We have NOT cracked this nut
I read. Alot. I’m curious, and interested, and care, and ultimately am really hard to convince to just follow along in someone’s predetermined idea of what’s what. My mom labeled me as “too stubborn”, repeating often, opening introductions with it by telling complete strangers that I was like this “even as a baby!” Stories about clothes that she liked and I didn’t and I’d willfully, at months of age, make them unwearable within hours of them touching my skin were repeated ad infinitum, excusing her and letting people know I was too intractible for her control.
And to be clear: that’s not “human nature”. That’s just my nature. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to get to what’s “human nature”, and what’s a clumping of similar characteristics with people that have gravitated towards each other. So many of those clumps are deciding they are the epitome of the entirety of humanity. Or worse, the entirety of what should be humanity, aka eugenics.
“Human nature” is one of those things that I started hearing about so early and so often I really can’t pinpoint it. It was in the air I breathed.
We went to a Lutheran church my first decade. When my parents divorced we went to a fundamentalist christian church, and my dad became a born again fundamentalist christian to try to win mom’s family’s approval so they’d pressure her to returning. Both institutions had very clear, unmatching ideas of what was human nature, despite both being rooted in christianity.
“Human nature” was used as one of the cudgel’s to try to browbeat me into accepting motherhood as my predetermined everything. In other words, my certainty that I didn’t want children was framed as being not-human.
I knew by the age of 5 that I didn’t want kids. There was a reaction when I said it out loud, clearly, and with very few words, “I’m not having kids.” I remember it, and it’s family lore, brought out every holiday until I stopped attending holidays. This wasn’t me getting educated by a system they didn’t agree with; I was 5. This was me seeing the difference between behavior/action and the words. It was what I was told was my place, the behavior I was to practice to build my “maternal instincts”*, and the behavioral controls I witnessed towards female adults, so un-subtle that I understood them as “bad”, at age 5.
*see what they did? They framed ongoing, everyday training from a young age as instincts – as human nature.
Around me, there were always doctrine about human nature, opinions about human nature, and things happening right in front of me that didn’t match either. These days, I’m not anything. I’ve read religious texts in all of the major doctrines, and the ones that I reflect on the most are from Buddhism. I also freaking love the Tales of Genji, and spent a couple years continuing to drip in more shamanistic books after a college class, and participated in Wicca ceremonies in my 20’s, and more Seders than I can easily count. I went far and wide in my explorations.
So as “human nature” gets bruited about, let’s really think about what it means.
It is actually a question as old as spirituality and religion
Our religions are complex. They are information structures. They are designing expectations for accepted interaction, and rituals and clearly designed space to manage pain and suffering. Some also manage joy, or meaning, or purpose, or health, or legacy information transfer…and the list goes on. They always have something to say about our place in the world. Some, like christianity, you have to dig deep. Others put human balance with nature as the topmost, bar none, bigger than multiple other standards combined, priority. Some revere nature, some look at nature and assume it can be reined in and commanded, with an infinite spectrum between.
It’s why I bring up religion in my intro for this piece. Religion is often our first whiffs of a holistic model for human nature. It’s likely in the air before our first mental connections that those sounds have meaning, and our mouths can make them. Because of that, religion is deeply embedded in our perception. While organized religion has big picture organization – top-down structures – it also always is nuanced at the point of ingestion. So your specific geographically-located church, with your specific leader(s) and/or committees and/or adherents will have their own nuances.
It’s also why I’ve spent so much time looking at cults. It can be really hard to see the tipping point between religion and cult. Cults use the same behavioral tactics as dark triad; monopolistic business; authoritarian regimes. It’s not a standalone pattern, but a fractal applied to a different facets of society or culture.
People organize themselves and each other in as many ways as we organize information
This maleability of our relationship organizations is everywhere. If you don’t walk into a situation looking for confirmation of how you believe relationships and cultures and societies form, you’ll see it.
If you want an easy way to start tracing, grab some old website navigations and see how jumbled they can feel; then start tracing what you can of the underlying business organization. The more jumbled the navigation, the more complex the shifts in organizational structures as you move between internal groups. All of the complexities of information structures can be found in any sizable organization.
If someone goes in looking for hierarchy everywhere, they’ll see hierarchy everwhere and never figure out how the navigation got so jumbled. Maybe some people will throw up their hands in disgust and disparage different groups. However, the dissonance isn’t in the organization or people; it’s in the difference between perception and reality – between what a person wants to see, and what’s actually there.
If they want to believe that hierarchies are the only way a group of people can function, they’ll make stories for why that alpha male was being gracious, instead of understanding that the group was functioning as a flat network with different people taking leadership roles as they hit different circumstances. It’s the same misperception and mislogic that lead to social myths about alpha wolves being tougher, meaner, snarlier, and dominating. Someone wanted to see it, and ignored or skewed perception of behavior that said otherwise.
Matrix organizations exist and thrive.
Truly flat organizations exist and thrive.
Intentional communities get things done, often on a scale that has more common benefit than our hierarchical communities – just not in the time scales hierarchical governance expects.
The complexity of the organization is significantly impacted by three things:
- whether the organization will allow for the time and work to maintain communications that build connection;
- or, flipping it, how deeply/persistently the organization is focused on speed and efficiency over understanding and resilience;
- the behavior of the incumbants, and whether the group as a whole will manage the ones who would have hierarchies.
Every connection requires time to maintain, and that time can’t be constrained to just-business if you want real trust to develop. The people who actively want hierarchy will use this ‘wasted time’ excuse ad infinitum.
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. It was pointed out at every possible opportunity, sometimes twisting the opportunity deeply to make it clear: 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, and really you can only trust family. The message was that we just needed to 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 leverage.
The more I learned, the more it became clear that our everyday suffering usually has a beneficiary. It can be as granular as 1:1 relationships where one is the abuser, getting regular hits of dopamine from seeing the fear/pain/submission of the abused. It can be as massive as colonialization and imperialism, where an entire country, society, or culture is reamed for someone(s) profit.
The exceptions to human-instigated pain and suffering are what we call acts of god: extreme weather events, lighting strikes, animal attacks, and meteors, to name a few. Yet as human action changes the climate, extreme weather events are escalating damage and increasing in frequency. As humanity’s tools gain effect through intensity or accumulation, and people rein in attribution and knowledge for the sake of the benefit of the very few, we shift the boundary line between human usury and god-scale happenings.
Humanity is not wholly evil, nor is it wholly good
Back in toxins and tonics, I laid out why I think people overall not assholes. The short version: I wander, and in my wanderings I’ve been overall treated kindly.
The same page also shows why I don’t agree with the sentiment that people are overall good: bad things are designed and set in motion that specifically cause pain and suffering to more people than the design benefits.
Nothing makes this clearer than our social biases. They are not beneficial to us on a mass individual level, but are massively beneficial on a system level with key demographics pre-ordained as special. Avoiding black men is not going to save you from a rich white rapist who convinces you that just giving in is in your best financial and survival interest; and avoiding black men might keep you from meeting someone truly special. Catholic priests were pedophiles; but Catholic priests were also the glue that held communities together across centuries. These surface characteristics – race, gender, age, religion, station, etc. – are not going to tell you diddly squat about how deeply or consistently someone will abide by or even enjoy usury. In the meantime, they assure that entire demographics will be silo’d from our whole, easier to predate and harder to find the resources to fight back.
Surveillance is also not the way to fix the egregious happenings. In a world that knows it’s always watched, people act differently. Everyday people worry about how they look when they dance, instead of enjoying the dancing. Malefactors already know to mask their worst qualities. They wait until the camera is turned away, and work to gain control of the camera in case they slip.
It is also a society-wide perception issue. In a world designed for profit, we’ve agreed to a certain level of usury. Profit is getting more money in return for something of lesser value. Usury, with a different label. When we cut back on taxing wealth, we uncapped usury. It’s just business to ignore boundaries, stretch truth, enjoy a touch of suffering – to gloat for buying low (starve an artist, underpay an employee, be opportunistic in dire circumstances) to sell high. If our culture focuses “too much” (by the usurious estimation) on understanding where unbalance and inequity are producing pain and suffering, it’s too easy to see that it’s a matter of scale – that pain and suffering is the primary goal of our profit-focused economic system, that happened to also solve a major chunk of distribution and logistics along the way.
Problem solving
People are always problem solving. What they’re focused on solving might mean nothing to business, or might counter business too directly to be “valuable”, but we’re still navigating problems every day. 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, now with more…something), 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 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 steal, watch how far you go with 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. The escalation of tactics to achieve a goal can go too far. A malefactor can start using the escalated tactics as an everyday starting point, spreading pain and suffering further because he only sees the self-serving benefit.
Tooling
I often talk about tools in my work. So first, let’s clarify.
tools are anything that augment a person
Tools are not just information technology, or weapons, or hammers. The “tools” discussion gets carted out alot as an argument that whatever is gaining focus as a frustration point is “just a tool”, e.g., that we need to make it available to everyone as-is, and refocus on the individual mismanagement.
Tools are anything that augment a person, whether physical (a hammer), intellectual (a book), or emotionally (a stuffed animal). The only time we aren’t tooled up is when we’re naked and asleep, with no made protection from the elements. Most of us haven’t been untooled in our lifetime. Even Bear Grylls tools up. Even the people on the Alone series can bring tools along as a starting point, and always make more. Even Naked and Afraid have a couple key tools. None of these people have gone out into the wilderness completely untooled.
Some tools are broadly useful and incredibly malleable in terms of efficacy, like fabric. Fabric could make clothing, or quilts, or cloths to help with cleaning, awnings to help cut the intensity of the sun, tents to sleep under without getting dewy.
Some tools can be used effectively outside of their specific design, like hammers. Hammers are intended to be used to pound in nails – something we can’t do with our bare hands, and which tends to ding or even break non-specified objects. But hammers can also be effective to help us pound objects into tight tolerances, or deliberately change the texture of surfaces, or start screws. They’ve also been used to bash in heads, with a spectrum of results ranging from a bruise to death. The intention of the person wielding it is a key, as translated by the force and vector they apply to the hammer.
Some tools are so tightly designed to their intended use there is literally no safe way to use them otherwise, like guns. Guns are intended to effect intense vector force on an object, which projects it beyond our human reach. It in turn effects intense damage from the vector force, hardness of the projectile, and softness of the object hit. That’s it. It’s so tightly engineered to do specifically this in a way that doesn’t harm the wielder of the tool that it cannot safely do anything else. If someone were to use a rifle to prop open a door, it wouldn’t take long for someone else to start yelling in fear and anger at such incredible, rank stupidity. Because this tool is the embodiment of the intent. This tool has no other use. It doesn’t matter who wields it for what reason, it will do harm.
“Tool” is a big part of the discussion around AI at the time of this writing. First, I agree that “AI” has been co-opted by marketing to be far too broad. LLM’s are what are causing people to cart out the “tool” argument, and it’s because they are really shitty at their supposed core precept: managing information. The stated intent is that you throw all the everything of information at this tool, ask a question, and it’ll parse through everything and bubble up exactly what’s needed. It tries to assure people that they don’t need to learn, they just need access to the “right” information.
It fails. It fails to find niche materials, it fails to provide attribution, it fails to stick to reality – hallucinating. It fails just little enough so some people can decide its ok to trust it. It fails in the single most effective piece of information literacy: traceability. With traceability, we can solve problems. Without it, we devolve to faith and trust, hoping and crossing our fingers that someone actually thought this through well. This information problem is so deeply embedded in the tool that it can’t be designed out.
That means it’s not an information tool, but a misinformation tool. Lo and behold, sticking to the magical “you just need the information” narrative, scammers and fraudsters and usurious assholes have found the most traction with it the fastest.
LLM’s are built up on decades of quality information management, leveraging the same hardware and development tools that make for quality information transfer. That is just the substrate, like the metal smithing of a gun. LLM’s are designed to steal and document the intellectual property of the world, siphon data to a centralized holding location that is now “owned” by the server owner, and spout hallucinatory, irreproducable mishmash. It does all this in a way that also deeply mismanages our physical resources. Yes, it’s a tool. But it’s a tool that was deeply, inextricably designed to do only one thing well: foment chaos.
Everything else is marketing and sweat equity.
How I ultimately parsed humanity
Removing the factors of time and expectations:
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People are trying to make sense of their world, all the time, in every way that hits their perception. Information is as important to us as air.
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More people are more interested in “live and let live” than spreading control, pain, and suffering; but the ones who enjoy control, pain, and suffering have an outsized impact for reasons that could be significantly designed out, if we muster the mass will.
Those two bullet points are what fits the logic of what I’ve found, trying really hard to triple-check that I’m building from the bottom up.
I also get it: what about all the shit we do to each other? What about the lying, violence, rape, theft, and bullying? I grew up steeped in the “given” that this was humanity. It just doesn’t align with what I actually found. They are real facets, and their extremes that feel like urban myths to some people really do exist. But the facets come in such a broad spectrum that they are not the defining characteristics. They are, however, what we most hope to avoid. Having them in our lives makes everything harder, with compounding impact.
We keep a weather eye open for them. They might be our deepest, most-agreed-upon confirmation bias.
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Lying, violence, rape, theft, and bullying are not a ubiquitous nature that we all need to manage against every day, and can be individual nature; again, most of us tend to “live and let live”
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People will reach for a lie for a reason: to avoid trouble, get out of trouble, to skew the information in favor of their desire, were lied to themselves, to self-serve.
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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, or following commands issued in a top-down architecture. Individual nature can come into play when violence feels like a boost to their sense of power.
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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. However, this narrative is gaining traction in certain corners again.
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People steal when they can’t buy or make themselves, or do so in the time in which they need or desire a thing; or when the having becomes deeply symbolic.
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People bully to get what they want with less direct effort, with a little interpersonal power boost involved, and a little dopamine kick.
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It’s a fairly safe bet that the more usurious a person is at the starting point, the more willing they’ll be to escalate bullying, lies, violence, desire, and theft. More people will only turn to these behaviors out of desperation. I’d bet there are more people who wouldn’t use these, period, than there are those who see no boundary lines.
In other words, our most violent, harmful behaviors are levers used to manage environment, and/or fulfill a future-sense. These aren’t things that happen in a social vacuum. If a culture/society decides to enable the patterns – to push environments where suffering is the norm – we’ll have more lying, theft, rape, and murder. If a culture/society decides to disable these patterns by supporting the people that make up the group, we’ll have less lying, theft, rape, and murder. If a culture/society decides that the path is to disabuse these patterns through punishment, we’ll have mass incarceration. Choosing disabuse is also a tacit acceptance that the patterns should exist, but some people want a say in which instances are ok. They want to build privilege into a system where they can bet with reasonable assurance that they won’t be murdered for the next egregious assholery.
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. Society is designed information, built by government and, historically, religion. Democracy-based government is designed information that has deliberate, procedural fungibility; it can be shifted to support or pressure; encourage or debilitate; fail for many, or for as few as we can engineer and iterate.
A person’s response, reaction, and environment all contribute to their decisions to behave or act, and one aspect could contribute more. The environment can push an otherwise kind person to desperation. We can’t understand until we look at all of them. We can’t understand if the are part of a systemic 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 certain behavior.
Kids on a battlefield kill on sight; they aren’t all suddenly psychopaths. The battlefield didn’t erupt out of nothing, for no reason, just because of “human nature”.
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. In this instance, it was literally the only remaining response to a dire physical and ethical situation. Anyone who pushes a different interpretation is narrative building: misinformation intended to at least confuse and distract.
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 issues as a complexity, framed in the compounded networks of their fulsome information and who-ness.
Human nature
IF there is “human nature”, my bet is that it’s somewhere in or adjacent to our use of information. Our languages, our religions and cultures and societies, our accreting understanding of the world and cosmos, our intense desire to share what we’ve learned, all hearken back to information.
But honestly, we probably won’t really understand what “human nature” is until and unless we contextualize. We would likely start by accepting that we aren’t special. When we care about the cats, bears, orchids, rivers, etc., more than ourselves, we might be able to start understanding how humanity contrasts. If we contend with life that has more technological prowess or a different fundamental makeup (aliens able to survive or even thrive in the vacuum of space), we might be able to build on that contrast.
Underneath that other-care and non-domination is a grace of acceptance. We have to accept that the world and all it’s contents isn’t ours to use and abuse. We’d have to accept that humanity isn’t the apex anything, because the apex is a specialization that would sunder our viability except in a very narrow space of use…like a gun.
Right now, we can’t even seem to give this grace to other humans.