This is part 5 of a series of blog posts. Please read part 1 first.
I want to know (vorrei sapere)
Come fa la gente
A concepire
Di poter vivere
Nelle case d'oggi
Inscatolati come le acciughe
Nascono i bimbi che han già le rughe
- From the song „I want to know“ by Adriano Celentano, 1976
What if I told you that you live an extreme life in an extraordinarily challenging environment. You would probably answer me something like this: why? I live a totally normal life. I have a husband/wife, two beautiful kids, a dog, a house, a car and a good job. All good! What’s extreme about my life? What’s challenging about my living conditions?
Let’s assume for a moment that your environment and your life are actually extreme. Now: would you be able to realize this?
If your life would change to the worse in a rather short time (e.g. if you lose your job), you would surely notice. You could compare your life to the one you had before and you could compare it to the lives of other people.
But is there an absolute scale which would allow us to determine the quality of our life? A way to measure it without comparing it to others or to our previous experiences?
Surprisingly, the answer to this question is no. And this is the topic of this post (and extremely important to understand for the following discussion of evil).
First let me explain why this must be like this (not very difficult) and then how this works in detail (a bit more complicated).
The pleasure we experience serves a purpose: it should guide our behavior into a direction which makes us achieve our (biological) goals. This process should work independently of the absolute level of success we have. It should always drive us to better conditions, no matter how good or bad the conditions currently are. Otherwise poor conditions of living would make us feel desperate (in a debilitating way) and this would make survival less likely. To get out of poor conditions we must act. Therefore our brain must always make us enjoy acts which are suitable to improve our conditions.
We all have seen fotos of children playing in, let’s say, a very poor village in a developing country. This kids, even if they have never seen a real PlayStation, seem to be as happy as the kids in Switzerland.
How can this be? How does this work in detail?
Our subjective perception of the quality of our life is proportional to the frequency and intensity of the rewards our brain makes us experience (pleasure, „feeling good“ etc.). Our brain always rewards us, if we do something we like to do. These are the things which were essential for our survival during our long history. Our brain has developed over millions of years in an environment which was very different from our modern world. Some examples of such things:
- Drinking and eating nutritious food
- Playing (= learning) when we are young
- Socializing (=sharing information and learning)
- Having sex (=reproduction)
- Enjoying children (=nurturing and teaching them)
- Collecting and Hunting (finding food)
- Helping each other
- Being lazy the rest of the time (=avoiding injuries)
Let’s call carrying out such activities our primary goals. We already see now, that these goals are not very aligned anymore with what is required to do to thrive nowadays.
Of course it was not always possible to indulge only in these things. What happens, for instance, if we have no water to drink? We have to organize some! And to do so we have to act in a certain sequence of steps. Maybe we have to get a jug from our hut, walk down to the river, fill the jug and climb back to our village. This process is called planning.
In planning, the brain creates instrumental goals which must be achieved first, in order to achieve some primary goals. Now the brain makes us enjoy achieving such instrumental goals too! This is important, otherwise we would not pursue them. Of course, the reward for achieving an instrumental goal has to be always smaller compared to the primary goal we try to achieve by the planned sequence of actions. Otherwise we would get stuck at pursuing the instrumental goal - instead of continuing the sequence to finally achieve the primary goal.
Planning is a hierarchical process. If we need to fill the jug with water, we have to walk down to the river first. Therefore the reward generated by our brain for walking down to the river must be smaller than the reward for filling the jug (which in turn must be smaller than drinking the water).
The important thing is: if we cannot achieve primary goals easily, we plan a sequence of actions which will lead to such a goal. And our brain makes us enjoy this sequence of actions too! Of course the rewards we experience must be a bit lower than the reward from finally achieving the targeted primary goal. But, and this is the important thing to realize, we have the ability to enjoy very long sequences of actions which lead us to achieving a primary goal much later.
It is therefore easily possible to fill a life to 95% with planned activities which lead to the fulfillment of only very few primary goals and still feel quite well in the process.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Our distant ancestors had sex (a primary goal) all the time and for many different reasons. Today, a man might feel that he needs to buy a fancy car to be able to convince a girl to become his wife. He will therefore enjoy the moment when the car dealer hands the car keys over to him. Of course achieving instrumental goals always feels good only for a very short time: the action sequence should not stop there, as it's only an instrumental goal. Therefore, the next instrumental goal comes very quickly into focus until - at some point in time - the primary goal (kissing the girl) is finally achieved. Buying the car is maybe only the final step in a very long sequence of planned actions. Therefore the man would also enjoy many activities related to earning the money needed to buy the car („I love my job!“). He would then maybe marry his love (also an instrumental goal!) and have, if all goes well, even have some decent sex (primary goal) for a few weeks.
The ratio of achieved primary goals to achieved instrumental goals can in fact be extremely low (as in the example above) and we still experience our life as „good“ and „normal“.
Only if important primary goals - like finding a partner - can’t be achieved at all anymore, we have a serious problem and we get depressed.
If our living conditions shift slowly into a state where the percentage of achieved primary goals is reduced, we won’t notice it. In the song lyrics on the top, the Italian singer Adriano Celentano complains about the apartment block architecture introduced in the 1970’s. At the time this was a big topic. How can people feel well living in such sardine cans? But today’s generation of people grew up in such buildings and this is simply not an issue anymore. We got slowly used to some loss of quality of life without really noticing.
Therefore it is, to come back to the question at the beginning, very well possible that our living conditions have become extreme over the centuries without us even noticing it.
But where's the problem? We are able to feel fairly well even in a shitty world. Good for us, or?
Unfortunately there is a problem. Our behavior is not independent of the living conditions. When our environment becomes very challenging, our behavioral patterns also shift into regions which were once reserved for emergencies. And this is the reason for the increasing prevalence of evil in our society.
More about this soon.
Image: Shutterstock / ArtMari
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