Human nature and the prospect of freedom

This post is a transcript of a video you can watch here.

In a video I made about a month ago, I looked at many of the very real restrictions on your freedom. In a video before that I looked at the pernicious effects of power on people, kind of as a warning. In this video, I’m saying all is not lost. There is plenty of reason to believe humans are capable of living in free, non-hierarchical societies. Here I’ll be using what I know about biology, psychology and anthropology to explain why freedom is well within the range of human possibility.

People like me, who argue for something that is quite radical in the current circumstances, often get told what we want is “against human nature”. I’ve been hearing claims about human nature for 20 years and I’ve always been skeptical. A lot of what I’ve heard is demonstrably false. A lot of what people think is human nature is actually just in the nature of our society. It’s culture. And even if everyone you know from every country you know people from is this way, that still says nothing about what is natural or what’s right. All it means is we are capable of doing that. I object to the belief that just because we’re capable, that means some behavior was inevitable. Like, is it human nature (and therefore inevitable) to kill other people? If so, there’s no point in a taboo against murder, right? Of course he killed him; it’s human nature. That’s not much of an argument. It’s just an excuse. If your knowledge of human nature is not informed by psychology, history or different cultures, you might be confusing nature with culture.

Human nature gets blamed for everything but never gets the credit. We are capable of all kinds of cruelty, but we’re even more capable of kindness. Why don’t we say “of course, it’s human nature” when we see people being kind, generous, helpful, clever or creative?

What’s more, most of the things we say attribute to immutable laws of human nature aren’t. War, for example. I argue against war and I get told war will never end because it’s in our nature. If you want to argue violence is in our nature, then that’s an easy argument to make. Almost everyone is capable of violence or at least wanting to use violence or supporting someone else’s violence in the right circumstances. And since we see that behavior most prominently in little kids, it’s fair to say violence is quite natural. It is pretty much impossible to survive as a species without using violence unless you’re isolated on top of a mountain or something. 

But war isn’t just any violence. It’s organized violence on a wide scale. If you’re arguing war is in our nature, you’ll need a lot of evidence. War is pretty much just an invention of states, and states are the invention of warlords. Some societies have done away with war, like Iceland and Sweden. Some have given up their ability to start a war, like Costa Rica. And some cultures, albeit smaller ones that never developed states, have no war at all.

In fact, a lot of these smaller groups of people have no violence toward each other, and have found ways around it, ways to manage violence and maybe channel it towards hunting, or even some non-violent physical activity like dancing. People like to bring up the groups Steven Pinker mentions in his book on violence but those groups are not representative of anything. He deliberately chose the most violent small groups that he could find to compare them with the so-called civilized world. It’s the same thing people do with the Yanamamo people of South America. Just about every time you read something trying to argue war is human nature, someone brings up the Yanamamo people, because they’re supposedly really violent.

But even if we leave aside the questionable evidence on that front, who’s to say they represent human nature any more than we do? They’re not hunter-gatherer bands like our ancient ancestors but sedentary horticultural tribes that form coalitions with one another. Their whole society is organized differently from that of pre- (or anti-)civ humans. So what’s the point of bringing them up? It’s a weak example to try to prove a hypothesis. I would rather appreciate the complexity in the study of human nature than reduce it to simplistic assumptions to make a point about the modern world.

In the same volumes they’ll talk about chimpanzees, because chimps are closely related to humans, and look at all the violence they get up to. But first and obviously, we’re not chimps. We have better communication, fluid social structure, and hey, I’m hairy, but I’m not that hairy. And second, we’re just as closely related to bonobos, who don’t fight nearly as much as chimps and have very peaceful methods of resolving conflict, mostly sexual I think, but hey, we could learn from them. The point is, you would need a lot more evidence than what’s thrown around to prove war is an inevitable fact of our nature.

The same goes for racism. We get told we’ll never eliminate racism. Why not? Because there is racism right now? Don’t let your limited perspective close the doors of possibility. Racism as we know it is a pretty recent invention. It comes from European imperialism, colonization, slavery and even today, it is still useful for keeping the working class divided. The ruling class benefits from these ideas, so they promote them, and next thing you know, everyone says they’re inevitable. Like many other things we call human nature, racism is very much a product of its time and place.

I could go on for hours but let’s move on to the prospects for freedom, justice, peace and all that other stuff. One very common feature of human life is cooperation. People cooperate in every society. They have to to survive. That is as true in the smallest band as it is in the largest mass society. That’s how we get things done. We cooperate in part out of a sense of reciprocity. You do something for me and I feel indebted, so I want to do something for you. So you help me build my house and I’ll help you build yours. You help keep me safe and I’ll help keep you safe. Alternatively, you carry my groceries and I’ll watch your kids while you take a nap. This cooperation and reciprocity have made mutual aid a necessary element of our survival, and probably the basis of a free society.

Then there’s sympathy and empathy, another reason we cooperate. What if I already have a home? What do I get out of helping someone who doesn’t have a home to build theirs? Why should I? What have they ever done for me? I think only people whose minds have been poisoned by modern society, say by having taken a lot of economics classes, would think some people literally do not deserve their own homes. But even despite the dehumanizing tendencies in our culture, we still have lots of people who would help out in such instances. If we organize to build homes for homeless people, lots of people will join us, and some of those who refuse to will get lonely and bitter. Altruism makes us feel good. We’re a social species. We cooperate, we sympathize with each other, we help each other out. And yeah, there are a few people who prefer to feel superior and on top. But the rest of us want not just to house but to empower people to do what they need to do, to help them solve their problems, rather than just temporarily alleviating their misery.

It shouldn’t be too shocking to think sympathy is deep in our nature. It’s not just humans, after all. Most species of mammals and birds have been observed expressing sympathy. It probably stems from the parental instinct to protect those who are weak and in need. But it’s not just for our kids, right? People volunteer to help people they don’t even know. And we know that’s not an anomaly because paleontologists have found evidence that humans have always helped needy people, even when they’re too old or sick to be productive and seem to serve no function in society. We don’t usually just let them die. They’re still a part of the community and their lives, their health, their comfort still matter. The only exceptions, when people have refused to care for the needy, are in times of extreme scarcity, like a famine, or because of ideology.

Values like sympathy and cooperation and reciprocity are why mutual aid has worked so well for our species throughout its history. They’re why we can be sure people are wrong when they say without money people would have no incentive to do productive work. Of course they would. Even in a world where we are forced to work for and use money, lots of people do volunteer work, or engage in collaborative projects online, or contribute to causes they believe in. Money is actually only an incentive to try to get more money, which is frequently given to people for performing unproductive and parasitic activities, like landlords and bureaucrats. It makes us terrified of NOT having money, because without it we would starve in the street. You could certainly argue capitalist society doesn’t go against human nature, but it’s based on fear. I’m pretty sure we could do better.

We also have a sense of justice. Now, just like everything else, justice varies with the time and place and individual. It’s related to our sense of sympathy. And like sympathy, it can be killed by ideology. But it’s still here, in spite of all attempts to squash it. If I go out and beat up an old person and their dog for no reason, what percentage of people would cheer me on? There are some sick people who like that kind of thing, again, victims of a sick society. But most people would react with outrage. That’s the kind of situation where regular people can be capable of violence, because if I saw someone doing that I would rush in and use whatever force necessary to stop it. Our sense of justice can explain quite a lot of behavior. Going back to war, modern wars are mainly for the purpose of increasing the profits of the largest corporations, but the justification, the excuses they use, are always about justice. The right appeal to justice bypasses the thinking brain and goes straight to righteous indignation. We have to get them for what they did to us. We have to get them because they’ll get us if we don’t. We have to stop them from doing the cruel things they’re doing, etc. etc. Even torture. I wouldn’t assume anything about the policymakers or torturers good intentions, but since 9/11 we’ve seen millions of people saying torture is okay because we’re only torturing terrorists. This nonsense is still guided by a sense of justice, just one perverted by ignorance and fear and bad ideas.

There’s an excellent book on this topic by Douglas Fry called Beyond War. One thing he says, speaking from his wide understanding of violence in different cultures, war can be replaced by “more effective, less brutal ways of seeking security, defending rights and providing justice for the people of this planet.” The cross-cultural data show violence is the exception, not the rule, among the countless peaceful solutions we find to our conflicts. We negotiate, agree to provide compensation for damages, reach compromises, forgive and reconcile with friends and strangers alike. “Humans have a solid capacity for getting along with each other peacefully, preventing physical aggression, limiting the scope and spread of violence, and restoring peace following aggression.” These findings should not only change our understanding of violence and war but our ideas about the necessity of standing armies, the purpose of military intervention and the possibility for non-violent conflict resolution.

But most of us don’t understand the intense controversy around the debates on human nature, so we just accept the simplest things that filter down to us, like “war is in our nature.” So those societies that don’t go to war anymore are just wrong? Those societies that never developed war inevitably will? Who says? Actually, they are proof that lasting peace is in our nature. It’s largely a question of changing the culture. And of course that’s why I’m here–helping people think critically about what they’ve been told, helping them realize things could be better.

I think shame and insults and gossip are all products of our sense of justice. Cultures have norms and values, and when people go against those norms and values, we shame them, maybe through insults, maybe through gossip, but we find a way to bring them down. In some cultures, the best hunters are somehow handicapped or insulted, so they don’t get too big for their britches. Rules vary with the culture but all cultures have rules and ways of enforcing them. That’s called governance. We internalize rules and sometimes follow them even when no one is around to enforce them, because we feel guilty when we transgress them. We know we risk gossip and shaming if we break the rules, even ostracization if we’re really bad. It’s also pretty common to believe there is one or more celestial ruler dishing out rewards and punishments, regardless of how many humans are around. Reputation is important to most humans, because it determines how easy it is to get what we want. Trying to fake generosity, sincerity and rule-obedience is problematic, because people notice inconsistencies and facial giveaways.

So we can use our words to carry out justice, even if we don’t all agree on what is just.

Most humans seem to seek justice, but their methods vary. Some favour violence and some don’t, and their reasons are complex. Much of the violence humans inflict on each other, which may get called “senseless” or “evil”, is a consequence of the desire to right wrongs. What that says to me is people need to know the truth so they can direct their sense of justice in the right way. When we hear a president giving reasons for why we need to invade and occupy those people, if we realize it’s all a lie, we get angry at the president, rather than his victims.

That leads to another aspect of our nature: critical thinking. To me, critical thinking is the single most important thing we can learn. Because we know people lie for various reasons, or just that they don’t know everything and could be wrong, we all have some ability to think critically. If I claimed I had magic powers to kill everyone with a snap of my fingers like Thanos, would you believe me? Would anyone over the age of 5 believe me? So we all have the ability to question things. BUT we don’t always use it. When we’re scared, confused, exposed to lies or misinformation, or consider we might have an interest in believing the lie, our critical faculties are weaker. Or maybe we just have limited perspectives because we’re a part of a culture. No culture is a perfect representation of human nature, least of all one with airplanes and remote communication and cruise missiles. And culture without perspective leads to ethnocentrism.

It would help for us to learn about our cognitive biases, so we know how our brains work and why they don’t work perfectly. Being aware of cognitive biases doesn’t always stop you from making mistakes but it helps. Ethnocentrism is a very common bias that makes us think we are better than them, or even that our way is the only way. People in power know all about ethnocentrism because it forms the basis of their propaganda. “This is the way we do things in our country, so you have to do it too.” “Those people have values that are incompatible with ours,” or as Zap Brannigan said, “they stand for everything we don’t stand for”.

I think the combination of values like sympathy, cooperation, justice and critical thinking are the basis of a free society. Sympathizing with victims of the current political-economic system can lead you to realize how much injustice there is. Injustice can enrage you. Critical thinking helps us direct our rage at the people responsible, rather than foreigners or whatever other group we’re told to blame. We cooperate to bring them down and build a mutual-aid society. 

A free society doesn’t mean one without rules. I don’t know what THAT society would look like. Humans make rules all the time. Never mind us clever adults; kids make up games and agree on rules all the time. And from what I remember, those rules were usually pretty fair–how else would you get everyone to agree on them? Moreover, deaf kids who don’t know sign language put together in school will come up with their own signs for things. They create a set of symbols with grammatical rules even when they’re not taught to.

I know I haven’t proven the desirability of a free society but I think it’s pretty clear one is possible. There is nothing in our nature that holds back establishing a society where no one can oppress and enslave others. Now, we just have to figure out how to get there.