Black Male Feminist

Let us be clear from the beginning, women and men are not created equal. Lets take it one step further, no one is created equal.

By believing that everyone is equal, we create a society of expectations and power vacuums where legitimate differences lie. We set the stage for the brand of social polity which sweeps complex issues under the rug in the name of political correctness.

Guess what? I can’t draw to save my life. My primary emotional setting is biased towards negative expressions such as anger and irritation. I am extraordinarily athletic. I have a certain style of charisma. Certain bits of information I process quickly, others take, days, weeks, or even years. I struggle with calculus but I really enjoy. I’m a good public speaker. My mind races sometimes and its really hard to focus. I’m terribly afraid of rejection.

There is no one else who experiences life exactly the way I do. There are those that do things significantly better than me and those that I do I things significantly better than. Then there are those that just do different things than me…

This is the nature of the life force: it does not imbue us all with the same gifts or shortcomings, interests or disinterests.

Thus, we are not created equal.

However, we can create equality. Why? Because if you were to take a macroscopic cross-section of the human species, you would see that many of our talents and weaknesses complement each other. We are all variations on the exact same theme and any attempt to dismiss this reality is a denial of humanity, something I cannot bring myself to do.

Intuition, the beautiful conscious experience of unconscious processing, has been the major vehicle for the development of human society for some thousands of years now. It hinges upon subjective, practical experience, with sensory information shaping the salience and products of the hidden brain. For many, intuition seems like something otherwordly; it is a positively inexplicable phenomenon which often gets promoted to paranormal or supernatural status. Intuition, from my perspective and those that share my views, displays the majesty of our brain structures. We are not computers, but something much more brilliant: we are the latest update of the vehicles that carry life.

Intuition is the easiest mental experience to capture; it happens spontaneously and is rarely accompanied by conscious control. The result is a feeling that this information must be true or at the very least, valuable, and from their behavior generally ensues.

It is my belief that intuitive reasoning has been the primary modus for the propagation of discrimination of any kind. As intuition is an unconscious process and unconsciousness is modulated both by genes and by environmental stimuli, the brain is drafting conclusions via certain frameworks and resulting biases without the individual being aware they are happening.

Thus, intuitively, women are weaker than men. They are more emotional and ergo, less rational, with ration being a substitute for intelligent. Their status as nurturer permanently marries them to remaining in the house, rearing children and preparing meals. Upon this anachronistic mindset, many a culture and society have been built.

It does not require a neuroscientist to see that this is utter nonsense.

But, most “scientists” are those that forsake intuition just long enough to forge testable hypotheses, opting for a shade of objectivity rather than woefully shortsighted subjectivity. As the individual thinks in empirical modes, his subjectivity is continually altered, allowing him or her to generate more mature intuitions.

I suppose this is the moment that I offer the pathetic speech about all the wonderful females I know. This is where I say, my boss, a clinical and forensic neuropsychologist, is one of the youngest and most successful practitioners in the region. Or maybe, my best friend, a female, is arguably the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. Or perhaps I engage in a lengthy diatribe about how men and women have different qualities for good reasons and those should be respected.

While this is all true, it masks my point with political correctness.

I have long since had to relinquish beliefs in many of the teleological beliefs that lurk in the ideologies so popular in modern society. Teleogy, for those unaware, is any belief that argues that we are moving to some final destination, some grand finality in which things either blow up (like Armageddon) or things reach maximum harmony. I don’t really care for either and I don’t spend much time wondering which is true.

What I do believe is that life is much like an infinitely complex algorithm that continually plays combinatorial games with all its expressions. Thus, from the first single celled organism to us, the most complex creature in the known universe, life finds more and more ways to deal with its innate problem: homeostatic balance or the maintenance of itself. Life wishes to live and it looks for more optimized ways to do so.

Optimized implies final state, optimality, right? Not necessarily and even if it did, it isn’t something we could even begin to understand. We ourselves are still evolving and the phenomenon of consciousness has saw to it that we accelerate the process nicely.

Life surges through all of us equally and that is where our equality lies. It isn’t that we were “created” equal but that we have been given equal chance to pursue all of our goals through the human condition.

Women provide a wealth of information because women, last time I checked, are humans. They brains with mind numbing complexity and they express a myriad behaviors just like any other human.

This goes for all manner of social identifier, gender, age, creed, sexual orientation — whatever.

Now, here’s the catch, intuitive readers have been thinking, “yes bryce, but these are social phenomena. While it may be true that equality and access to the life force are freely permitted, the identifiers entire into different waters, socialization.”

This is 100% fact and this is where all our problems as a species lie. Intuition leads one to this place and keeps plotting along as a biased, unwieldy beast.

Allow me to offer an opinion: humans are a social species; evidence suggests that our evolution has been borne upon the wings of our ability to communicate and form complex societies, all of which helped us adapt against our competition in nature. Language, abstract thought, and deliberative planning — all hallmarks of humanity — are the direct reasons why we have flourished how we have.

Deep within all of us, presumably etched into our genetic information, are the exact same fighter and Darwinian champion instructions our ancestors passed along to us; however, with the advent of consciousness came reflective thought and reflective thought creates very interesting precipitates. As vessels of life, we are hardwired to want to live, however, life in its emergent complexity augmented its automaticity. We went from nonconscious, with no awareness and no control, to conscious, with a type of control. The dimensions of this control are far beyond the scopes of this post, but they involve the dialectical relationship between organism and environment. Consciousness permits a step in the direction of free will, but it is not entirely free.

So while certain concepts are ingrained deep below the levels of consciousness, our awareness, or the things we direct our conscious phenomena toward, assigns special value to the streaming information. This causes a type of modulation, a change, in the very anatomy and operation of the brain.

This process is by no means easy, but it is the basis for psychoanalysis and the entire field of clinical psychology.

What does this mean for society? It means that for most of us, we are quick to identify and classify others as this or that, a quirk of the life program, but we don’t have to assign negative or positive qualities to these categorizations. With enough practice a person is able to see the entire world around them for what it is: a massive playground for existential exploration.

The exploration of life.

As previously stated, we are all humans. Black, white, Chinese, Mexican, Persian, French, Moldovan, El Salvadorean, Spanish. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Jain. Tall, short, fat, skinny. Heterosexual, homosexual. Cisgender and transgender.

While our complex wet-ware (brains) will attempt to structure these things and assign values to them, it is possible to reorient the entire way one sees them.

Why would anyone actually want to do these things? Because they’re right? Because they’re ethical? Because they’re moral?

No.

Because its life. We should value the differences between one another because thats how our brains make decisions. David Eagleman calls the workings of the inner self the “competition among rivals,” meaning that even within ourselves various programs are running and competing for conscious and behavioral expression. It is from this intrinsic makeup that we humans created democracy or the “competition among rivals” socially speaking.

With difference comes the inbuilt quality of life: the ability to recombine over and over again to produce increasingly more efficient results. Women come built in ways different than men not because of some ontological status, but because it enriches the process of life.

Therefore, I am a feminist. I believe that women possess just as much right to pursue happiness in our societies as myself. I believe EVERYONE should have a right pursue happiness.

We all come built in different ways because it promotes an extraordinarily robust existence. We have been blessed with the ability to help that process along.

Thanks Life for conscious awareness.

Wax Inamorata

About 10 months ago I started asking myself and those around me what was the nature of reality. Looking back, the question was exceedingly naive, but only because the journey to where I find myself now has been so laborious. To go from card-carrying idealist, to newly converted materialist is about as striking as one can transform, but it rely underscores the dedication I have put into my cognitive and professional development.

This journey has been about an excursion into one’s self, only to realize that the perceived structure of that self was mostly an elaborate illusion. So, shedding layer upon layer of delusion at breakneck speed, I’ve forced myself to endure the shame and nakedness that enlightenment so often brings. Enlightenment is so often colored with delicate hues and empyrean settings, but the cruel reality is that enlightenment, the elucidation of self, is a frightening and painful ordeal. You must part from concepts and beliefs that formed the foundation of who you found yourself to be. Enlightenment in its most concentrated form is more akin to a furnace than the warm rays of a summer afternoon.

Yet, strength is built up and you are formed as a new creature indeed.

My goals have shifted much in this last year, from enterprising entrepreneur, to subtle academic turned clinician learning to tinker with the delicate knobs of human existence. Although intuition would lead one to belief myriad things about our nature of being, empirics have lead scientists to almost unfathomable promised lands. This appealed to me as I felt the pining of a self that didn’t merely wish to optimize the interactions between man and his surroundings, but to truly understand them on a level that fostered accelerated optimization that could lead to lasting success.

Many of us can be good at making money or brokering trades — I simply wish to understand why.

My goals have promptly shifted, clearly, and I have been in the process of reorienting my trajectories as a result. By and large, my future is much more to my liking.

However, I’m at the age at which many of us are fulfilling biological needs, namely, settling down and starting families. We are genetically predisposed to want to have children and pass on our genes: we are the most evolved of Earth’s carriers of the “life-algorithm”. But, our complex evolution has brought us to varying stages in which we through environmental and experiential circumstances choose to delay or completely override these transcripted instructions. Hence why Gen-Y has pushed off child rearing en masse and opted for social successes first.

I digress.

I live in LA but I would go apeshit if given the opportunity to study at MIT, Columbia, or Harvard, the hallowed grounds of many psychological and neuroscientific movements. In my mind’s eye, I am more than qualified to hang with the big boys and deeply contemplate the inner universes that we all carry. This is my nearly monothematic drive at this point; I am singularly focused on the attainment of this aspiration.

How do I fit a woman into this narrative? Well, thats another intriguing morsel I’ve found myself chewing on…

Over the summer, I wrote “Why I’m Not Ready For A Relationship” and systematically eviscerated my younger self. My goal was not wanton self-deprecation, but instead it was a healing and learning process for my inclination towards narcissism. In the present, I tend to be fully convinced of my plans in toto or at the very least the tools at my employ to put together plans. Thus, I tend to be hardheaded and resistant to correction in the moment. That article was a not-so-subtle reminder to the modes of thought I often use and a guide to the pitfalls I should avoid.

As a young man, I was extremely self-conscious and socially insecure with regards to my physical appearance. It followed that I was unequivocally attracted to gorgeous women who made me feel attractive. I projected my broken self-image onto them and used the reflection as a de facto sense of status. However in that process I rarely took the time to parse out who these women actually were and if they were a good fit for me.

I’ve honestly never considered what I wanted in a woman. As long as I could celebrate her outer beauty and tolerate her inner self, I was good.

This has been a disastrous method, clearly.

But, again, my relentless questioning about what constitutes reality made this revelation possible. Many external viewers, mainly friends and family, already knew this and told me on several occasions. But, the brain must become emotionally connected to concepts if it is to value them; I had no emotional connection to my own shortcomings — I wasn’t denying them; I was utterly unaware of them.

So, here I am, an aspiring doctor of the mind, considering what I actually want in the woman I “choose” to spend the rest of my life with. While this question is anything but easy for me, I think I know enough about what I don’t want and what doesn’t jive with my personality to lay the foundations for a coherent description of what this woman may be like.

The first and most critical aspect is that I am not creating a hard list of things I must have. Just like I’ve matured from a few years ago, I will continue to mature, grow, and improve as a man, scientist, and whatever identification associated with me.

My first professional scolding came from my second internship in college where my supervisor, tired of my attitude, called me into her office and told me I was emotionally immature. My responses were consistent with someone who lacked control over his inner world and this was a problem: she shouldn’t be the recipient of whatever crap I was going through; I was 22. Over the last four years, I have done everything I can do to modulate my emotional responses to positive and adverse stimuli and although I have a very long way to go, I think I’ve made considerable progress. A major thing I want in a partner is that same dedication to personal improvement. Whether it be emotional or intellectual, I will be captivated by a woman who is invested in her inner wealth.

On the topic of intellect, I require a certain type of mind. Less about brute IQ or the ability to regurgitate information, I will be deeply intrigued by a woman whose cognitive architecture is complex and rigorous. She would be the type of person whose mental contents would be supported by a masterful mental framework. How she thinks would keep our conversations lively…

But, the appropriate “how” must be offset by cognitive flexibility. She does not have to think like me, but must remain open to alternative modes and methods. An “open” mind whose interests include the mental gymnastics concomitant with intellectual inquiry. She will be someone who is comfortable — no, longs — to embrace the nakedness, the discomfort that comes with enlightenment.

That enlightenment process is about vulnerability. I am notoriously difficult to coax into vulnerability and my goal would be to embark on the intellectual, emotional, and affective journey with someone who desired to become vulnerable to me as well.

Vulnerability done right leads to intense loyalty. Although brain science has some scary things to say about hormones and a proclivity for infidelity, I rest assured that the woman of my “choosing” will find herself as dedicated to me as I will be to her.

I can be extremely pessimistic, especially in my moods, so the woman that knows when to reach out to me and when to leave me be will point to someone that understands me. My personality is one that requires a strong counterpart, I can be intense and insensitive. I can’t say “she has to be stable” because that creates too much vagary, but along the same lines of the mental frameworks, the emotional frameworks must be in order. If she is flying all over the place emotionally, we are bound to hit walls.

I honestly don’t care about her race, job description, or any of those types of descriptors: she can be a physician from Senegal or an administrative assistant from Montana. Its more about the construction of her mind than anything else. I, of course, have may physical “types” and appearances that I am attracted to, but those are rather diverse. More background noise than coherent decisional dialogue, but you can bet your ass I will think she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet..

So, that is what what I look for. If I never find it, you can find me on a campus near you considering the fabric of the cosmos and their correlates in the brain, haha. I’m very happy with my progress thus far and I know that my future is as bright as I can conceive it, romance included.

bryce

Unmasking The Matrix

What if things weren’t as they appeared? What if the history we were told, the ideas that we were taught, and the norms we were instructed to follow were mere distortions? What if society was no more than a cleverly concocted scheme used to pull the wool over our “true” eyes?

Well, all of these are true.

Things are not as they appear; history and social norms are distortions, and society is a cleverly concocted scheme. However, there doesn’t need to be a shadow elite or a corrupt government to facilitate these skew.

One has to look no further than their own brain.

Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale’s School of Medicine offered a quote that summarizes the workings of the brain beautifully:

When someone looks at me and earnestly says, “I know what I saw,” I am fond of saying, “No you don’t.”

You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.

Ouch.

In Dr. Louis Cozolino’s book, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, he talks about the widely misunderstood phenomena of how the brain actually becomes conscious of information. Most of us know that there is a wealth of information that exists beneath the consciousness, that is information that one isn’t aware of; however, that there are processes beneath the conscious escape most. That is, all of the information that eventually reaches your conscious mind, that part of the brain that you know and are well aware of, has already been processed and treated by the processes preceding conscious thought.

Thusly, you do operate under distortions; namely, your own.

Your reality is not the reality; it is consistently skewed towards the narrative that you are operating under. That narrative is your underlying beliefs, preferences, and hidden feelings operating on an unconscious level.

Now, society, as I have proclaimed over and over on this blog, is little more than a dyadic relationship between individual and collective. Society is a summation of interactions with culture coming about as an emergent property. The nature vs. nurture debate has long since been deemed a superficial argument since it is clear that both are involved in a human being’s development. Thus, as humans form societies as a means of evolutionary resilience, societies form humans in a process of necessary cohesion. In order for societies to remain together, a common set of rules must be established so that behavior is graded against an impersonal and impartial rubric…

However, human sociality is anything but impersonal and impartial and this leads to the distorted notion that it negatively brainwashes.

Let me be very, very clear: brainwashing is real and there have been plenty of documented attempts at system wide influences by the government. However, much of the rationale behind brainwashing is evolutionarily consistent with maximized social cohesion and moral interpretation. Morality is actually hardwired into us through the insular cortex amongst other regions (nature); however, it is society, mainly culture, that modulates what one group of people find acceptable or morally reprehensible.

The conversation of free will, much like the nature vs. nurture debate, has become rather anachronistic in modern scientific circles as well. Although we are hardwired in ways that create the substrate for our behavior, we all vary as to what is necessary to stimulate certain responses. Moreover, as one develops, one’s experiences shape them one way or another and learning can cause variations on schemata. Thus, one is bound by their brain physiology and propensity given brain circuitry, however, there exist many degrees of freedom within that framework allowing for myriad behaviors.

Everything that is is the result of life as an algorithm and its mode of transfer and transcription, DNA. Your genes have built you in a particular way and you will behave in a particular way. Additionally, the life algorithm has one goal: to continue to live and out of this process it is likely the brains came to develop. Brains were able to better modulate homeostatic optimality and conscious brains increased this process all the more. One interpretation sees our jump in evolution as being facilitated by language. Language not only allowed us to grow as a social species, but instigated the brain to become even more complex and able to generate inner images and reflect on these modalities.

The “matrix” is not an external imposition, but instead a physical reality of one’s own brain processes. However, Darwinism is still about survival of the fittest and you can damn well be sure there are those that operate to gain a disproportionate amount of power and influence. We are all very aware of these people and they are the closest thing to a secret society as one can imagine.

It is imperative then, that one, once cognizant of these described processes act in a manner which promotes life. Instead of seeing the ignorance of many misguided religions, political regimes, and social agendas and responding with further divisive ignorance, one must get in the habit of realizing these structures are as natural as language. They are supported by our physical morphology; to grant them some external agency, some mystery, “evil” connotation is a sin of ignorance. Ignorance can be cured. To persist in ignorance is stupidity. Stupidity is much more resilient.

The way to usher in a society that harmonizes all of the naturally occurring brain structures and is aligned with life on this planet is to, as objectively as possible, audit the stimuli entering one’s conscious mind, keeping in mind that this information has already been tainted by one’s disposition, beliefs, and preferences. With this in mind, one can begin to alter how their un- and non-conscious apparatus judge information. Racism can be reversed, but only after one opens themselves to processing information different. This is a long and difficult journey.

Our conscious apparatus is an evolutionary gift that allows us to vastly accelerate the course of evolutionary progression. Although our genes give us certain allotted abilities and interests, we can take those batons and run with them unlike any other species on this Earth.

Instead of wasting one’s time fighting external ghosts and blaming “systems” for one’s plight, perhaps its time to turn inward and reflect then turn outward and reflect on the totality of humanity and in turn, life. The system is only as good as its constituents and if you are playing the blame game, you are perpetuating the same bigotry, asymmetry, and division as those you which to overturn.

Speak the language of universality or you will simply be contributing to the problem.

bryce

Is Racism Dead?

No.

Racism is far from dead, but one needs to approach this subject from a slightly different angle in order to have a meaningful understanding of it. For most of my life the conversations regarding race relations have been charged by one subjective opinion or another, usually stemming from the cultural and experiential framework of the involved parties. While this is beneficial and by no means should be discarded, it does very little to elucidate the topic on a grand level and usually aids in continued dissension and segregation.

The first thing one needs to understand is what this whole thing about being a human is all about. What is this insistent sense of self that we all intuitively feel, but usually lack the requisite dexterity to explain? For the last year, I have been discussing the mind as an emergent structure from the brain, a theory that most scientists tentatively accept given current evidence. The mind is a part of the brain, an extended structure that allows for additional user interface and optimization of homeostasis as explored by Dr. Antonio Damasio of USC.

The question then becomes, what structures of the brain aid in mind-making? And of those mind-making neural correlates, which of those are the central locus of the apprehended self? This is an ongoing question that many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists participate in and so far many compelling theories have been put forward. The exact structures are beyond the scope of this post, but what can be said with more or less certainty is that one’s sense of self is distributed throughout many neural systems. Thus, there is no “seat” of intelligence, no central location of the soul. Sorry Descartes, the pineal gland, while important, does not seem to be the answer.

The sense of self and the brain thus operate in lockstep with one another which is important because in addition to a distinct selfness, we also have a distinct sense of “other-ness,” something I explored in the last post on this blog. We are an extremely social species, as made evident by our prolific use of language, and this language and sociality made our transition from the arboreal forests to what we are now possible. Language, as posited by many evolutionary psychologists, psycholinguists, and certain anthropologists, made our evolutionary leap possible.

Brain development, the evolution of the neural system, as aforementioned, made the maintenance of the inner environment, homeostasis, more efficient and effective. Life-as-algorithm sees the basic goal of life as the nonconscious willingness to persist, to live. Thus, the development of a self-aware mind replete with the ability to reflect and inhibit certain hardwired drives, reflexes, and instincts, made life-living easier. However, this did not do away with these evolutionary primitives and with that we turn to the discussion of racism.

Racism, conventionally defined, is a prejudice against a particular ethnicity or cultural group. To take it one step further, racism is a certain type of extreme in-group bias. In-group bias more than likely has its evolutionary roots in the sympathetic system, the primordial “approach or flee” or “friend or enemy” reflex. As our brains process information in a particular way, we rely heavily on our visual and limbic (emotional) systems especially in unconscious processing. Our brains are constantly making maps (literally) of innumerable stimuli and creating various memories of them. Although much of our neural system is genetically inherited, experience plays a key role in the making of our reality.

As we “scan” the social horizon, it follows that we look for individuals that are in some way like us. The most salient of these features are our phenotype, the genetic expression of physical features. This lays the foundation for in-group favoritism.

Racism is not innate; it is a learned aversive response to visual human anomalies. However, what is innate is our proclivity to scan, analyze, make memories, both semantic and episodic, of what we see and inwardly experience.

As cultures usually develop within particular regions and enclaves, there will be many differences between the normalcies from one group to another. This will activate the instinctual “friend or enemy” response, but as I stated from the beginning, the development of the conscious mind allows for inhibition of evolutionary primitive responses. The keyword is allows; this is not a clean or simple process and unconscious components can still come to the fore.

But these enclaves which progress with many, many differences mean that the moment they come up against one another, conflict will arise. There would need to be mental structures which would need to be taught on how to process and integrate all the different modes of expression without judgment. Go into any community and one can immediately recognize that these are not the type of frameworks being passed on between generations. We tend to teach conscious frameworks of isolated identity (you are Armenian) or the type of pop toleration that rarely survives the real social pressures of categorical difference.

What does this all mean in English? It means that racism is not dead because humans rely on their senses of selves, intimately tied to their physical senses and the apparatus that processes them, the brain, in order to work their way through the social environment. Because we have evolutionary drives to categorize and explain and ultimately interface with, mixed with the social pressures which naturally arise as we interact, the biases will complicate, not dissipate.

What needs to be done is for more people to become aware of how the processing of information occurs and how most of their responses to stimuli are entirely more complex and physical than they realize. We are not robots, per se, but we are not entirely free creatures either. We are heavily influenced by the codes written in our cells and our earlier formative experiences. Thus, in order to truly get a hold on racism, or any prejudice for that matter, we must continually investigate the brain. Feelings and emotions play a vital role in information processing, but the role they play is rarely objective.

Racism is the result of evolutionary ignorance and arbitrary categorization of difference. It persists because it is embedded deep inside the entire process of life.

We as humans need to be open to dialogue early in our lives about the differences and the images they can create in the brain. Now is not the time to continually war with one another over ideology; this solves nothing and simply pits one interpretation against another. This is why black-white relations in this country have persisted long after the abolition of slavery, long after the granting of civil rights, and long after the so-called “post-racial” era began. There is no post-racial era as long as we are using words like “race” to delineate one human from another. Cultures must be proud of their traditions, but they must be willing to identify with the larger structure of the human social being, the meta-entity that we affectionately call “mankind.”

We are all men. We are all humans.

Racism is far, far from dead because humans have not become aware of most of the information I’ve laid out in the post. We are so concerned with concrete “essences” and other distorted senses of egoic self, that many of the things we believe obstruct the relativistic truth of genetic and experiential factors of development. Few people like the notion that they have been formed to think improperly and even fewer are okay with the idea that the actual content of their thoughts are improper. In-group bias likes to think of one’s self as mostly right and others as mostly wrong. We are prone to forming smaller and smaller groups to aid in social coherence and all of this has lead to the conflation of social problems we are all too familiar with.

I hope that many of us push further into the explorable aspects of ourselves to see the error in tribalistic thinking. I hope those that are aware continually to explore what these things can mean for our kids. Be aware that the bulk of your processing occurs outside of conscious awareness and who you think you are may be a far cry from what you actually exhibit. The purest ignorance can seem like enlightenment from a dim soul.

bryce

The Faceless Them

Its an exciting time to be alive and an extremely exciting time to be a cognitive scientist or researcher of the brain in any capacity. We are finally beginning to understand many of the tricky aspects of what makes us us, but let me not overstate this progress, there is still much to be parsed out in dissertations and grant proposals all over the world.

One of the more well-known biases discussed in social psychology is the so-called in-group/out-group bias which, as its name implies, is concerned about dynamics between collections of people.

Evolutionary Psychology is a relatively young field in the psychological sciences whose main goal is to establish a coherent theory that many cognitive processes and social behaviors have been naturally selected for. This is, of course, much easier said than done since we can’t just go back in time and see how our ancestors behaved. We certainly don’t know much about our prehistoric arboreal progenitors and their cognitive capacities, thus, separating belief from empirically validated results has proven difficult. Nevertheless, it is on relatively firm founding that humans do exhibit in-group-/out-group bias and that this bias is probably the result of certain survival mechanisms wired in the brain. Our instinctual selves, deep within out unconcious, are concerned with “approach” and “flee,” as would’ve been of the utmost importance to early humans. As we became more sophisticated and our cognitive capacities grew, these instinctual drives branched out to be involved in more than just strict survival, but also in the maintenance of societies.

During my time as an undergraduate at LMU, I remember walking from my dorms through the main thoroughfare and always being confronted by some social cause. As a Catholic institution with a long history of supporting social justice (or the illusion thereof), many of the students were on the front-lines of such flammable topics as gender identity, religious tolerance, homelessness, and the dissolution of the corporate veil.

I was rather inert then and I would say I probably still am. Perhaps its the scientist in me or perhaps I had an early understanding of the inner workings of human society. The exact answer evades me, but I remember being positively unmoved by most campaigns.

Instead, I found myself asking the question, “why do we all seem to want the same exact things, yet no one seems to be able to actually acquire them?? Moreover, why were so many hands in the “pot” that were acting as obstacles for people to gain the equality they were demonstrating for? During the Prop-8 push for gay marriage rights, I remember explicitly asking a fellow Christian why we should be so concerned about what two other people did to express their love. As a heterosexual, whether genetically coded or unconsciously/consciously choosing, what makes my “group” any more privy to the institution of marriage than the next guy or gal?

However, I was barking up the wrong tree. It isn’t a matter of expression and it isn’t about the social dynamics per se, it is about how we as organisms have evolved to this point.

I remember as a kid in a much more traditional religious setting, the discussion of evolution was nonexistent — it wasn’t that we didn’t believe, we just figured that perhaps evolution was the method God used to propagate life. Darwinism, however, was treated like the plague. The survival of the fittest was almost demonic and went against practically everything our belief system taught. But, it was this very same indifference to evolution that kept me in a state of consternation during college — I didn’t really get how these things were all working together.

In my opinion, humans place entirely too much emphasis on certain aspects of consciousness and not enough on others. There is a heavy self-absorption, probably a residual trait from our days swinging in trees, but paired with advanced sentience, we are self-absorbed and quick to elevate our status. From my perspective, society has been evolutionarily advantageous to our species; hell, advanced language, the impetus which made socializing of our sort even possible, is the real thing which we should be elevating. But, the notions that we are somehow set apart on a cosmic, intrinsic level has made some of the more pernicious aspects of the human condition that much more destructive.

We are quick to talk about the “system” and how “they” or “them” are the ones doing this or that. The system is and I cannot stress this enough, human. It is entirely made by man, supported by man, and perpetuated by man. It is a human structure. The system is nothing more than the constantly evolving means by which we socialize; it isn’t good or evil, it is an outlandishly complex process of trial and error. Let us not forget that modern humans have only been around for what is a drop in the pan against the evolutionary history of this planet. The Earth itself, is a drop in the pan against of the evolution of the cosmos.

Thus societies, the environments which act as dialectics with each and everyone of us as individuals, progress very slowly. Thus, in-group/out-group bias, the distant child of primitive fight or flight reflexes, still wields in iron fist in our brains.

Our brains are processing centers and cognitive scientists are doing their best to figure out how they do their magic. Most of who we are, our sense of self, is submerged below what is even conscious: you are only barely aware of who or what you are. Thus, much of the larger social behaviors reflect these very primitive social drives. Every single cultural, religious, or political bout is a microcosm of one hundred thousand years of modern human interactivity and billions of years of life on this Earth.

We are a part of a much, much larger unfolding narrative.

Thus, The Faceless Them, the government, the elite, the police and so forth are no more real than you as a Them. To someone else, you are always a Them. It is easy to condemn the actions of those outside of your social group because, again, evolutionarily speaking, they are much less likely to act and subsequently think like you. If you look at the training of a police officer, the regulations he must come to enforce may alienate his cognitions from those of a young, out-group minor. Sometimes the other activities of that police officer can keep him grounded, after all, a police officer is not just a police officer, but a brother, a Catholic, an X-box aficionado and so forth.

The idea that it is always a “them” is exhibited from an early age. We come our the womb coded to jockey for power and play the role of evolutionary victor.

“They” are always always conformists and followers, while “we” are vibrant and individualistic. “They” are corrupt and base, while “we” are more pure and well intended. One of my favorite quotes of the last year is, “we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and other’s by their actions.” This is a classic exhibition of in-group/out-group bias. You know that your buddy is cheating on his wife, but since he’s your friend your more inclined to overlook is indiscretions. Let that person be a president that you don’t like and you get the cluster-fuck that is Bill Clinton’s scandal.

Our sense of selves seem to come hardwired with an intrinsic sense of “others”, those who do not fit our native associations and when you equate in the ruthlessly persistent evolutionary trend of “survival of the fittest” you get a clash of behaviors that sculpt history. In addition, we can self-reflect and actively communicate our inner sense of self, which means that statuses are no longer concrete. In the animal kingdom, it is easy to parse out who is the alpha, in our higher-ordered logic, one is sometimes alpha, sometimes not, and everything in between.

Factor in the human proclivity to explain everything (hello Left-Brain interpreter) and our self-absorption which modulates that interpreter and you get the totality of the world we exist in today. Arbitrarily constructed coalitions, religions, mainstream and countercultures, terrorist cells, and extremist groups.

We all carry the beautiful algorithm that is the lifeforce, but that algorithm is still more or less working itself out. The biases that come with it are recalcitrant and satisfying to the mind’s touch. They support one’s sense of self and are as natural to our conscious thoughts as anything else in the complicated psychical milieu.

The focus for most people will continue to be the expressed behavior and as such, society will contort and evolve in a manner consistent with our history. As various scientists continue to prod at the deep, inner workings of the human mind and brain, we will hopefully be able to streamline that process.

bryce