Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Society on the Couch
What is up with this society? Meaning America pretty much. People are pretty much the same unit everywhere, but culture takes some pretty big variations. Just look at religious beliefs from atheism to people basing their lives on religion, even to the point of suicide bombers. Some peoples eat what disgusts others. We find each others customs and rituals offensive.
We must start this idle speculation with the nature of humans. The Blank Slate theory was put forth by Behaviorists about a century ago. Humans are an open book and the environment writes their story. No free will of course. This thinking has dominated thinking in psychology and pop psychology since the sixties. Blame the parents, blame the environment, blame society. Criminals are made, not born. Males and females are the same, its just that they are enculturated differently.
Freud and company said no way. Instincts rule us just like the animals and we are barely aware of what really makes us tick. Of course we have more flexibility within those bounds than say, an ant, but instincts just the same. Our environment acts on us to be sure, but only within certain biological limits.
I would go with Freud here. Clearly the failure of communes, communism, socialism, radical feminism and other social experiments can be explained this way. Evolutionary explainations of our behaviors make much sense. Clearly the biology of our mentations and behavior are daily being discovered.
Freud and Skinner would agree that conscious free-will is nonsense. While I don't totally agree here, much of what we do is hardly free and/or rational. The examples abound. Teens starting to smoke. Gambling away life's savings. Sucking on the crack pipe. Marriage to someone you know is nuts. Even the brightest of us is capable of stupid acts.
So what is this human nature? Its not going to be covered well at all here, but we are groupers. We talk about independence, but we conform for the most part. We want to be in the group. We take on the attributes right down to dress, style of speech and leisure. Our survival once depended on it and still does pretty much. We also have hostility to those outside our group. My family, my country, my race, my city's football team,...
This basic nature is acted upon then by that social environment from the immediate contacts like family and friends and extends out through the mass media. We are essentially programmed. What we think of as our independent and original thoughts are often just insertions from the television.
As we go from individual to groups of ever larger size, we get the whole society. Here the individuality left gets bleached in the majority rule. Aggregates of actions determine elections and markets. Of course this isn't always good. Often it is manipulated such as advertising and marketing. For better or worse, money rules to a large extent. All other values seem to tremble to the almighty dollar.
Nothing else defines America today like consumption. Many of us spend our major time and energy in pursuit of money so we can get more stuff and feed our egos. Lip service is given to other things like family. The job can pretty much keep us in line, even with the nutty workplace rules and idiotic supervisors. The debt monster keeps us to the stone. We envy the rich even as they drown their sorrows in further greed, drugs and senseless affairs.
We are digging our own graves. We eat like pigs and are fat. Our health care costs will only escalate further. We drive everywhere and the vehicles are bigger than ever. Never mind we are polluting the planet and sending cash to terrorists to fight in wars we pay for in taxes. We demand our entitlements despite the programs going broke. We vote for a leader who scares us sheep with fears of terrorists so we can die in a war we can't afford.
Sounds rational to me.
We must start this idle speculation with the nature of humans. The Blank Slate theory was put forth by Behaviorists about a century ago. Humans are an open book and the environment writes their story. No free will of course. This thinking has dominated thinking in psychology and pop psychology since the sixties. Blame the parents, blame the environment, blame society. Criminals are made, not born. Males and females are the same, its just that they are enculturated differently.
Freud and company said no way. Instincts rule us just like the animals and we are barely aware of what really makes us tick. Of course we have more flexibility within those bounds than say, an ant, but instincts just the same. Our environment acts on us to be sure, but only within certain biological limits.
I would go with Freud here. Clearly the failure of communes, communism, socialism, radical feminism and other social experiments can be explained this way. Evolutionary explainations of our behaviors make much sense. Clearly the biology of our mentations and behavior are daily being discovered.
Freud and Skinner would agree that conscious free-will is nonsense. While I don't totally agree here, much of what we do is hardly free and/or rational. The examples abound. Teens starting to smoke. Gambling away life's savings. Sucking on the crack pipe. Marriage to someone you know is nuts. Even the brightest of us is capable of stupid acts.
So what is this human nature? Its not going to be covered well at all here, but we are groupers. We talk about independence, but we conform for the most part. We want to be in the group. We take on the attributes right down to dress, style of speech and leisure. Our survival once depended on it and still does pretty much. We also have hostility to those outside our group. My family, my country, my race, my city's football team,...
This basic nature is acted upon then by that social environment from the immediate contacts like family and friends and extends out through the mass media. We are essentially programmed. What we think of as our independent and original thoughts are often just insertions from the television.
As we go from individual to groups of ever larger size, we get the whole society. Here the individuality left gets bleached in the majority rule. Aggregates of actions determine elections and markets. Of course this isn't always good. Often it is manipulated such as advertising and marketing. For better or worse, money rules to a large extent. All other values seem to tremble to the almighty dollar.
Nothing else defines America today like consumption. Many of us spend our major time and energy in pursuit of money so we can get more stuff and feed our egos. Lip service is given to other things like family. The job can pretty much keep us in line, even with the nutty workplace rules and idiotic supervisors. The debt monster keeps us to the stone. We envy the rich even as they drown their sorrows in further greed, drugs and senseless affairs.
We are digging our own graves. We eat like pigs and are fat. Our health care costs will only escalate further. We drive everywhere and the vehicles are bigger than ever. Never mind we are polluting the planet and sending cash to terrorists to fight in wars we pay for in taxes. We demand our entitlements despite the programs going broke. We vote for a leader who scares us sheep with fears of terrorists so we can die in a war we can't afford.
Sounds rational to me.
