[ExI] Evolutionary Psychology, Maslow's Pyramid and Politics

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 30/12/2024 00:38, Keith Henson wrote:
> My experiences with the scientology cult and at the same time running
> into evolutionary psychology gives me an odd view of why humans are
> susceptible to religions at all.  In the view of EP, human behaviors
> are either directly selected or are a side effect of something that
> was selected.
>
> Capture-bondinghttps://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding  was
> directly selected.  As I put it, women who bonded to their captors
> became our ancestors, those that did not become breakfasts (or did not
> reproduce).
>
> The model of war which includes taking the young women of the defeated
> tribe is a case where genes for war behaviour survive better than the
> people with such genes (when the alternative to war is starvation).
> It is a strange business where a person can be in conflict with their
> genes.
>
> Anyway, genes for irrational thinking/behavior were selected in the
> past.  The behavior/irrational thinking are still expressed when
> people think they have a bleak future.
>
> The psychological mechanisms that give us capture-bonding give rise to
> a number of otherwise hard to understand behaviours, "Partial
> activation of the capture-bonding psychological trait may lie behind
> Battered-wife syndrome, military basic training, fraternity hazing,
> and sex practices such as sadism/masochism or bondage/discipline.
> [11]"
>
> Selection for war has provided humans with irrational thinking modes.
> Religions are certainly irrational.  They propagate in human culture
> because we have been selected for irrational thinking as well as
> rational thinking.
>
> (Unless the tribe is facing starvation, rational thinking is
> evolutionary favored.)
>
> Keith
>
> (This is a preliminary draft and may be expanded.)

I'm not so sure that rational thinking is favoured unless times are hard.

There's an argument to be made that hard times actually favour rational 
thinking. We know that wars tend to accelerate technological 
development. That's only possible with rational thinking. There's plenty 
of evidence that religion doesn't work (in terms of achieving 
technological progress), but science does. And even more evidence that 
it's the more technologically advanced groups that win wars.

What incentive do people have to do the hard type of thinking, if they 
are comfortable?

This doesn't clash with the idea that hard times lead to more 
aggression. It does suggest that the more hard-up - and therefore more 
aggressive - groups might be more inclined to rational thinking. Which 
seems wrong to me (and I hope it is, because it leads down a very dark 
path), so maybe there are flaws in my thinking. Please expose the flaws 
in my thinking!

I was recently reading this:
https://falkvinge.net/2024/06/29/contemporary-politics-is-much-better-understood-using-maslow-pyramid-than-the-economic-left-to-right-scale/

And it made a lot of sense to me.

I'm pretty sure that most people aren't really wedded to one political 
tendency, that's far too cerebral for the majority of people who mostly 
just want to be able to get on with their lives. Maslow's heirarchy of 
needs applies to all humans, whatever politics they claim to subscribe 
to. And it's inevitably a result of our evolution. So I think that our 
Evolutionary Psychology leading to Maslow's pyramid is much more 
relevant than capture bonding, at least for contemporary politics. You 
can probably predict which types of political party will be most popular 
by looking at where most of a population are on the heirarchy, as Rick 
Falkvinge's article explains.

All of which aligns nicely with what Keith has been saying for ages now: 
Improve people's day-to-day lives and prospects for the future (which 
usually means education, among other things), and you reduce the 
likelihood of wars and other bad outcomes.

One of the most significant bad outcomes is the likelihood of them 
voting for (or otherwise allowing to come to power) authoritarian 
governments. Consciously or not, the various authoritarian states seem 
to realise that they need to keep the population in a state of anxiety, 
relative poverty, ignorance and fear (iow, low down on Maslow's 
heirarchy). I don't know of a single authoritarian state that looks 
after their population well, keeps them materially comfortable, 
well-educated, healthy, feeling good about their future, and allows them 
free and open communication between themselves and with the wider world.

Obviously, otherwise we wouldn't call them 'authoritarian'!
The higher tiers of the pyramid just aren't compatible with 
authoritarianism.

So, one of the most important questions we should be asking in today's 
world is: How can we give people (all people, everywhere) the means to 
improve their lives, regardless of the regime they live under?

How can people, wherever they are, climb the pyramid, improve their 
physical and economic well-being, their education, and their 
communication with the rest of the world?

That, it seems to me, is the most important problem we need to solve, if 
we want to avoid a Bleak Future for all of us. And Governments aren't 
going to solve it. We can expect just about all governments to actually 
oppose it. As well as many businesses, too (when was the last time you 
tried to read a scientific paper on Sci-Hub?).

If we can crack that one, global warming will be a doddle!

-- 
Ben
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20241230/63ef496c/attachment.htm>