hbdchick | you will never understand human biodiversity without first turning an hbd-eye on yourself.
before i elaborate on that, a small exercise. indulge me.
at the end of this sentence, when i ask you to, i want you to raise
your eyes from your monitor (or smartphone or tablet or whatever device
you’re using), glance around for a few seconds, and then come back here.
okay: go!
back? great.
now, i don’t know exactly what you saw during your brief adventure away, but what i do
know is that when you looked around your room or office or the coffee
shop or your own private tropical island (d*mn you!), you experienced
seeing a smooth, undisturbed, flowing picture of your surroundings — it
was a video-like experience (hopefully not a shaky cam-like one! if so,
get to a doctor, quick!). that experience is a false one, created by your brain to make life easier for you. what happens, in fact, is that each and every time
we move our gaze from one object or scene to another, in the
intervening nanoseconds, we are effectively blind. we don’t “see”
anything for those split seconds. the reason we don’t experience what
would presumably be a very disturbing and confusing one — the lights
going off and on all day long! — is because our brains fool us. the
brain interpolates
the visual data captured via eyeballs, etc., and presents it all to its
owner (user?) in a nice, even — but unreal — picture of what that
individual “sees.”
cool, huh? yeah.
the reason i bring this up is just to illustrate how our brains are not really to be trusted.
fantastic, wonderful, unfathomable organ! — but one that fools us. a
lot! it deceives us so that we don’t go around bumping into things all
day long (the saccadic masking mentioned above). it deceives us
(deceives itself!) so that we can decieve others. it probably fools each of us into believing that we are discrete individuals — that we are or have “selves.” h*ck! it even looks like our consciousness is not a stream but more like rhythmic pulses. all for good evolutionary reasons, of course. but, still, there it is: the brain is a trickster.
once you realize this about the human brain — that it’s an indispensible but untrustworthy organ — all of the cognitive biases and dissonances that we suffer from start to make sense. humans are not rational creatures. we are capable of some
amount of logic and rational thought (some more than others), but more
often than not, our “reason” serves as an excuse generator for our
innate drives, desires, and proclivities.
the next thing you need to know — and you really have to internalize
this — is that all of those drives and desires and proclivities are
innate. all behavioral traits are heritable
to some degree or another, which means that genes are behind them, and
which means that there’s not much any of us can do to change our
natures. for instance, there prolly aren’t specific genes that will
make a person a christian versus a muslim, but there are definitely genes “for” religiosity. which
religion a person with “genes for” religious belief follows will
obviously depend to a large degree on the culture in which he is
immersed, but persons with “genes for” religious belief will tend to be religious or spiritual somehow.
all behavioral traits are heritable. and, so, you cannot change people or peoples — not fundamentally. people are what they are.
you are what you are, and so most of your thoughts and conclusions and
feelings about life and the world around you are expressions of your
innate traits. mine, too. (don’t worry. i’ll get to that.) and let’s
be honest: innate traits and a deceiving brain are no foundations for uncovering the truth.
we cannot rely on our gut instincts in trying to uncover the facts
about reality or to (consciously) understand how the world works. the
only way around this problem of our lyin’, cheatin’, no-good brains is
to rely on science and its finding. of course, since science is
conducted by humans, we run into all those cognitive biases, etc.,
again. but with enough effort, i think we can eventually
discover some truths. either that or space stations will some day start
falling out of the sky, and we’ll know we’re doing it wrong.
