Over the few years of my life, I've had a few frustrations with human kind. I've generally tried to do the right thing, to make the world a better place, etc., along with everyone else, it appears. But, hey, I've finally noticed that it is just not working out. After thinking about it a bit, I decided that I've been way too optimistic about my fellow humans. After considerable reflection, I've come up with some rules of thumb that helped me a great deal to keep my perspective and my cool. This is the brief summary -- for those who belong to the majority in rule # 3. The other 20% of you can click on the expanded versions or just page down!
AND -- don't think of this as the bible or anything -- it can change, and you may have better and more interesting ideas -- we can talk!
Most of us are NOT paying attention. Is this news? I think not!
This one has a modest corollary - the world is run by those who show up.
Most of us are conservative, we don't like change. This is the norm, and it works pretty well.
We need meaning and purpose in life. It's in our genes. Folks with this dominated the others. The problem is that almost any meaning and purpose works, good or bad. And this rule also means that religion, all kinds of religion, will always be with us. Don't fight it, live with it and use it.
Most of us don't read. It's not in the genes. We are an oral tradition species from thousands of years. Pictures work, but stories are better!
Word of mouth works better than anything. It just gets passed around. It beats advertising every time.
Dictatorship is the norm - democracy is a thin veneer on top of a human kind looking for hierarchy and order.
Selfishness is normal - we all start out that way, and it's hard to let it go. It works!
Most of us are corrupt - tribal - selfish - it works well, and is the normal state of affairs.
Poverty has always been the norm, and still is. Us folk in the Western World are living in Disneyland. This won't change in the near future!
You can't persuade anyone of anything they don't already believe. This leads to a lot less arguments.
Conspiracy theories presume way too much intelligence in our 'leaders'.
Most people are black and white thinkers -- they don't get the complex issues. This seems to come from a biological imperative to divide everything up into 2 camps -- them and us, friend or foe, good or bad.
We are a violent species, especially the male half. 95% of the people in jail for violent crime are men. The U.S. is the most violent place on the planet. The best theory is that we have raised this wonderful ideal -- the American dream -- and then made it virtually impossible to attain for most of us. Those with NO shot at it, get it any way they can.
Never pay retail - you can always find it on sale.
It's never as easy as it looks!
You are never going to beat the squirrels - give it up. They have nothing else to do but figure out how to get into your bird feeder.
Law of 'Sociality' - yes, I know it's not a word - yet! We are social beings, and our economic, social, and political health depend on each other in profound ways!
We Want to Be Free. This is a difficult one, and I'm not quite sure about it as yet, but it does seem to be a strong tendency among all humans.
There is always hope. People continue to aspire for resurrection, civilization, integrity, altruism, man for others - we do seem to aspire to move forward!
Here's the expanded version for the minority among us who are the exception to rule #3.
Most of us are NOT paying attention.
When someone is merging into your lane of traffic, do NOT count on them noticing that you are already in the lane. YOU have to do the avoidance thing, because they are generally NOT paying attention. If you are in a long queue, and someone else shows up, odds are that they will not notice where the end of the line is. You may have to point that out to them. People get wrapped up in things, they focus on one thing at a time -- it's a genetic survival technique. The male can locate food and find his way home. The female pays attention to the cave. There's no genetic preference active for traffic, queues, or reading notices! So don't get upset when folks around you don't seem to notice something -- that is the norm, not the exception.
A corollary for this is 'the world is run by those who show up'. If you want to make a change, go to the meeting -- or call the meeting! Most people don't.
UPDATE 2017.01.30. I wrote this piece originally decades ago, partly in jest. It struck me as true, that people are generally not paying attention, and it seemed simpler to just recognize that, rather than be disturbed by it. As it turns out, there is significant neurological research that supports that. 95% or more of what we do with our brain is an automatic reaction, which we occasionally aware of, mostly after the fact. See the book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. So we make almost all major decisions with the FAST brain, not our SLOW brain. See the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is true for political and economic decisions as well. The only part of our society that is actually using this is advertising! And we have a recent presidential campaign that offers obvious proof. The other amazing thing that we have discovered recently, that it is actually possible for all of us to pay a bit more attention, and to make much better decisions, with the simple practice of daily "mindfulness". Nothing religious about it, nothing magical - it turns out that this is how our slow brain catches up. On that see: A Mindful Nation. I continue to have hope, and you should too.
Most of us are conservative.
Most of us do not want things to change. This is the norm and it pretty much works. Just imagine that you walk into the bank to cash a check, and the bank teller decides to change the way he/she does accounts just for you. Not today, thank you!
And it's a genetic preference. Before we could read and write, when the knowledge of building houses was simply passed down, if you built a house, you had better do it the way they were always built. Otherwise, you ran the risk that it would fall down in the first rain storm, and you would catch a cold and die. People survived best doing it the way it was always done. Those innovators, the people who built a house that departs from the standard, ran great risk that their genes would not be passed down! So . . . when people resist change, get used to it -- that's the way most people operate.
2017.01.30 update. I still think this is true, and I have come to learn just how deeply seated this is. On that topic see my Blog entry: https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-are-those-idiots-from-other.html. This is a review of Jonathan Haidt's book: The Righteous Mind. Not good or bad - it just is.
We need meaning and purpose in life.
It's in our genes. Folks with this dominated the others. The problem is that almost any meaning and purpose works, good or bad. And this rule also means that religion, all kinds of religion, will always be with us. Don't fight it, live with it and use it.
I think it is important to recognize that this has a genetic root, and it is not just our culture, history, or the persuasive power of the threats laid upon us by most religions trying to convert us!
In most cases, this need is fulfilled by some form of religious belief. The exact form varies widely, from the Buddhist approach of agnostic rules for life, to animism and Hinduism that find gods in everything, to the Jewish, Christian, Muslim preference for a single creator. But it is pretty clear that, despite the enlightenment and the secular movement, religion as such is not going away any time soon.
These religious beliefs provide meaning and purpose, but the variety is so great among them that they barely have a common thread. One might say that some belief in life after death is required, but that does not seem to be the case. Traditional Judaism and most Asian religions do not look for any reward for good deeds in some other life. Some of them talk about the dead, about ancestors, and about achieving "nirvana". But it doesn't sound much like the classic Christian paradise. And many, many primitive folk do just fine with religious tenets that involve no after life whatsoever.
But up-lifting goals that are not religious also work well with human kind. Hitler and Mussolini crafted goals that drove entire nations, without any semblance of a religious taint about them. Gandhi and Martin Luther King rallied thousands of people to a goal with no agreement on religious tenets. I can still remember President John Kennedy's inaugural address, and how it energized me. He lifted my sights, lifted my spirits, made me believe that we could do great things together.
Lately, our political leaders have been gathering followers by preaching fear and hatred - of others, some others, almost any others - whether they be El Kaida or the Democrats or the Republicans or atheistic destroyers of marriage.
Why doesn't some one try the other approach? Lift up the best that is in us and push us forward with it. What about the common good? What about the good of all human kind? What about an uplifting goal that would make our lives worthwhile?
Most of us don't read.
It's just not in the genes. For thousands of years, we handed down wisdom and knowledge through song and poem. If you could remember a rhyme and a meter, you could remember how to hunt the elephant. If you couldn't, you didn't eat! Pictures work, but stories are better! Books are really recent in the evolutionary scale. And it is even more recent that someone could actually own one! Even after Gutenberg, books were very rare.
The statistics are that 43 million Americans read at the 4th grade level, meaning they are functionally illiterate. Most people average 99 hours of reading in an entire year. Only 11% read the newspaper. It's not a problem with our education -- it's in our genes.
Even when people do learn to read, most of them do not retain things that they read. They retain the oral version much better.
So - don't count on written notices to do anything. You need to stand up and say it, and it works even better if you can sing it! And if you want a really great career, get into story telling of some kind -- people just love to hear stories. Think movies, not books.
Word of mouth works better than anything.
This is a corollary of 'most people don't read'. If it is the "in" thing, the "cool" thing, it will move product. The word gets around. It beats advertising every time. The trick is how you go about getting your product to be the latest 'cool' thing. I think this is the power of celebrity endorsement. Most people are fans of sports and movies -- someone in that world can sway them better than the coolest print ad. Check out the "The Cluetrain Manifesto" on the web. http://www.cluetrain.com/
This public relations guy figured out that he could make a lot more noise for his company if he just talked to people all the time, rather than sending them press releases and such. After a while, they started calling him because he was such an expert in the area.
Just remember how you found out about this! Since you are among the minority of readers, you found it written down here. But most people will not. Remember rule #3.
Dictatorship is the norm.
Democracy is a thin veneer on top of human kind looking for hierarchy and order. We crave hierarchy. If it doesn't exist, we make it up. It takes a whole lot of social maturity for a democracy to survive. When the US was planning to invade Iraq and liberate them from their dictator, a friend of mine sent me a publication which recited all of things that had been created or discovered in that small part of the world -- like writing, and the first legal code, the Code of Hamurrabi! This friend clearly felt that the dictatorship there must have destroyed the source of so many wonderful things. But the area known as Iraq has always been a dictatorship -- as far back as anyone can trace the history. In fact, almost every place was always a dictatorship. The Greeks and the Romans had a short fling at an oligarchy -- a democracy of the nobility -- but it didn't work out. People want and need strong leaders.
This representative government stuff is always just a step away from disappearing. When the founding fathers finished the constitution, the vast majority of them thought that George would be a king within 10 years -- but it was worth a shot. When Lincoln was elected the first time, he was not sure that the 100 year old democracy would survive his first term -- and this was before the Civil War. This is priceless stuff, and hard to keep intact. Don't take it for granted. And . . . don't try to push it on any culture that doesn't have the basics to support it -- it won't last. It's like trying to teach a pig to sing -- it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
If the Iraqi people really want a democracy, they have to work on the basics -- we can't force it on them. It hasn't worked any place else on the planet -- with the possible exception of Japan!
Selfishness is normal.
We all start out that way, and it's hard to let it go. It works! Don't be surprised by it. When some altruism appears, just be grateful. Most people support their family, but it takes a fairly sophisticated society to support even the tribal. Getting to the level of the nation is a really big step -- most parts of the world have not achieved it in any degree.
If you want people to get motivated about something, you have to appeal to their selfish interests. It's only as a person or a society matures and gets beyond survival that they can cast a little wider area of concern, and actually consider their city, and, after a lot of maturity, their country. It will be a very long time before most people on the planet actually care about the planet itself. We are still working on this inter-dependency thing.
Why do you think capitalism succeeds so well? It's based on selfishness.
Most of us are corrupt.
This is a corollary of the selfish rule. We are tribal, focused on ours and our family and tribe. Again, this was genetic. It works well - xenophobia is the normal state of affairs. We protect our own, for survival. Altruists didn't pass on the gene.
In the so called "civilized" western world, we voice principles that sound like honesty and integrity. It gives us a reason to be upset when we catch people taking bribes, misstating financial results, ripping off their corporations for millions of dollars, etc.
The reason is that we have discovered that, for a truly complex economy to survive, we do need each other at some level. We have to have a market that we can actually trust. The value of our currency is based on trust. Most business deals go down with only a handshake. So we keep working on it, but you shouldn't be surprised when someone is caught with their hand in the till. In the rest of the world, outside of North America and Europe, everyone knows that everyone else is on the take -- that's why capitalism struggles there. Heck, it is barely making it here.
Poverty has always been the norm, and still is.
Us folk in the Western World are living in Disneyland. If the rest of human kind really understood how good we have it compared to them, they would be invading our borders. But, wait, they are doing just that, aren't they!
There's an important corollary to this one: crime is the norm where poverty is the norm. This is a little complicated, because poverty is not just low income, but the perception of being poor in an affluent economy where you are excluded. Our sociologists / criminologists know this. If we want to reduce crime, we need to reduce poverty. It has to be cheaper to create good paying jobs for people than to build prisons and hire police officers. As the gap in our society from top to bottom gets relentlessly larger, we can only expect that our crime will continue to increase.
The best theory that explains this is that we have raised this wonderful ideal -- the American dream -- and then made it virtually impossible to attain for most of us. Those with NO shot at it, get it any way they can.
One good step would be to raise the minimum wage so that anyone with a job can afford food AND housing. The concern there is that will cost us all more money. On the contrary, it is going to save millions when it reduces crime, improves school performance for those kids in poverty, and drives the economy with all of those working folks able to buy the things that they make. This is a consumer economy. That means that most of the things that drive it are things that we really don't need. You can't sell things people really don't need when they have low paying jobs and are afraid of losing those. They have to FEEL affluent. We CAN pick ourselves up by our bootstraps -- we just have to make sure that we pick up MOST of us.
But then there's that selfish thing!
You can't persuade anyone of anything they don't already believe.
I used to think differently on this - so I had lots of arguments. Life is much simpler now. I really don't need to "kill Santa Claus," or change the social order! The only hope for change (see rule #2) is a generational one. Go after the kids! Why do you think Head Start is such a success?
This rule was brought home to me one day when I was discussing evolution with a friend who is of the more fundamentalist persuasion about the Bible. I was asking how he could ignore all the evidence about evolution, and he brought me up short with this: "If I can believe that someone created this whole universe in a single stroke, don't you think I could believe that this entity could make it appear to be billions of years old?" Got me there. I give up.
Religion and politics are the worst here, of course, but there are plenty of other beliefs out there that are held with great fervor. You see, people need meaning and purpose in their lives in order to survive. If you threaten what gives them a solid foundation, they will resist with great emotion - not reason, mind you - emotion. There is no way to reason with someone about a belief or principle that they did not arrive at by means of reason. You cannot argue with someone's emotions!
If we don't see a meaningful religion, a meaningful goal in life, we make them up. When someone presents one that promises happiness, now or later, we are sorely tempted to adopt it. Charismatic leaders understand this -- they speak to our needs, not to our best interests.
Conspiracy theories presume way too much intelligence in world 'leaders'.
They are not that smart! I've met a few -- most of them are just a tad above average intelligence, and somewhat short-changed on the practical side. No one is behind the scenes moving the levers -- it looks like a mess because that's just the way it is. Just look at the conspiracies that have actually come to light through the stupidity of the people running the show. They got away with it for a while, but they left big footprints -- think Iran / Contra, Enron, Tyco. These are NOT smart people!
We had a lawyer here in town who walked off with about $200,000 in some accounts. He thought he was pretty smart. I'm thinking, what on earth can you do with $200,000 these days? You sure can't live on it for the next 20 years. If you are going to do it -- at least get enough to retire on!
Most people are black and white thinkers.
Most people are black and white thinkers -- they don't get the complex issues. This seems to come from a biological imperative to divide everything up into 2 camps. Edward O. Wilson (On Human Nature, 1978, p. 72) says we have a tendency to "dichotomize" -- to separate everything into 2 camps -- them and us, good and bad, friend or foe. It seems to be a genetic propensity for making quick survival decisions. But it leaks over into all kinds of things.
Patriotism, support of the current government, tends to be one of them. When we have a sense that our way of life is at stake, we divide into 2 camps. If you think we should be doing something different here, you are un-American. If you are upset that American corporations are ripping us off for billions, you don't support the American enterpreneural way. The FBI has a list, and you are on it, my friend.
Humans are so complicated and messy, that there are NO easy solutions. It takes more time and more money and more energy than anyone wants to expend to really solve human problems. I talk to my elected officials about the downstream effects of cutting social programs -- they cannot get their brains any further out than the next election. Honest. If it doesn't happen in the next 2 years, it does not exist!
We are a violent species, especially the male half.
95% of the people in jail for violent crime are men. The US is the most violent place on the planet. Of the developed countries, our murder and violence rate are number 1. You have to go to Somalia to live more dangerously -- of course, it is REALLY bad there!
But it is in the genes. That testosterone generates the energy to defend one's turf, and it does a wonderful job. As societies get more complex, as we gather into tribes and villages, controlling that tendency to murder each other is a major part of our social cost.
I'm convinced that professional football is a plot to reduce violent attacks by males on each other (see rule 10). For that period of Sunday, and now extended to Monday nights, watching those huge guys pound on each other keeps their audience from doing the same to their neighbors. We will have attained an amazing level of civility when we actually ban football as too dangerous.
I would also count it a significant step forward when we charge people with abuse who beat a child with anything, including the hand. That early lesson in respect and human interaction lays a strong foundation in our kids that violence on your neighbor is a basic rule of life. Verbal abuse can be just as damaging and should be banned as well -- at least toward children.
Over the years, I have had numerous occasions to observe some Vietnamese friends of mine and how they deal with their children. They are always quiet, respectful and patient. They also always have high standards and goals. Those kids have done amazingly well, and I have never seen them raise their voice to them, let alone their hand.
Never pay retail - you can always find it on sale.
A bit frivolous, but important. This is especially true in many stores that cycle SOMETHING on sale every week, and off the next.
It's never as easy as it looks!
You know how this works. You have this little project to do. It'll only take an hour or so. But then, there is this, and that, and I need a tool, and one thing leads to another and it takes the whole day. I've learned never to start ANY project that involves plumbing except early on Saturday morning, so I can be sure the hardware will be open when I need it!
You are never going to beat the squirrels - give it up.
They have nothing else to do but figure out how to get into your bird feeder.
Law of 'Sociality' - yes, I know it's not a word - yet!
We are social beings, and our economic, social, and political health depend on each other in profound ways! We do not seem to really understand this at the grass roots level, as we are all normally swamped by that selfish stuff -- but once in a great while, it surfaces. When we thrive, we thrive together. When we fail, it is because we have ignored the weakest among us, we have not made room for them at the table, and we have fallen down as a society.
We Want to Be Free
This is a difficult one, and I'm not quite sure about it as yet. It seems to run counter to the hierarchical rule and the social one. I would have thought it might just be part of the "hope" one, but it seems to run deeper than that. It seems to be a strong tendency among all humans. For example, one sociologist, Orlando Patterson of Harvard, has concluded that slavery is a doomed system, that consistently and regularly fails. Humans are not like ants, and we will not tolerate a complete loss of freedom forever.
There is always hope.
People continue to aspire for resurrection, civilization, integrity, altruism, man for others - we do seem to aspire to move forward!
Post-note.
This is the genetics from tougher times. Things are very different today, and moving much more quickly - too fast for the genetics to adapt. I believe that we are more than our genes, and we can adapt. My point is that it's an uphill battle! Don't get discouraged.
© Copyright Carl Scheider 2006 2023
Last updated on Nov. 1, 2006. Few changes 2017.01.30. 2023.09.09 Modest updates. Pretty durable, eh?