The fuzzy math of ‘human nature’ #

Suffering is real, and often due to the behaviors or actions of another person #

I grew up hearing ‘human nature’ as the reason why I shouldn’t trust anyone. People lie, people murder, people rape and steal and bully and lie some more to cover it all up. You can trust no one until you know them. Just watch the news to see examples; read between the lines, and there’s often a thread of ‘if he/she just took the time to know this person, they could have avoided this outcome’.

Yet it didn’t make sense when I looked at the world, what behavior was happening where, and how to balance the whole. Knowing someone longer didn’t mean they didn’t bully, just that their bullying was supposed to be expected and accepted — adapt to them, and they wouldn’t reach for this tool. 

How I ultimately parsed it, removing the factors of time and expectations:  

• People will reach for a lie due to a domino cascade: self-defined, to avoid trouble, get out of trouble, to skew the information in favor of their desire, or lied to themselves. Other-defined, they misunderstood provided information, are repeating a lie unwittingly.
• People will reach for violence (with murder being the egregious form) with a change state in mind: remove a speedbump to getting their desire, stay out of trouble, as a response to overwhelming fear or anger; as a boost to their power structure; following command issued in a top-down architecture.
• People rape to fulfill desires, sometimes some outlier ones; and to punish and bully. Rarely these days people will rape out of social expectation, but historically that was a factor.
• People steal when they can’t buy or make themselves, or do so in the time in which they need or desire a thing.
• People bully to get what they want with less direct effort, with a little interpersonal power boost involved, and a little dopamine kick.

In other words, they are tools used to manage environment, fulfill a future-sense, and it takes people butting together to escalate. These aren’t things that happen in a social vacuum.

This isn’t so much ‘human nature’ as the combinatorial troubleshooting of future-sense (fear/desire), environment, and a person’s processing chain; all within the context of other people.

It’s the person’s processing chain that leads them to to the action. It, the response, the reaction, or the environment all contribute, and one aspect could contribute more. We can’t understand until we look at all of them. We can’t understand if they are one node of a large-scale social pattern or self-driven without looking at broader context. If they are part of a pattern, the information structures imply it’s more likely to be environmental issues, not a sudden mass burgeoning of bad actors.

Kids on a battlefield kill; they aren’t all suddenly psychopaths.

So when Ukraine fights back against Russia, it’s not the final action (violence) that is the key, but the environment: they were pushed to it. It is literally the only remaining response to a dire physical and ethical situation. Anyone who pushes a different interpretation is literally narrative building: misinformation intended to at least confuse and distract.

This is why this entire book had to come out all of a piece. Continuing to silo and simplify information as a best practice isn’t helping us across the board. We have to be willing to look at complex issues as a complexity, framed in the compounded networks of their fullsome information and who-ness.

It’s in an individual’s contextualization with other people in their environment where the core issues can be found: what it takes to reach for these tools; the empathy reset (or lack) that happens after that makes them less or more likely to reach for the tool again; how deeply they reached into the egregious states of each. The one exception is rape: it’s already deep into violence as a starting point. It is literally taking our one consistent biologically-driven intense pleasure source and making it a weapon, translating it into pain and shame.

When it comes to problem solving, we generally start with what was successful before.

When that doesn’t work, our choices expand: escalate (do what worked before, harder), try what others have been successful with (mirroring), or get creative.

Murder is an escalation of violence. Bullying often germinates from being bullied. Even in an experience without examples, though, they can happen.

When we decide to get creative, predictions are confounded. Prediction is further confounded by not knowing when the creativity will kick in, what direction it will go in, or what level of unordinariness it will start at.

I’ve personally, completely by accident, ‘misused’ software in such an unanticipated ways that I found issues with deeply intertwingled code that had successfully pinged along for years, all because I sensed a workaround that could potentially fix a problem. It worked, once the code was fixed, which also solved another glitch they hadn’t been able to figure out. Deviation from the given answer set isn’t intrinsically a moral failure. Problem solving is a part of our adaptability. 

That doesn’t excuse the egregious manifestations of manipulation and violence, or make them acceptable. Our religions seem to agree. Agnostically, many of our laws revolve around what ultimately is: don’t kill, don’t take, watch that damned desire spark. 

This entire lead-up is a long way of saying that, pushed hard enough, any of us have the potential to hurt another in ways that can’t be healed. We also understand, at some level, that the escalation of tactics to achieve a goal can go too far, and the same malefactor can start using it as a tool.