Where is Here?

If I am successful with this website, I will be able to take you on a journey through human experience, both in today’s world, and how we might have come to where we are now through evolutionary processes. The following questions that I hope to bring some awareness to and, with some luck, have found at least partial answers for are what I would describe as “Here”:

• How is it that, despite our ability to apply reason and logic to a situation, we get stuck in irresolvable — and often pointless seeming — conflicts or arguments?
• Given that giving up feels bad, what alternatives exist in situations in which the only other way forward seems to fight?
• What makes it so difficult for people to take my perspective in a given situation? Put differently, what leads people to behave in a way I think of as inconsiderate or worse?
• If I were to consider changing my own approach, how can I ensure that I will not be taken advantage of by those who still operate under the current model?
• And what are the circumstances in which anger and aggression likely remain the most appropriate response, and how I can learn to modulate them optimally?

These and similar questions have been on my mind for the past few years, and I have done my best to pursue answers that satisfy not only one of these questions, but all of them simultaneously.

One of the major challenges with approaches I have come across — including relating to people from a love-and-kindness perspective, using mindfulness to achieve a reduction of attachment to outcomes, or Nonviolent Communication as a means to foster more compassionate relationships — is that each of them seems to presume a goal or set of goals which at times collides with what a given situation is calling for.

That is, many models of improving human experience, in a world that is vastly more complex than the one which our current psychological and interpersonal cultural mechanisms evolved in, will indeed improve certain aspects of experience in certain situations. It also seems to me that a majority of models creates a kind of “prediction trap” from a game-theoretical perspective:

If someone I am faced with knows the kind of approach I have subscribed to, and they are able to predict — and in a way nail me to — the response this approach prescribes for me to take, I will become vulnerable to reverse engineering of my behavior. And one goal I have pursued while thinking about these questions is to enhance my and others’ experience of choice and, conversely, reduce the experience of being open to manipulation.

Human-like Animals Before Language

To demonstrate where I believe an incredibly central piece of the puzzle took its course, I would like you to use your imagination. If possible, think back to a time of maybe a few hundred thousand years ago, when proto-human animals were on their evolutionary path to becoming the humans of today.

At some point in time — well before we had the ability to communicate anything abstract with words — what I envision is that these animals (which I will call people and persons going forward, in part to stress the similarity in their experience and responses to present-day humans) initially lived in relatively small groups that, over thousands of years, grew into larger and larger packs or tribes.

When this story begins, the people in these smaller groups were all to some degree closely related through sharing a common genetic lineage. That is, the process for which I will use terms such as evolution and natural selection would — the way I understand this process — not have given any advantage to the genes of people if they had been wasting a lot of the incredibly scarce resources for the purpose of in-group fighting. Quite to the contrary: it was of paramount importance for the genes of these people to survive until the present day that any form of overt conflict would only occur if it was absolutely necessary for settling a dispute.

If I think about what natural selection would then have selected for, I end up with a mechanism by which these external resource constraints become internalized into the psychological makeup of each individual as experiences for why certain actions are either good (leading to enhanced chances of gene survival, despite the resource scarcity, due to the selection pressures) or bad (an interpretation of “this behavior will lead our group into demise”). And probably only very few groups made it in the really long term, which might be one reason that we do not observe any evolutionary stages between our closest living evolutionary relatives and modern humans.

In other words, natural selection favored experiences in humans that were felt strongly, that changed a person’s course of action, and that if acted upon, would increase the chance of a group of genetically closely interrelated people to survive. While I appreciate that this may seem like making an excuse for behavior we now think of as bad, I believe it is essential to consider that many of these so-called bad behaviors are, in their essence, a consequence of once having been adaptive — at least under certain conditions and in certain contexts.

I will continue this thread later on this site, on matters of people’s responsibility for their future behavior and how useful it is to consider and treat people as guilty for their past behavior. As a mini preview, suffice it to say that I believe it matters whether people have understood the origin of their choices, and are willing to part with some of the reasons for why they behave as they do, once they come to understand that these reasons might have been useful in the past, but are no longer serving them in the present.

Coming back to the story… The average group size grew, and more and more of these prehistoric proto-people were gathered in a few but also ever more populated regions of the planet. Consequently, there were only ever so many ways in which groups could peacefully split and move to adjacent but yet separate parcels of land. I am fairly certain that the risk of one individual offending another, both among the same tribe, and with neighboring and probably still genetically related tribes, increased drastically over time. Two individuals might, for instance, spot the same food source at almost the same moment, creating a condition of “who gets to use this resource?“

It might be tempting to say, “well, the stronger one, of course.” But that is not how I intuitively think of the near-optimal solution that natural selection provided us with. Instead, it seems more likely to me that these proto-people developed a kind of “this individual was here first” morality. Individuals and the tribes they belong to remain in competition for resources, but with the acknowledgment of a claim to a resource, such that the individual and tribe who gets to a resource first will have some (proto-property) claim to make to the others and the larger community. This only works of course, if by applying this model survival chances are indeed improved. It opens up the opportunity for making false claims…

If then another individual comes in and starts to challenge that claim, there might ensue a conflict over the resource, but instead of the (physically) weaker having to submit, an internal brain mechanism would indicate a sense of ownership to these people. In other words, they came to look at reality with a sense of “I (or the other person/tribe) was here first” with a feeling of defiance if that experience was challenged by someone else.

In that way, I imagine that the concepts of ownership, of having a righteous claim, and of deserving were created long before people could use words to describe them to one another. Compared to mental — that is, internally held — representations of pure body strength providing signals to such individuals as to what the proper response in a given situation is, these people developed a sense of both the present and the future under conditions I would describe under a heading of “this is what is supposed to happen next!“

Oughts

Put differently, groups of these proto-humans grew beyond a few families, in which all individuals are directly inter-related. This made immediate genetic competition among such individuals less beneficial, and provided some selection-pressure incentives for nature to favor behavioral adaptations that would allow larger groups to find, capture, and then share resources with less friction and violence. At the same time, this created the opportunity for further genetic variability, beyond selecting for physical strength, but rather for, say, creativity in tool use, by reducing the amount of resources spent by each individual on protecting those already found by any given individual of the same group.

An example which I found mentioned in the newsletter of Dr. Rob Henderson comes from a study by Jane Murphy titled “Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” On page 8 of the PDF (page 1026 in volume 191 of the journal Science), Murphy describes under the heading of “Norm Violations” how the people in the community alive during the time of the research would deal with someone among their midst who constantly breaks the rules in a way that seemingly benefits only themselves at the expense of the group. In response, one of the Eskimo said that probably “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”

That is, people developed — very early in our shared evolutionary history, given my intuitive understanding of how deeply these moral feelings of right and wrong reach into my awareness, and how strong and intense they can become — a sense by which their own behavior and the behavior of others was labeled as being “good” or “bad” for the flourishing of the community, and that this happened as a consequence of natural selection pressures applied to a situation of prolonged resource scarcity.

These feelings of right versus wrong arise whenever we observe our own behaviors or those of others, and mostly on an unconscious level we perceive that the action taken contributes to community well-being (good feelings of rightness) or it leads to problems down the line (bad feelings of wrongness). They have, over the thousands of years since humans gained the skill of using language, become translated into propositional rules. And punishments and rewards are supported by our felt experience of right and wrong and the derived rules to this day.

Typical examples include the Ten Commandments from the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions. Such rules are the propositional reflection of moral intuitions instilled into people long before language was available. I find it critically important to point this out, since it explains to me why the feelings underlying these commandments or rules are not to be argued with on the level of their propositional content.

That is to say, if someone feels that a certain action — say, abortion — is wrong, it does not help to point out an alternative interpretation. It may be true that under specific circumstances, or from a more detached perspective, this action may seem relatively more permissible (if not outright beneficial to almost everyone involved in and affected by the situation, besides the embryo in the example I chose). But that is of no consequence. In other words, even if someone who feels that abortion is wrong could somehow be made to propositionally believe that, genuinely, everyone on the planet would be better off if a specific abortion took place, that in itself would not have any particular impact on how the person will feel about abortion in general.

I will take some time later in the book to describe what I believe might allow people who feel differently on any given topic to relate to one another in peace, without either of them feeling the need to correct the other person’s intuitions, and yet come up with a way forward that does not impose rules on other people — as impossible as that may seem.

Property Rights as an Example

I now want to take a brief moment outlining my understanding of how these moral intuitions about rights and wrongs are critical for improved human well-being, how they turned into what we call norms or rules about rights, and how they can be misapplied in ways that diminish human well-being.

Our modern day property rights specifically provide an incredibly important service: peace of mind. This gives people the freedom to pursue many ends without constantly having to worry about others taking that which they experience as having already acquired and being accounted for. I recently noticed a very small item, a headphone jack conversion cable, that went missing from my office desk. Only after searching for at least 15 minutes, and realizing that it had indeed been removed without informing or asking me, did I notice how distressing this experience was.

My inference was that something had been stolen from me — and only later did I realize that it might, for instance, have ended up in the trash by mistake. In that first moment of sensing a threat, I felt a sudden conviction that I could no longer leave any of what I consider to be my possessions out on my desk over the weekend. That experience sucked — and it still does not feel right or good: I carry suspicions about this context. Can I leave things out overnight and over the weekend?

In many ways, I presume this implicitly evolved morality provided the springboard for a rapid increase in skills and capacities. It did, however, require safeguards. Nature itself does not seem to care particularly about human standards of “morality” — cruel behaviors of individuals do, in fact, occur frequently and are part of reality, whether we like it or not. Their occurrence is, I believe, nature’s way to hedge for fluctuations, particularly a sudden and extreme downturn, in overall resource availability. Should resources ever become very scarce again, it might, at least for a time, be of critical importance that some individuals exist who will implement a rather ruthless and selfish morality in order for the entire gene pool to survive a potentially cataclysmic event.

To prevent individuals who showed and to this day still show such behavior from torpedoing this overall useful development and achievement, the moral intuitions had, at some point, to be made explicit, so that they could be brought in front of the community (or elders) to be adjudicated. This function has, over long stretches of time, led to the formation of a concept of external moral authority, someone (or some group of people) with the power to dictate the outcome of someone who breaks rules: God, the King, the Judge (or justice system), the head of the family, etc. In most contexts, we believe that there exists someone who knows the rules, who can be appealed to for the purpose of resolving a conflict based on the observation of wrong behavior of others.

Morality and Criminality

As an important side note: I have come to believe that natural selection has instilled in human psychology, through the variation we observe across people, traits that protect us from resource scarcity ever since we lived in groups. But that also produces some small number of individuals who seem incapable of following the majority’s preferences for moral rules. It is, on a personal level, incredibly tragic that such people exist, since they inflict harm on others and are often not capable of adopting rules that would allow them to integrate more peacefully into society.

I still have the hope that if people can appreciate that nature did and does not care about the fate experienced by these individuals, we can choose to care. Equally I hope that if these people — who act in a way we typically consider criminal — can appreciate that their choices are not so much of their own free will, but are driven by impulses that they can learn to integrate, and that learning to do so can reduce their own distress and the lack of their respective integration into society, they will have at least some motivation for doing so — particularly if they can experience that we, as a society, do not blame them and discard them as worthless.

My intuition is that the human fascination with rules — particularly those we would like to impose on others in order to serve our own well-being — is a remnant of that development. Whenever we experience that someone else’s behavior interferes with our goals, or that it clashes with how we believe the present moment ought to unfold into the future, our minds seem to jump on the opportunity to look for rules, policies, regulations, cultural norms, etc. that would give us a justifiable cause for a reprimand — and then potentially someone else to dish out that reprimand. If we cannot locate such a person, we are then often inclined to do so ourselves, so long as the situation does not put us into harm’s way, that is.

My intuition is that the notion of “I spotted these berries first, so they are mine” really is the prototypical, original case of property rights. And understood that way, for the majority of individuals in a larger group to have intrinsic mechanisms that prevent them from attempting to take what another individual has already laid eyes upon prevents a lot of aggravation between them, especially if these norms are reinforced through some kind of tribal authority, such as elders.

Many cases in which similar mechanisms have evolved — such as feelings of anger when a human being experiences someone else coveting their sexual partner, or feelings of despair when someone threatens your career goals, or feelings of disgust if a person is seen as spoiling a common resource, such as peeing in the freshwater source — are all related to an experience of not being safe with respect to resources one has made one’s own and expects to have available in good condition at a later time.

This concept of ownership, the ability to exert agency over resources one has brought under one’s personal control, is, I believe, critically responsible for the peace and quiet in modern society. To the extent that this concept is threatened, people will show behaviors that, in the aggregate, are detrimental to the quality of life.

Marginal Benefits

The limit of this benefit occurs if and when ownership claims can be made where a large number of people experience them to be (borderline) fraudulent. The justifiable — even if often not very well justified — question that occurs to people might be “how is it possible that someone could ever own this much all in their name?” Or, how could what you claim is owned ever be owned by anyone. Underlying this question is, I believe, the moral intuition that for resources to be put to efficient use, it matters that most members of the community have at least some access to large pools of resources, which in turn increases the variability of exploration that these individuals can engage in.

In the present-day environment, there are situations in which two sides get into conflict, where each side can make such an ownership claim — and I hope you will allow for a bit of leeway of interpretation on my part here. In the debate on climate change, people who believe that it ought to be the right of individuals to dig up oil, to then sell it or use it as they see fit, will find it difficult to understand how anyone could come up with a good reason to deny that right, especially if the oil being sold provides cheap energy and resources to those who would otherwise have difficulty meeting their needs.

People on the other side, who believe that this dug up oil will spoil the planet, which is owned by the future generations, may feel that the process of poisoning this global resource is disgusting and must be stopped. And given the sheer size of the ownership claim (an entire generation owning the future planet), they are of course willing to engage in quite some disruptive tactics to make their claims heard. This is, in a nutshell, the conflict as I see it: two groups of people have strong moral intuitions about their actions as righteous, and neither side is willing to consider the other side‘s claims given the tightness they experience around the risk of losing access to a resource they feel they and people they represent own (now or in the future).

It is important to note that while the feelings are not amenable to reasoning and rational analysis, what goes into the calculation that we “feel about” very much is amenable to reason. That is, only if a person believes that, in this instance, carbon dioxide actually presents a form of poison for the planet will that person be inclined to feel disgust about the actions that increase the amount of carbon dioxide. Whether or not a person believes that is not part of the moral intuitive process itself. However, so long as a person experiences that their moral intuitions and feelings do not matter to someone on the other side, it is as good as impossible for them to let down their guard.

Challenging Rights — an Everlasting Conundrum

Back to imagining our proto-humans… One individual walks over a ridge and sees a valley full of promising (and naturally provided) resources — freshwater, nutrient rich vegetation, small game for hunting, good caves, etc. — and then they meet someone who walks the other way and says, “this all belongs to me, and me alone.” What would a reasonable response to such a claim be?

I do not have a good answer, but very much appreciate that some present-day aspects of how wealth has become distributed between people in close enough proximity — i.e., among people who can in principle run into each other or are being presented with images of those others that can make successful ownership claims over much more property — can create the potential for conflict, something that the initially selected-for benefit does no longer condone or cover.

In that case, nature may simply prefer an outcome in which, through whatever means necessary, the wealth is relatively more evenly redistributed eventually. At least there seems to be a natural limit of tolerance that people display when being faced with extremely unlikely odds of observing a certain imbalance of accrued wealth, especially if they themselves have been leading lives they consider productive and virtuous within the moral framework of their respective community.

And I feel certain that it matters which community one belongs to and feels associated with. One of the most challenging aspects of today’s conflicts in the United States is that different people no longer experience themselves as coming from the same community — that of being a U.S. American citizen. Once a larger community breaks into smaller sub-cultures with different approaches and moral intuitions, the feelings that arise from those differences can lead to ever more entrenched conflicts.

I do firmly believe that some of the proposed modern-day remedies to this ailment, such as communism or collective ownership, do not confer the necessary benefits of property rights. That is, if individuals come to believe that their individual investment into their own well-being — such as ensuring having sufficient resources to settle their own affairs — together with their own, individual moral intuitions are no longer safe, because someone else may simply say, “this is a communist collective, and you must share what you gain with everyone, and you must believe what you are told to believe,” it re-creates conditions more similar to those prior to the proto-morality of “I found these berries first.”

Under such conditions, stronger individuals or sub-groups become and are experienced as dictators. And I believe that living under those conditions creates stress and even more disharmony and conflict than imperfect property rights. In addition, I also believe this will give rise to a culture of conspiracy theorizing, in which the language used by the seemingly stronger will become undermined and subverted to a point where facts can no longer be used at all, since language is constantly abused by people in order to manipulate others.

Deserving and Being Stuck

It seems inevitable that at some point people will meet each other on two sides of a conflict, each with a kind of claim relating to ownership or righteousness, such as the ability and right of doing with resources one has control over as one sees fit. If then the people on the two sides simply insist that they — or someone they feel a moral duty to represent — deserve something, whereas the other side does not deserve what their claim is about, it creates a perpetually stuck situation.

The conflict arises, very likely, out of the feelings related to a specific need. But what makes it irreconcilable is the attitude with which people insist on their claim being the righteous one. And taking that perspective (thinking that the way I perceive the world is correct, and that the other person or group does not deserve what they claim they deserve) unfortunately creates a kind of mental barrier. Since I have already decided that the other side’s claim lacks merit, why would I even spend the time and effort to listen to them?

Nature’s implicit goal of preserving precious resources — in this case our time and energy, which we would have to spend on resolving the conflict — is backfiring spectacularly. It has created a very difficult situation where that which was supposed to help us flourish, our emotional experiences that provide our moral intuitions, which in turn help us save precious resources, now prevents us from getting out of that very situation. And that in itself potentially wastes more resources than would have been saved, since this conflict can take a very long time to be settled. The process of settling such a conflict in absence of the willingness of both sides to at least consider the moral intuitions of the other side also makes it almost inevitable that one side will walk away as the losing side, frequently setting up the next conflict down the line.

Ultimately, I believe that the only way to truly resolve such conflicts is through the integration of moral intuitions, both within and between people. Only if choices are made that satisfy the moral intuitions of the vast majority of people will those choices be considered a genuine solution to the problem.

Put together, I believe that our penchant for the thinking of deserving as a foundation for decision making provided many adaptive benefits over a very long stretch of time. For one, we are still here, and humans did not die out, despite the myriad of natural and inter-tribal challenges (and conflicts) that our ancestors had to overcome. I do however also believe that we are running up against the limits of that thinking.

One of the best models from the past I can draw inspiration from for overcoming this perpetual conflict is — how in promulgating the Constitution and Bill of Rights — the Founders of the United States recognized that allowing unfettered self-interest, even self-interest based on virtuously held moral intuitions, without some well-calibrated balancing of those interests is likely to lead to a lopsided outcome, which over time would create conditions of great and general dissatisfaction.

Besides what I perceive to be naturally occurring resentment when faced with someone making highly emotionally evocative (property) claims — that is, for instance, how one feels if they meet someone who seems to be working roughly as much and as hard as they do, but is receiving much, much greater access to resources for similar effort — I believe that the concept of deserving itself can lead people into quite a few pitfalls.

One fairly common and hence important pitfall to avoid is based on simple misunderstandings. Imagine that you are walking inside a grocery store, and at the corner of an aisle you run into someone else — who has, from their perspective, the very same experience. Similar to two proto-humans arriving at the berry bush at almost the same moment, imagine both individuals then hold a strong thought in their mind that “I was supposed to be able to walk here” — or for the proto-humans, “these are my berries!”

Rigidly applying the concept of deserving in this manner will then actually increase, rather than decrease, the amount of violence people are willing to engage in. It creates, in everyone involved, the sense that their cause is righteous, and that spending resources on educating the other side of their error is worth the effort. In short, the very approach that can avoid conflict — sensing emotionally about your own and other people’s needs — can under specific circumstances become the source of conflict if people get stuck in applying this approach blindly.

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that centuries-long feuds between families are solely based on the concept of deserving, but I firmly believe that if nature would have found an equally effective and resource efficient way of solving the problem of increased group size and density of not immediately genetically related individuals living together, we might now have a vastly different experience.

In short, humans — including their children and future generations — can get stuck in a situation in which two sides of a conflict have a propositional claim in mind that gives them not only permission for acting, but creates a kind of mental imperative to act, in a certain way, in search of a remedy to a moral failing observed in someone else. Something unfair transpired, and built upon the foundation of the proto-morality of “I was here first, and if someone comes and tries to get what I am owed by reality, I will see to it that this person learns their lesson,” we are willing to go out on a limb to make that happen.

Reverse Engineering

The last piece of the puzzle worth mentioning here is that, over the span of just a few generations, maybe since the 18th century or so, humans have gotten into the habit of being intensely interested in finding ever more subtle ways of getting people to do what they would want them to do without using unjustifiable threats of violence.

Don’t get me wrong, whenever people feel they can get away with — that is, will not ever be reprimanded for — using such unsavory tactics, there is always a chance that they will try. Intimidation, such as for instance firing employees involved in attempting to form a union, will always remain part of the human behavioral repertoire. But where in the past outright intimidation might have been the means of choice, people nowadays seem to prefer different methods.

Some of this may have to do with the fact that humans seem to care a lot about their reputation. As such, it is often much more effective to find more subtle ways of manipulation that “fly under the radar” of both those who would be in a position to adjudicate behavior as bad (such as the courts in today’s world) and those who are being targeted as having their behavior manipulated.

The most commonly accepted form of such manipulation is probably advertisement — maybe up to and including propaganda, at least the less demeaning kind. It is probably also the most benign form of manipulation, since it is often offered with some detectable framing around it. That is, people generally know when their consciousness is put under advertisement or propagandistic pressure — one of the reasons that ad filters have become so popular: people generally do not enjoy that experience.

Less commonly grouped under this category, but for me very well belonging to the same family, are certain language games. A sender of a message may surreptitiously add a bias, also known as Russell or Emotive Conjugation, that does on some level not substantially alter the message while adding a kind of mind-bending force of asking the receiver to agree with it in order to retain their moral self-acceptance.

If, for instance, someone simply says that a government held 100,000 people in a holding area out of concern for the country’s safety, this might not be considered shocking. If on the other hand, the person speaks of crimes against humanity and illegally detaining a suppressed ethnic minority, our present-day moral intuitions make it very difficult to still consider the actions of the same government as anything but morally reprehensible. And this is true of the Chinese government with respect to the Uyghurs just as much as of the US government with respect to people arriving at the southern border. The moral intuitions you experience as a consequence of reading about people held by a government depends on whether or not you believe the holding of these people to be justified.

The same applies where messages about masks during the COVID pandemic are concerned. Clearly some of the virtues of masks — their life saving properties — were given first too little and then too much weight in how this topic was communicated to the public. And given that the information came from the same sources, it is only too understandable that a critically thinking public would, over time, come to distrust this very source of information.

I generally think of this category as the reason for the — maybe even well-deserved — “Fake News” moniker and meme. To the extent that people come to understand that information is no longer purely factual, but is produced in order to create a moral imperative for the consumer to agree with the sender, it becomes difficult to think of the information as anything but fake…

And yet more cynical and pernicious forms of this tactic include messages from HR management over applications of Nudge Theory to criminal forms of trickery, by which people are lured into giving up valuable resources in order to gain or preserve something they care about. Each of these methods has — in their own respective domain — become popular as a means of circumventing the process by which claims (that the person making the claim wishes to lead to a behavioral change) can be adjudicated by the community or elders as bad for life.

For instance, if a government form contains a default answer that sounds plausible, such as having to check a box if one does not want to be an organ donor, who would be the person to complain to about this particular choice of communicating that default, making it at the very least more cumbersome (if not necessarily morally slightly more questionable) to check the box? And what if the person simply skipped over the question, who can the family later turn to for moral reprieve? In such an instance, one can only hope that the government making that decision does not make mistakes…

On the whole, I suspect that our societies and cultures have, over the past few hundred years, become vastly more determined by legalistic means of controlling behavior. Whereas in the past contracts were entered into by shaking hands on a shared understanding of mutual expectations, in today’s world, people often are faced with myriads of fine-print that protects one side’s interest against any potential claims for reprieve.

There is general public agreement on the shadiness of the entire timeshare business model in real estate — using people’s desire to make life-enhancing decisions, and telling legally permissible lies in order to trick and pressure people into accepting that a certain product would offer those enhancements. People appreciate how unsavory the sales tactics are, and yet little interest seems to exist for changing the status quo. There is an overall sense of resignation, accepting this state as inescapable. And I believe that the way people feel about their lives shares, on a very deep level, great similarities with how they feel about timeshares. At best, you can learn not to get caught up in such a situation, but there seems little that people feel they can do about it.

I believe this feeling of the inescapability of the status quo applies to very many conflicts and communication situations, including masks for COVID, climate change, abortion, etc. In each of these situations, people on both sides are shifting between resignation, conspiracy thinking, and outright rage and revolutionary attitude when faced with what looks to them as an impossible communication challenge: what if the other side uses biased information in order to push their agenda? You simply cannot argue against that — with the people using such language — on the level of propositional content.

Take Home Messages

At the end of each essay, I summarize what I believe to be the critical points I have extracted. My hope is that they will contribute to your understanding. But I also hope that they will not be (ab-) used as means of strong-arming people into some sort of agreement with the person who is speaking or writing. If after visiting this website you still have the urge to use any statement I made or content I provided in order to make another person submit to your feelings, using reason and logic as a cudgel to that end, I will have failed in my most important goal — making you, the reader, understand that this form of interpersonal engagement is hopefully something we can soon consider as our evolutionary past.

Attempting to override the inner moral intuitions of people is something I wish will become known as “human relations version 1.0,” something which we can outgrow. Instead, I hope we can learn the process by which we can help each other integrate all of our feelings into a coherent and collaboration oriented self-experience, one to and with which we can then peacefully relate. And with that, here are the take home messages for this introductory essay:

• Language is overrated — this may come as a bummer to you if you hold an advanced degree such as a PhD in the humanities. I simply have come to believe that what matters most between people is finding a way of establishing mutual trust and the ability to share resources through sustainable, long-term oriented relationships.
• Trust is built by demonstrating and making good on “emotional openness” — among the books and other information sources I have used for my inquiry into this topic, this generally goes under the heading of vulnerability. What this means to me is that I need to demonstrate to people that they can actually touch my experience. If and only if someone believes that their signals of disagreement with me, especially expressions of emotional pain, as a consequence of my choices will be listened to, will they be willing to in turn let down their guard. While language can be helpful in explaining my choices and intentions, the more critical piece to building trust is the willingness to let other people touch you where it potentially hurts in the first place.
• Bad behavior will never be eradicated — nature requires, in order to apply its process of selection successfully, a wide enough range of expressed behaviors (phenotypes). This includes behaviors that are not particularly helpful in the environment in which they are expressed, but hypothetically helpful in environments that could be encountered. So, some amount of inappropriateness on the level of people’s behavior must be dealt with (more on that later). To the extent that resources become more and more secure, it seems natural to me that the frequency and intensity with which bad behaviors occur will diminish — so long as they are not made specifically adaptive by people with a naïve understanding about incentive structures and how selection pressures apply to them (more on that later as well).
• The best answer to other people’s rights I do not agree with is not for me to insist on my rights — again, this may be a disappointment for many readers… What else am I supposed to do? I hope that future essays on this website will give a glimpse into what I believe is an alternative approach, one that allows a person to make an informed choice when and how to use the ultimate means of force (violence, restricting others’ freedom, and threats of these actions) judiciously, and as a last resort, but not as a means of convenience in making others submit to one’s own moral intuitions.