One of the most interesting and controversial claims made by Sociobiologists and Evolutionary Psychologists has to do with the importance of deception in human social life. The argument takes several forms but basically goes something like this (and please pardon me if I’m oversimplifying a bit): The competition for resources within hominid populations increasingly favored strategies of deception rather than the use of sheer brute force. The reason for this is simple; brute force takes an awfully big toll on the gene pool. In other words, a physical struggle for scarce resources can get you killed (or at least mortally injured); whereas a strategy of deception is more likely to get you what you want without as great a risk of someone putting your lights out (and consequently reducing your opportunities for passing a few genes on to the next generation). What inevitably followed was a rapid escalation of brainpower (and, needless to say, the use of language) in a search for new and more clever ways to deceive. But the downside of all this is that your competitor is simultaneously evolving these capacities as well, hoping to head-off your nefarious tricks and perhaps to spin a few good ones of his own. Unfortunately the race to become the most accomplished liar eventually hit a brick wall... Life had become an endless Bugs Bunny episode. Ahhhh but wait… What if you could somehow also master a skill for deceiving yourself; then perhaps you and your so-called friends might find a way out of this cul-de-sac once and for all. The beauty of self-deception is that you can go on fooling people all day long (at least from the perspective of your evolutionary “fitness” - if not with the cooperation of your conscious mind) without pissing everybody off quite so often - and perhaps even tolerate being similarly deceived by them from time to time. After all, folks need to get along (especially when they’re stuck together for months on end in a dark cave with very little food and an ice age raging outside), This strategy, it seems, kills two bison with one flint spear, and the idea would go something like this: If you could somehow convince yourself that you’re not a born liar (when, in fact, you are), your skills for deception would likely skyrocket. The simple reason for this is that you are now free to get behind your gobbledygook heart and soul. (It is often said that the best salesmen are those who believe wholeheartedly in the products they hawk) You might think of this development as the birth of marketing. And better yet; if you could somehow manage to convince yourself that you’re not actually being fooled (when, in fact, they’re feeding you a heaping load of hogwash), then you’ll probably become a much more enthusiastic fan of other people’s gobbledygook as well – you might think of this as the birth of religion and politics (by which I simply mean the most ancient forms of what we would today call “consumer confidence”). The greatest problem for this theory (at least according to it’s harshest critics, and aside from the fact that reading too much about it can lead to crippling paranoia), is that if people should ever begin accepting ideas like these on a large scale (in the way, for instance, they do Christianity, Islam, or Neoliberalism), they would soon be stripped of a valuable evolutionary strategy; one which has reliably insulated them from an old ally and nemesis for millennia - brute force. So long live the illusion! And long live our illusions about the illusion! Jonathan Gedaliah; from an imaginary conversation with Leo Strauss.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 01:56:41 +0000
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