactory to misanthropists.