Evolutionary Defenses That Limit Social Progress: Preserving Culture, Norms, and Social Expectation

It does not matter what society, nation, religion, or country we are from, what company we work in, what university we go to, what fraternity or sorority we are in, sometimes we defend culture, tradition, and values that are very unhealthy, irrational, and destructive to our lives and those around us.

We often believe that defense of these values is the result of some special insight and understanding about how to best preserve ourselves or find happiness, or make a great society. This of course is the brain talking itself into an explanation that hides the subconscious minds' real motives: and over-active species preservation instinct.

We Are Not In Control of Emotions: Our Species DNA Encoding

I propose this is all nonsense. We are not geniuses, and instead we are puppets being pulled by the strings of our species-preserving subconscious and more primal mind, which is not all that sophisticated either.

Such defense of culture is irrational because it is in fact destroying ourselves, tradition, and values, often result in the greatest tragedies in history, from the U.S. Civil War to genocides all around the world: and while people often blame the conscious mind for that defense. We have invested a century looking for cognitive treatment to overcome such self destructive behavior to no avail. If only it were that easy!

400 Generations of Preservation: Wrestling with Social Expectation

The brain wants to defend its certainty in our world around us. Consider this example:

When we enter a store and a clerk does not greet us as expected, perhaps we find ourselves angry.

We walk around the store thinking about how this clerk did not greet us and how rude they are: or how offended we are.

We keep walking and investing energy into thinking how we have to correct them, or how they are wrong.

We do not think of the actual utility of being greeted in the first place as our brain is busy at work thinking of all the reasons why it is wrong and what we are going to do about it. After all, they should know it is polite to greet us.

As we work ourselves up into a frenzy we fail to see that all of our thoughts are coming from our subconsciousness mind because it feels threatened by the fact that the world around us did not go as planned; something changed and our brain is releasing chemicals to prepare our body to defend itself.

Our brain is over-reacting as the brain we have today is not designed for the comfortable world we live in; it is designed for a more archaic world similar to the not-so-distant hunter-gatherer past.

Our brain's defenses deal with the prospect of an uncertain future stimulated by the clerk not greeting us by releasing chemicals (drugs) that fire up our emotions and put is in attack or defense mode.

In some cases this results in us developed tools to control our environment around us, or even worse, to direclty attempt to control or bully people.

I propose we find ourselves angry because it is not "us" that is making us angry, but rather it is the more the result of socialization trainning and instinctual parts of our brain that we have taught through repetition that consistence is safety for ourselves: coupled with more primal parts of our brain preserving the species after 400 generations of evolution.

In this store clerk scenario, the subconscious and more primal parts of our brain feels threatened by the fact that something changed in the routine that it found itself safe in. Change increases uncertainty, which is generally not good for our survival, and so the brain is stimulated in a way to anger us and put our body on the defense: hence the complex emotional reaction that has no logical or utilitarian basis.

We are not upset because of some geniuses insight about how to run society, although our lesser sophisticated conscious mind hangs onto these reasons to justify our reactions that are apart of our species preservation and far bigger than the small conclusions we can come up through reasoning alone in that moment we are so caught up in.

Expectation Results in Chemical Stimulus When It Is Not Met

I suspect the reason we defend culture that is self destructive to our well being is because a section in our brain receives chemical drugs upon the stimulus of the challenge to expectation: expectation being no change in culture.

This expectation makes its way into our conscious mind which in turn results in our defense of socialization and culture. The greatest trick the primal defenses of our brain pulled on us this have us believe its addiction is our own actual rational conclusion in the form of pseudo-cognitive awareness.This section of our brain that is drug addicted inhibits the growth in the rest of our brain and our consciousness.

The Brain Uses Drugs to Manipulate Our Active Consciousness

People who defend culture and values may have sound reasoning for doing so, but this runs in parallel to the fact that defending them rewards the more primal parts of the brain as it makes moves to preserve the wellbeing of your body in the way it has been encoded to do so averaging out what it has learned over 400 generations of evolution: although of course these are over reactions as the world we live in today does not need these kind of extreme defenses to survive and we are now living far way from the mean lifestyle of the species over our entire existence time window.

Thus we can say it may be that those who defend the way things have always been do so because they are a puppet being pulled by the strings of their brain's desire to feel safe through consistency, and not defending culture because of some magnificent insight from reasoning and thinking things through; such conscious conclusions are often a powerful illusions architected by the parts of our brain we are unaware of in order to comfort our conscious need to feel in control of our actions.