Dear Google, please keep Will Smith’s name out of my FUCKING feed!!
Our fascination with stupid crap helped us to survive in the stone age.
Warning: For the first time, I am actually NOT going to freely offer my abrasive opinion as if i know more than you do about a purely subjective issue.
I know… surprise. No, this is not a rare moment of honesty. Quite the contrary, it’s actually one of those pontifical, I’m-above-it-all-in-my-judicial-robe kinda things.
So yeah, i’m used to it. Used to seeing articles written by people who need to vent and just didn’t have anyone to talk to. Used to the fluff articles by writers who couldn’t think of anything relevant but who have to pay their rent. Stuff about Ukraine, gas prices, racism, etc. by people who have no particular expertise in their respective topics. Articles that somebody writes in response to a response (by some jackass) to their own previous article.
Like many of you, i’ve seen myself get sucked into some pathetically pointless arguments, wasted a lot of time responding to some truly idiotic shit, seen myself getting addicted to the controversy until i start turning into the very same jackass that i’m complaining about.
But this is what i, and some of you, have come to - verbal diarrhea. There’s a word for it: Narcissism. Arrogance. Talking just to hear myself talk, as if you could actually buy something with my two cents, just to gratify my tribal instinct and defend my own righteous morality.
And it really is just about tribalism. This narcissistic fascination with the sound of our own two cents is, in the context of stone age life, what made the tribe militarily strong (bear with me please, it actually does make sense).
We’ve all been there in our younger years. What we call youthful arrogance, that aggressive certainty that says I’m Right and if you could just think for yourself then you would think exactly like i do, is actually a tribal survival mechanism that’s hardwired into our stone-age brains.
In the prehistoric world, the only culture, religion, and world view you knew was the one you were born into. There were no alternative life styles or religions, no generation gap, no opposing views. You were never exposed to any ideology that would have you question the prevailing mythos. Tolerance, diversity, objectivity, these were foreign concepts. And it was that way by design. Natural Selection did that on purpose, programmed me to blindly assimilate and not to question.
Because in those days, the tribe was everything. As the tribe lived or died, so would you live or die. That’s why Natural Selection “invented” the Tribal Instinct. It’s all about social polarization. About Us and Them. Every tribe had it’s own geographical territory, and our brains were wired with this know-it-all kind of intolerance that tends to create invisible social barriers, to autonomically fabricate cultural, religious, and ideological boundaries to coincide with the geographical one.
Here’s how it works. Natural Selection invented culture as a tribal bonding mechanism. The emotional attachment we feel toward the culture and religion of our birth ensures that the individual will personally identify with the tribe, emotionally depend on the tribe, and fight to defend it. And now, my narcissistic desire to defend my personal morality and be RIGHT (and post on Medium about why i’m right) is an expression of that stone-age mindset that sees other neighboring tribes, with their own customs, rituals, and gods, as morally inferior, not quite “civilized”. Natural selection invented youthful arrogance because It wanted an individual that would be supportive and loyal to their tribe, and aggressive and judgmental toward foreigners. The individual Homo Sapien is far more dependent on the group for his personal survival than any other mammal on earth. The tribe is the basic survival unit, so natural selection programmed our brains with a blind sense of tribal superiority.
So the arrogance you and i felt in our adolescence was simply an expression of a natural stone-age tendency toward cultural bias that gets greatly exaggerated in response to life in a modern, melting-pot world where even our parents grew up in a very different culture from our own. The Archie Bunker inside me bristles at the diversity in which i’m forced to live, and i constantly express that caveman by spouting my pointless opinion about meaningless stuff like Will Smith.
We are tribal animals, living in a world which triggers our inner teenager wherever we go. And we just love to pontificate. Think about it: why-the-hell do we give a rat’s ass about some dude we’ll never meet who got pissed about another dude with a lousy joke?
