Two kinds of people
Nowadays there always seem to be two kinds of reactions to things. It’s said that we’re a “polarized” society, and this is often blamed on social media’s overarching “engagement” algorithm. And it is that, certainly.
But why does that algorithm work so well? It has to do, I think, with how human consciousness works, at least the consciousness of modern humans living in our capitalistic world.
Emotional processes of humans have likely evolved as populations have grown over millennia — but maybe there were always differences in the kinds of hominids in our past — something that today’s technology has simply observed, and then used. Social media echnology has created processes that cause us to separate into two camps — about almost everything.
That’s certainly been profitable. It “enhances engagement” — which is business-ese for saying “when people are angry enough at other people who disagree with them, they’ll keep fighting, and fighting, almost ever stopping…”. This is known today as “engagement.”
One often sees the two kinds of people interacting in the comments section of news sites. Recently I have been noticing that some stories now — often ones about the very kind of issues that worry me — no longer offer readers the opportunity to post comments. That becomes to me a signal that the editors were pretty sure that, given the issues being raised in this particular article, nothing good would come of allowing comments, because people would just be at each other’s throats with opposing views, arguing and angry and not advancing anything. This is a sign of our times, and many people now shrug about it; but it also, I think, speaks to something deep in the design of humans, something that I suspect has been there for a very long time — maybe for 70,000 years or more.
Why the breakdown seems to occur in so many different areas is also puzzling to me. I notice it in people discussing animals: some see them as creatures like us; others as simply objects to use. But I notice it everywhere. When I read about the Singularity, I notice that there are those who think we will eventually become robotic, and others who say that can’t happen because “robots can’t be conscious.” Everywhere, always, we disagree.
For a few years now I’ve thought that perhaps there really are two kinds of people. That idea first came to me after I’d read, in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction, about what I’ve come to think of as a “madness gene.” I got the idea from something Svante Pääbo said.
Pääbo, a paleogeneticist, told Kolbert that “Faustian restlessness” was “one of the defining characteristics of modern humans”; that it was probably a genetic modification that occurred long ago.
“It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land,” he told her. He referred to this as a kind of “madness. …he thought it should be possible to identify the basis for our ‘madness’ by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA,” Kolbert wrote.
For me, the “madness gene” concept provides answers a lot of my questions about the two kinds of people. It seems that there really is something deep, somewhere, maybe in DNA, that does seem to fit the theory.
Psychological studies have discovered basic differences in how people approach the world, and new things; how they react. Some internal mechanism produces people who are either more cautious and worried or more exploratory and less cautious.
We all notice this. Over time, terms have come to describe the differences. Sometimes the labels “conservative” and “liberal” are used.
Another way of dividing people into two groups is to observe that some are ones with power and others are ones without. Ones who rule over others, and ones who are the ruled. Ones who “succeed” and ones who don’t. If you follow that to its end you realize that the ones who don’t “succeed” are no longer here; they’ve died out. (Pääbo used the term “replacement crowd” in his book Neanderthal Man.)
The concept of “race” is one of those artificial concepts that sapiens hit upon to justify a way to lord it over others — a number of philosophers have come up with ways to explain and justify this. Many of us are now seeing through that as being nonsense, although in our hearts many of us still believe in white supremacy.
Another way to understand the two kinds of people is to regard them as those with hubris and those with humility. There are in truth a lot of ways to slice this thing up.
Eventually I came to give names to these two kinds of people. One I call “creator gods”; the other I call “mourners.”
In my book I devote a few chapters to the creator gods. I find it easier to describe such people because they hog all the attention; we can know what they think and how they behave; they live in the public eye. “Hubris” describes them for me; also “narcissism.”
The creator gods and their followers see nothing but good in developing more and more artificial life, are cheering on the time of Singularity when humans will have become non-biological. They are the Koch and Musk acolytes and wannabes, happy enough to destroy the wet life of the planet if it gets in the way of their god of profits.
Sometimes I think of them as immature or sociopathic. But I know these are easy epithets. There is something more complicated, and maybe it is simply genetic.
Of course, some creating is good. And I know that. But these people trouble me because they seem to have no “off” switch. Maybe that is genetic. They seem to have no respect for anything other than their own skills. They seem to me to be the engines destroying the Earth, caring nothing for biological life unless it can be of use to them. And that is really the source of my antagonism.
The mourners are those who perhaps see what is going on; have sort of figured things out, or figured parts of things out, about the long descent into artifice that cut off our essential connection to the consciousness of biological “wet” life. (Although none of us seems to have figured out how we can amass the power to reverse things.)
Or maybe it is just that we don’t have the strength anymore. Something has made us weak.
The mourners are the ones who have (or want) the connection to the biological consciousness of the Earth. They are the rest of us. The ones who feel lost.
Mourners go about life as best they can when their world is being destroyed by forces they find powerless to control. Some might think I’m referring to the “forces of Nature” but what I really mean is the forces of the powerful who got us into this mess, plundering the Earth, and have no desire to stop, and no one to stop them. The creator gods.
A simpler way of describing the two kinds of people, though it removes a lot of the important edges, is simply “the powerful” and “the powerless.”
Isn’t it interesting to realize that it is the powerful who do not care about saving the Earth, and that those who do are the powerless ones? Of course there are many people who are not paying attention at all, who seem to not care one way or the other (although probably they will care, at some point). What does it say that the sapiens who hold power are OK with destroying their home and all its other inhabitants? That it doesn’t bother them enough to really change their ways? That it is more important for them to think they’re the masters, on top?
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, long ago seems to have come to a simple way to describe the two kinds of people. He writes, in the language of the 1940s, that “there are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the ‘race’ of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man.”
That makes the point I want to make, too. Because, stripped of everything else, that’s what we are left with.
