Why Do People Suck?

We have to understand the suckage before we can try to fight it. So here, take a good hard look.

I’m not gonna go into the whole Free Will or Nature of Evil debate, so this might actually be new territory for some of you. In fact, I’m going to start with Dunbar’s Number.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesized that there was some kind of link between brain size or brain complexity and the maximum number of relationships a primate could maintain—or at least maintain some sort of functional awareness of—and this dictates the maximum size of a person’s tribe. There’s significant debate about the nature of the links, especially whether there’s any causal relationship, but I’m not focusing on that right now. The research I’m interested in is in the size of tribes, observed in nature, as it were, that were the raw data for Dunbar’s study. I don’t care about any supposed links to brain size or brain complexity.

I’m also assuming 150 to be a kind of average, and that a number that high also assumes some kind of overwhelming reason for a group to stay together, whether it’s effective sharing of very limited resources or wolves at the door. But 150 is the number, and that seems to be the (average) cap on a human’s ability to think of people as being real people. These are your neighbors in the neighborhood. These are the actual players in your MMORPG mob, and everyone else is just an NPC.

Yeah, consider me hesitant to leave these concepts in gamer terms. There are too many of the “ALL OF THIS IS A SIMULASHUN!!!1!” crew around for me to be comfortable even accidentally throwing gasoline on that idiotic fire. But one of the things that makes the “simulation theory” appealing is how that tiny piece of it, that only a small number of people actually feel real, seems to validate the whole scenario.

We all understand that this limit isn’t a problem for everybody. Well, it is and it isn’t. But the thing to understand isn’t that Dunbar’s Number is 150. For some people it might be 400 or more, and for others only 20. The problem is that Dunbar’s Number isn’t 10,000,000,000. The problem is that it exists at all, and that it takes hacking your own brain to get around the issue. The Dunbar Number is itself an evolutionary hack to allow us primates to exist in extended tribes at the stone-age level, and it’s never gotten a chance to get larger because the world population has shot up from 150,000 to nearly ten billion in a mere thousand generations, and that’s not enough time for evolution to take a decent stab at a helpful tweak.

First, let’s look at how Dunbar’s Number #^@&s things up.

You know who you know. At some point, your brain is full of people and their relationships to you and to one another, and you just run out of the ability to follow the cast in your own personal show. This is when you start to take shortcuts. Entire populations of people become represented by any individual you might know that you think shares characteristics with them. And if you don’t know anyone like them at all, then those entire populations are represented by caricatures and fables and the various tools of bigotry: stereotypes and the loud opinions of other people in your in-group who you don’t want to be on the outs with.

If you know only one person of a certain demographic, that that one person becomes the template for a whole demographic. If you know two who are pretty much alike, then that template is reinforced. If you know two who are significantly different, however, then you might realize that the demographic has some range and you should be careful applying the stereotypes. But if you don’t know any, then your racist uncle’s loudmouth blatherings stand as gospel.

This is why diversity in representation is important. This is why travel is important, especially while you’re young. Especially before your ideas of what certain groups of people in the world are like get fixed.

If you grow up having known no one in the world who isn’t pretty much exactly like yourself, odds are excellent that you’ll end up being that racist loudmouth uncle to the next generation of children, voting your ass off to keep the walls up and gates closed so that the next generation, and the next, and the next, will never meet anyone who can prove you wrong.

Unfortunately, exposure to a little diversity doesn’t change much because there’s still the problem that the people outside of our personal network still won’t seem like real people to us. We have to exercise our empathy and sympathy daily to remind ourselves that the people we only read about or see on shows or in the news are actually real—and even so there’s the undermining voice that wonders whether we’re getting the whole story, whether it’s all propaganda or paid actors or any amount of conspiracy theory bullshit, because in our heads they go away when we stop looking. Because we’re out of space for storing them.

Some of us have trained ourselves to maintain a kind of amorphous awareness of the rest of the world. Some of us simply have a heightened capacity for such things—but sadly, not as many of us as would like to make the claim. And some of us have only ever had a tribe of one, and those are narcissists—and if they keep track of people at all, they keep track of them like property and assets.

There’s the clue for how we might naturally treat the people that are on the wrong side of our own personal Dunbar Number boundary: as objects, as assets, as pawns on the board on our side or the other side, as resources to be captured or expended. And it doesn’t immediately feel wrong because they don’t feel like people to us.

So instead we have to know it’s wrong and know they’re people, and we have to actively allow the part that knows to be in charge.

—

Dunbar’s Number isn’t the only design flaw in our brains that forces us to find ways to think around it. I think everybody knows this. And this is why my fangs pop out every time I hear a politician say anything resembling the phrase, “Yeah, but what does your gut tell you?” Because we’ve spent ten thousand years trying to make things work beyond what our guts tell us, stockpiling myths and parables in our cultures and formalizing logic and science to back them up, so we can all make space for one another to exist and thrive—and here is one more asshole trying to tell us to act like baboons because a troop of baboons would do exactly what he wants, give him more power, dump more wealth in his pockets. And at the same time our baboon actions would trigger some decrepit and misguided reward circuits in our own brains that we haven’t figured out a way to unplug yet that will make sure we do it again and again.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, there is a baboon-level dopamine-drip bliss that we get for acting like brutes because historically, evolutionarily, there was an upside to defending our territory and beating the shit out of an aggressor. But when we’re shitty now, we’re being told to imagine that we’re defending our territory and brutalizing an actual human being that we’re only imagining is an aggressor, because that gets us our addictive dopamine reward.

And now it’s too late, because we’ve gotten hooked on acting like baboons. But some aware portion of our brains lets us look around and wonder why we’ve all regressed 150,000 years in behavior.

—

Breaking that addiction takes shame and grief and pain, and, like for any addiction, it’s easier to just not. It’s easier to blame it on the other guy, whoever that hapless bastard was, and claim that we’ve become who we are because of that set-up. So many of us never recover. Many of us trigger baboon behavior in the next generation of whelps so we don’t feel alone in our guilt, so we can point to them and say, “See? It’s only natural!”

Drill sergeants trigger the baboon regression in their infantry, stripping off decades of grandmothers’ hard-fought “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” in six weeks of training with absolutely no idea of how to restore it when the war is over. So it becomes easier to make sure that the war is never over than to try to reintegrate soldiers back into civilian society.

Many soldiers get so addicted to their baboon juices that the war will never be over in their own heads when they get home. They drift around and cause more trouble, baboonizing the next generation in their own families, baboonizing members of the kiddie sports teams they coach, forming little radical clubs among themselves for “correcting the evils that have been allowed to creep into society.” Or maybe they just die of the grief and shame when it all comes crashing down, or of the drugs they self-medicate with to blunt the grief and shame.

Or maybe they snap out of it.

Hell, maybe most of them snap out of it. Eighty percent, even, as a guess—at least in functional terms, ignoring the private breakdowns and quiet recoveries we never get to witness. But the ones that never recover are excellent for keeping the infection going with domestic violence, domestic terrorism, with infection of law enforcement branches. You name it.

But we’re taught to respect and #^@&ing worship our veterans instead of treating them like the potentially infectious agents of baboonery and unexploded bombs that they are. Perhaps this society-wide fawning behavior is designed to try to keep them from going off. I’d prefer they get mandatory therapy, frankly—actively trying to rebuild the elements of civilization that we required them to shed so they can go back to normal. It’s literally the least we can do.

—

Considering how Dunbar’s Number predisposes us—especially those of us too poor for doses of travel and cultural enrichment for ourselves and our family—to racism and various other kinds of bigotries, and the ease of how we get addicted to the internally generated opiate rewards for acting like shits to one another, and the actual #^@&ing monsters who find greed-motivated and political-power-motivated reasons to turn us into opiate-addicted baboons and keep us that way, there isn’t much hope of utopia breaking out.

It takes a sensible implementation of diversity and inclusion programs to break the generational patterns of bigotries that are a natural outgrowth of the Dunbar’s Number phenomenon. Those take decades to build and fine-tune and can be undone in a single session of a baboon-infected legislature.

The baboon infection itself is nearly unbreakable once it has taken hold. An addicted person needs a safe place constructed for them to have and survive their crisis of conscience, with the right mix of privacy and non-judging emotional support, and that’s not something you can usually find naturally occurring. It has to be purpose-built and funded. And then it takes an array of healthy human connections to prevent relapses. It is so much easier to interfere with recovery and rehabilitation than to support it.

And then there are the greed-and-power monsters. Our society churns them out like it’s our #^@&ing job, because they’ve worked for decades to incrementally fine-tune the machinery of our society to perfect their production. That machinery needs systematic dismantling, and they’re going to fight us at every step, and sometimes they’ll even use their baboon armies to do it.

So this, this right here, is the explanation for why people suck. When you really look, it’s clearly only some people that suck. Somewhere between twenty percent and half, depending on where you draw the line. Because everybody sucks at least a teeny-tiny bit, and the ones who are true monsters are pretty freaking rare, but that 20% rat-pack of true baboon bastards is a well-and-intentionally-maintained population purpose-made and actively employed to suck on demand because they generate wealth and power for the wealth-and-power machine that is attached to our barely functioning society like a bloated tick that’s almost ready to pop.

The implication of all of that is that people don’t have to suck. The implication is that people who don’t suck are going to have to work together to rescue and slowly drain the suck out of some of the baboons to restore their humanity and to reduce the rate of infection and relapse. We’re going to have to search for and exploit the weaknesses in the monsters and their greed-and-power machine, and somehow work even harder to keep the machinery of society that they have parasitized running while we do it. And at this point it’s going to take at least a generation of hard work. Could be half that if some kind of calamity disrupts the machinery for us.

I don’t know how to make it sound like fun. Or even hopeful. We just have to do it, because there’s even less hope for us if we don’t.

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