Nature, Law, and Money

Economics is a means to artificially recreate on a large scale what people naturally do in small groups. In a household, we organize ourselves to wash dishes, cook meals, sweep floors, and whatever other tasks are necessary to lead a life up to our standards. Groups of friends will similarly do favors for one another. One friend may be an experienced mechanic and repair their friends' broken bicycles, cars, and appliances; another might be a talented musician who plays for their friends' amusement; still another might spend hours in their garden only to share the bounty when it's time to harvest. As long as addictive and distracting forces like crack or television do not impede us, people naturally gravitate towards creating, maintaining, and collaborating.

Yet all these small scale favors are done amongst people who know each other and are limited by distance and social networks. An individual may have many friends within a 20 mile radius, but only a smattering outside of that distance. In order to bridge the miles and impersonality, we introduce trade and money. Commerce. This isn't what people naturally do, but it's similar enough that it works without excessive stress. But we still grumble about it, without always knowing why, because it's not what we were made for. Ultimately, this type of exchange of labor leaves many of us feeling empty. And beyond all of that, it inhibits a sort of collective human potential. We will do best what we do naturally, just as a screwdriver is better used to screw screws than to hammer nails. And collectively, humanity isn't reaching its greatest potential, because our parts are being misused.

The same can be said of government. It is a means to artificially recreate on a large scale the order that small groups enforce amongst themselves. Within a group of Christian friends, for instance, members will keep each other in check if their behavior starts to diverge from accepted norms. The same can be said of anarchists, cowboys, and socialites. All groups have shared values and beliefs about what they consider a successful and socially acceptable life, and they enforce these values amongst themselves by giving status to those who embody their values and by dismissing, ridiculing, and in extreme cases rejecting those who fail to live up to them. Governments, in turn, enforce values on a large scale through more overt means of coercion, namely fines and jail time. This is done because governments reign over many different groups with distinct values. The rules of the government become the common-ground behavior, the values that must never be broken, even if they are not enforced by an individual's particular group. And once again, this behavioral control inhibits collective human potential, because it is both rigid and prone to corruption, while our natural settings are dynamic with evolving rule-sets.

The challenge is to find a means of large-scale organizing that is also natural. The closest example of this are cultural movements, which are cellular in nature but scattered throughout the world. For instance, a group of cowboys in Loredo could travel 200 miles to another small town in Texas and meet cowboys there who shared their values. This is because they share the same culture, which evolves naturally with them. Ideas and values are transmitted by members of the culture who travel between towns. Periodically, there are large gatherings, such as Burning Man, in which members of these cultures can get together and resynchronize their values after time apart. Art, music, and literature also are a means for a culture to share its values across a great distance and to a potentially massive audience. This is particularly true of movies, though other music and literature still play a significant role, especially amongst subcultures.

The Enlightened Society versus Enlightening Society

A while back I went on a Buddhist meditation retreat. Admittedly, I didn't go with the most open mind—or, rather, my mind was too open and it frightened me. Either way, I left early and with a long list of complaints about the Buddhist doctrine. In the end, the crux of it lies in the title of this essay. Tibetan Buddhism is an effort to create an enlightening society. That is, a society that uplifts all its members to a state of enlightenment through years of meditation and dedication. In the end, they will all have a perfect understanding of their own nature, and through this understanding they'll be able to overcome those impulses which degrade society, such as jealousy and lust. Although this vision is beautiful, there's a potentially insurmountable obstacle in its way. In order for an enlightening society to fulfill its goal, all its citizens must willingly participate. Not only will many be too busy farming, building, and otherwise running society to meditate, otherwise will simply refuse. Because of this, an enlightening society can achieve part of its goal, but it will likely never get completely there. Workers and rebels will remain unenlightened.

In contrast, an enlightened society does not attempt to bring each of its citizens to a state of self-knowledge. Rather, the society itself has a perfect understanding of human nature and is structured in such a way as to account for it. In this way, it doesn't matter if a farmer understands his desire for sex. Rather, within an enlightened society, he'll be able to pursue this desire without it harming those around him. How exactly this would work is still unclear, because we have yet to attain a perfect understanding of human nature. Perhaps what some psychologists say is true, and it is not in our nature to couple for more than five years at a time. If this is the case, than the institution of marriage would have to be reworked. Perhaps, instead, life-long love does exist but its nature changes over the course of years. If that's the case, then once again marriage would have to be reworked to account for these stages.

The way I'm describing an enlightened society, it sounds like the kind of place that would engineered by psychologists. Perhaps, now that we've distanced ourselves so much from our roots, that exactly what it will take. What I'm proposing isn't inherently unnatural, though. In fact, it is the very essence of human nature. All of our instincts and impulses, though they might be out of place in a modern setting, were once essential survival skills. Anger, greed, gluttony, pride. All these things we so vehemently suppress today did once before help our ancestors survive. For over 100,000 years, people lived in small hunter-gatherer societies. Over those 100,000 years, our social instincts evolved. For that kind of society, human nature is perfectly adapted, just as thousands of years of evolution have perfectly adapted a fennec fox to its Saharan environment. Modern man is a species taken out of its environment, and this is causing both dissatisfaction and conflict with our own nature. An enlightened society acknowledges that we're better suited to another way of life and it attempts to recreate the setting in which we evolved, so that we can once again be natural.

This is not to say that an enlightened society must be a society of small hunter-gatherer tribes. Rather, it's a society that—through a comprehensive understanding of human nature—can satisfy and account for our instincts as effectively as possible without reducing the scope of today's civilization.

The Over-Educated and the Under-Emplyed

I haven't done well in many things, but one place I did excel was school. I got good grades, ranked high on standardized tests, and impressed my teachers during class discussion. School was my first experience outside of the family, and it was going so well that when I was young, I thought I would have similar success with my career. Lo and behold, by the time I graduated with honors from college, I spent the next decade struggling to find a job worthy of education. It seemed that the only careers open to me for things like substitute teacher, pedicabber, or laborer. Even though I'd done well in school, the job market didn't actually need people like me, and so I was relegated to jobs that felt demeaning.

My story isn't uncommon. I have many friends with college degrees who just can't seem to find that professional career path they feel they should be on. Instead, they worked alongside me as pedicabbers or they squander their four years of liberal arts study by preparing cappuccinos all day. Throughout this populace, there is subtle unhappiness. It's not just that they wonder why they spent four years in undergraduate school (and paid the corresponding tuition), it's that they now think that they're too good for their current station in life. They're too good to be baristas and general laborers. Because of this attitude and this incipient expectation to become something better, they never fully settle into their work. They live in perpetual discontent, waiting for the day their big break comes.

While I was in India, I was struck by how different their attitude towards work was. Although the caste system has officially been done away with, it persists to this day in the same subtle ways that racism persists in the United States. For all it offends the American sensibilities of equality and opportunity, it did have apparent merits, including a greater contentment amongst the lowest classes. At construction sites, women would carry heavy loads of stone on their heads all day, making only 40Rs—the equivalent of .95 cents. Men would be during their own back-breaking labor with shovels and sledge hammers. While I had done something similar in the US during my stint with the E-Corps, my co-workers and I constantly bickered about it. I didn't see the same dissatisfied posturing amongst the Indian workers.

This makes me wonder if perhaps the high value we place on education in the United States is a disservice to our youth. It fills them with dreams and with pride that society is not able to satisfy. It convinces them that they will have a significant role somewhere, but instead market forces will relegate most of them to something far below their expectations. Is this enlightened behavior for a society? Because from what I see, it spreads discontent.

The only way I can comprehend what's going is to once again compare society to a human body and careers to types of cells. Police officers are white blood cells, constantly patrolling the veins looking for interlopers. Educators and white collar works are neurons, synthesizing information and directing the movements of society. Laborers are muscles, garbagemen are liver cells, truck drivers are blood cells. And I (and those other over-educated, under-employed members of my generation) are fat cells. We are the reserves. We serve little immediate society beyond, perhaps, keeping others warm during the winter. Really, our true purpose is to be the reserves. We are the back-ups. We have an education and a desperate eagerness to join the middle-class workforce. When society has a need for more workers, we're readily available to fill the role.

Just as having a little fat is good for a human body, having a little fat is good for a society. The only problem is that the United States has grown obsess. We support a lot of people who aren't really doing much. We've grown heavy with a populace of fat cells, many of which want to be muscles and brains, instead. What will it take for society to get back in shape?

Leadership and the Elite

For a long time, I've aligned myself with the anarchists. I hate being powerless, and in the anarchist model, power lies not in the hands of a few elites but with all people. This model is founded on the belief that those at the lowest levels—the workers in a factory, the citizens of a city—know how to make the system work best. At their level, they see the system in detail and know what works and what doesn't. How many people have complained that their management is disconnected and making bad decisions? The anarchist model is an effort to overcome this while at the same time empowering people. This essay, however, is not about anarchism. It's about elitism and why that model might be best in certain (or perhaps all) circumstances.

Consider medieval Europe. After centuries of affluence under the Roman Empire, the continent falls into poverty and disarray. People rarely live beyond fifty years. Starved, they do not grow to their full height. Uneducated, most cannot read. These were hundreds of years of scarcity, and yet at the same time, a small number of their people lived opulently in palaces. These elite received the education and nourishment the rest of the populace lacked. They also had all the power. From a modern perspective, this setup screams of inequality. Perhaps, though, no better model could have taken its place.

Looking at this another way, medieval Europeans were not the unwilling subjects of feudal lords. Rather, they invested considerable resources into ensuring that at least a fraction of their populace had enough food and education to lead effectively. These lords weren't simply drinking fine wines and eating roasted geese. They engaged other nations in diplomacy. When necessary, they led their countries to war. They also attempted to enforce some sort of order amongst the populace. All of these things require a certain level of education. A good general will know tactics, a good diplomat international decorum. To ensure that their leadership was up to snuff, societies invested a disproportionately high amount of resources into their lords and ladies.

I similar model existed in Tibet, though instead of lords, the country was ruled by monks. Once again, the nation was too poor to educate everyone, so instead they invested their resources in a handful of elites. While Europeans kept all their power in a small group of families, though, Tibetans distributed the power evenly. Monks came from every family, assuming they had a spare son. Even the most powerful of these monks could come from humble places. For instance, the current Dahli Lama was the child of peasant yak herders. He was the most powerful man in his country, and he didn't need royal blood to assume his throne.

We might think that today we've moved beyond this. In the United States and most of Europe, people receive a lengthy education. They participate in government through democracy. Many start their own small businesses. At the same time, though, only a handful go to the best private schools, and in turn, only a handful have actual power in congress or on the board of major corporations. Perhaps our education is good enough to give us a superficial say in how things are done, but at the same time, the world has grown considerably more complex than it was a thousand years ago. Not everyone receives an adequate education to really understand what's going on. I, at least, have not. If you think that you have, then seriously ask yourself how well you would do if put in the position of President. Hell, would you even make a decent diplomat? A good army general? Remember that the diplomats and generals will be highly educated. They will also be your rivals. Will you be able to outmaneuver them in the drawing room or the battle field?

Human Nature and Social Bonds

As I type this, a French couple is sitting in a nearby corner of my cafe. I cannot understand much of what they're saying, but by the tone of their conversation, it's clear that they find each other's company affable. In another corner, several Tibetans are having a conversation. I'm the only quiet one, though my attention is committed to writing, which is its own sort of conversation with faraway friends. If you go to any cafe, you'll find a similar scene. In fact, you'll see something similar on the streets of most cities or the corner stores in rural towns. Pretty much anywhere you find people, you find conversation. We do it as naturally as we breath, and he crave it like water and food. Periods of conversational deprivation lead to discomfort. Loneliness is just another form of hunger.

Somehow, I doubt tigers go through this. I doubt iguanas feel lonesome. People could have evolved differently. We could have had been a more solitary species. Instead, however, our instincts predispose us to seek out the company of others. Laughter feels good, as do massages. Without even thinking about it, we gravitate towards people so that we can indulge these feelings. I listen to the French couple laughing, and I doubt they're thinking, “We're laughing as an instinctual reward for socializing.” Our awareness of this is unnecessary. The effects are the same. By laughing together, we strengthen social bonds, not unlike monkeys grooming each other for parasites. For a species that depends on society to survive, this is essential.

The human heart is composed of billions of cells, and in order to stick together, these cells produce a substance known as adherons. Without adherons, the heart would fall apart. Without laughter and conversation, society would fall apart. Heart cells do not produce adherons because they know it keeps the heart together, and similarly we do not talk with each other because we want society to remain whole. This is simply our nature, and it's so well-designed that we do need to think about it. We simply live it. By being ourselves, we instinctively create societies.

There are other factors involved, too. Naturally, we model ourselves after others, and in this way societies became increasingly consolidated. On the other end of things, when people reject us for being too different, we experience mental anguish. Studies have shown that in periods of social anguish, the cells of the body begin dying off at faster rates. There are physical consequences for going against the collective. People who do it too much are weakened and left vulnerable to disease. In other words, those who do not adequately conform are weeded out of the gene pool.

So we have both the carrot and the stick leading us down a path of social cohesion. In 'The Cells of Gods,' I described another way of looking at human society. Here, I'm saying that this is an unavoidable consequence of human nature. We aren't simply a social creature like a dog. We are a societal creature with divisions of labor and cultural hegemony. When we laugh with each other, we are indulging in what makes us human and what at the same time binds us society. In the West, with our emphasis on the individual, a recognition of this aspect of our nature can be discomforting. A common theme in novels and movies is how stupid and cruel society can be. There's a saying that goes something like, “People aren't stupid, but groups of people certainly are.” Stories like 'The Crucible' epitomize this attitude, as do countless 'Twilight Zone' episodes and Ray Bradbury novels. We fear the movements of the social organism, as it so often gets out of control of the individuals that compose it.

The Cells of Gods

The ancient Greeks had a very week sense of self. Rather than identify as individuals, they were more inclined to identify with their City-State, such as Athens or Sparta. This phenomenon persists today in other cultures, though in the U.S. we tend to identify primarily with ourselves. One study elegantly demonstrated this by asking people from different cultures to write a list of words describing themselves. While people from Western societies tended to list words like “smart,” “athletic,” “funny,” and “pretty,” people from collectivistic societies such as Japan and rural Mexico used words like “brother,” “friend,” or “employee of Toyota.” In the West, we identify ourselves by self-contained characteristics, while in collectivistic cultures people identify themselves by their relations to others.

Returning to ancient Greece, we see the same attitude. People took great pride in their membership to a City-State and identified themselves most heavily through this association. Just as they were less aware of their personal characteristics, they were more aware of the personalities of these cultures as a whole. The Athenian mentality was very different from its Spartan corollary. To them, the personalities of these cities were so strong that the civilizations themselves became like gods. Athens was Athena. Sparta was Aries. When Sparta attacked another city, it wasn't just the wrath of Sparta, it was the wrath of Aries. When the Athenian elites cast their judgment on Socrates, it wasn't just their judgment, it was the judgment of Athena.

Today, we've lost our sense of this. Our focus is so keyed into individuals that we no longer see what these individuals constitute. This is similar to how we see ourselves as discreet individuals and not as collections of cells. In some ways, this is only natural. It is our level of perception. We do not see our cells because they are too small for us. We do not see societies because they are too big for us. Still, we can pull out a microscope. Still, we can stand on the top floor of sky-scraper. We can societies into focus just as we can put our own bodies into focus, and at times its important to see life from these other perspectives.

When we look deep into ourselves, we see the human body divided into billions of specialized cells: liver cells, blood cells, neurons, epidermis. Each of them has a job, be it transporting oxygen or processing sugars. By working together, they are able improve their odds at survival. Human society is similar. On our own, people have trouble surviving. We aren't tigers or eagles. When we band together, though, we're able to live long and relatively comfortable lives. As with cells, this entails specialization. Some of us process food while others dispose of waste. Some of gather is vast office towers and process information. Some of us behave like white blood cells, patrolling the city streets and maintaining order.

The cells of the human body are not aware of the creature they compose. Similarly, it is not obvious that we are part of something greater than ourselves. Yet just like the cells of a body, our collaborations create something. We are Austin and Chicago and New York. These cities are more than just buildings and roads. They are alive in their own right. They have their own personalities, their own momentum. They go through periods of depression and excitement. Their economies flourish and wane.

From 'Into the Night':

Were the gods truly in the heavens, or were they down here on Earth? I only had to stare at the city sprawled out beneath me, its own lights twinkling in reflection of the sky. It was alive. Cars pulsed through the intersections, moving in an organic, statistical harmony. Their brake lights were crimson, blood flowing through a giant's heart. It was something I never saw down there, wandering its veins, lost in its flesh, a part of it. But standing so high, this creature seen in a single glimpse, it was as clear as a diagram of the human body. I was forced to wonder, was this what the elite saw? When they moved into their loft apartments, was part of their reward a truer perspective of human society? As crazy as this sounds, maybe Athens was Athena. Maybe Poseidon was the sea. Maybe we are the cells of gods.

Instinct and Culture

In the West, we divide emotions into “good” and “bad.” Generally speaking, those emotions which are pleasant are considered good, such as love and joy, while unpleasant feelings such as depression or anger are considered bad. Although is primarily meant to help people gauge the quality of their own lives, we also use it to judge others. For instance, depressed and angry individuals are more readily spurned for their emotional timber than their cheerful counterparts. There are no doubt many reasons for this, including the way that moods spread. Being in the company of a sad person tends to make people sadder, while being in the company of a cheerful tends to make them more cheerful. There is also a less recognized but more interesting factor. “Good” emotions are a mark of success, and because of this, people are encouraged to emote this positive feelings even when they do not genuinely experience them. Similarly, it is shameful to experience “bad” emotions, and people will sometimes deny the presence of these feelings to both themselves and those around them.

Even amongst those who acknowledge their negative feelings, there tends to be an impetuous to purge those feelings as quickly as possible. To this end, people drown their feelings in alcohol, television, and similar distractions. Others take medication specifically tailored to “cure” these feelings. These approaches attend to the symptoms without addressing the cause. Certain philosophies do address the causes, but it's with the attitude that suffering is “bad” and the goal of life should be to attain a perfect state of happiness. Although a gross oversimplification, this attitude defines the undercurrent of philosophies as diverse as psychoanalysis and Buddhism.

Of course, there's no denying that depression and anger are unpleasant, both for the person suffering from them and for those in their company. At the same time, though, they are an integral part of the human experience. With anger comes the fire to enact change, to set firm social boundaries, and to purge from our lives behaviors and company that cause us dissatisfaction. Similarly, with depression we gain insight—a fact affirmed by psychological research, which shows a multi-point increase in IQ scores during such periods. In my own experience, moments of depression tend to be marked a heightened awareness of beauty. A thunderstorm is never so glorious as when experienced after heartbreak. After one particularly bad day, I spent a whole evening watching pigeons outside the library, and my attentiveness to their coos and struts had never been more genuinely or unshakable.

Perhaps it would be helpful to look at this from a perspective. In Buddhism, there is this notion that people are cursed creatures. We have a divine mind with the potential to reach enlightenment, but we also have all these animal instincts which cause unnecessary suffering. The purpose of Buddhist study is to distance yourself from this animal aspect of yourself and more fully embrace your divine mind. Similiarly, Christianity divides the human experience into base animal drives (aligned with Satan) and a divine conscious (aligned with God). As with Buddhism, this divide is seen as a curse. We are a tainted race and we must suppress our animal aspect to earn an eternity in Paradise.

Given what science now tells us about evolution and psychology, perhaps we should reevaluate this deeply embedded distaste for the darker emotions. Are anger, hate, and depression truly evil? Truly bad? The belief behind evolution is that everything evolves for a reason. We would not experience these feelings unless they had a purpose, unless they were meant to guide us. Sure, they're unpleasant, but so the pain of touching a fire. At the same time, that pain discourages us from touching fire again. It helps us learn and adapt. Depression is no different, except that instead of leaving a burn on the flesh, it leaves a tender spot on the mind. It is nature's way of helping us adapt to a world that couldn't entirely be predicted by genes, but instead but be learned again and again with each generation.

I try not to be prescriptive in these essay, but today is different. Today I have a recommendation. Next time a dark feeling washes over you, relish in it. Let it guide you; let it inform your choices. Don't run away from it or pretend like you're better than it. Acknowledge that it's your nature trying to come up, and rather than snip the bud, today you'll let it bloom.