7. Why Things Go Wrong

Introduction

Previous chapters have tracked a trajectory of Earthly-life, that is far removed from most people’s perceptions. Grounded upon a universal principle that seeks the maximum sustainable productivity of universal resources, the chapters have identified four rules, derived by life’s complex systems, with which this could be achieved on Earth. They have observed the emergence and collaboration of complex organisms able to put those rules into effect, they have witnessed the gradual development of a productive balance, and they have observed the emergence of highly cooperative humans with sophisticated abilities and moral principles capable of building on that success. Then they have seen it all going wrong. The question asked in the last chapter, was why?

The answers inevitably are many, and many of these will be explored in future chapters. The question asked here is somewhat different. It is, is there a more comprehensive issue that draws all of them, or at least most, together in common endeavour? I believe there is. It is, I suggest, human delusion.

By way of introduction it should perhaps be said that nature, over the last four billion years, has not been deluded. Its instincts, although developing slowly, and suffering from many major setbacks, have persistently sought higher sustainable productivity.

Its problem has been that the balance needed, could only be gained through trial and error learning – making errors inevitable. Our problem, by contrast, is that, as part of nature and as part of that learning process, we humans, driven by our desires, have discarded what nature has taught us.

Delusions of Status

The need for self-esteem, the desire to feel respected as people of worth, is a major driver of human social behaviour.1 As such it can be expected to have a role in nourishing our delusions.

The desire for respect is ancient. It is anticipated to have arisen as a survival mechanism within cooperative groups. Those who adhered to the groups’ norms would have become trusted and accepted. Those not, seem to have been distanced and ejected.2

Adherence and acceptance were rewarded by improved personal security and by the providence of communal respect. Respect is the foundation on which self-respect and self-esteem builds.

Within groups that lived by cooperative, egalitarian ideals and that survived into the recent past, high self-esteem facilitating good mental health was the recognised norm. This suggests that, in earlier times, when these social systems predominated, self-esteem would have been the norm to which all people aspired.

By contrast low self-esteem, today, is a major contributor to suicide. This suggests that the need for self-esteem still has survival implications.

Today however, the world of cooperation in which respect could be accorded to all, is long gone. We live in a competitive world. In this world the urge to gain self-esteem has become a win-or-lose competition for status. Within it, instead of being driven by communally constructive aspiration, people are driven by their insecurities.

Winners in this competition fly high on status, while losers who have few alternative support networks around them, have little or none. They, unsurprisingly, are at risk of poor mental health.

The ultimate paradox, however, is that, even for winners, the more power they achieve, the more insecure they will feel. They become obsessed with holding onto, and gaining more power, because without it, and without the illusion of respect that is gained from it, their mirage of self-esteem will crumble.

This, it is suggested is a weakness upon which delusion can feed.

Delusions of Reason

An issue of a different sort, that is equally significant and insidious, is the failure of rational logic to factor into its reasoning the complexity, and consequent unpredictability, of Earth and human systems.

A major fallacy this has produced is the statement “the ends justify the means”, often extended to “lesser evils are justified in the cause of the greater good”.

This fallacy builds upon two presumptions. They are that we know what is good, and that we know, and can rely upon, each of the steps required to achieve it.

If these two presumptions were true it could be reasonable to assume that each step should be looked upon as good, even if, considered individually, it was not. Neither, however, is true.

Regarding goodness, and put simply, it would take a truly exceptional person to know in advance what will, from their narrow viewpoint, turn out to be wholistically good in the future, in a world that is inherently unpredictable.

Regarding the steps, although we might think we know all of those needed to reach our desired end, this is not under our control. In a complex world, unexpected things persistently happen.

A common example is starting a war that we believe will reach its desired end in a matter of weeks, only to find it goes on for years and years and years. Whatever goodness might originally have been perceived, will, in this situation, be massively subsumed under the bad.

This fallacy it should be said, is not recent. It will, for instance, have powered wars and much more besides over, at least, the last eight thousand years.

That said, over almost all this time, the arbiters of common morality and the common good could not be ignored entirely. Such a situation has only become possible since the neoliberal assault upon these values in the 1970s and 1980s.

The success of that assault has the result that, without the independent moral authority of those values to fall back upon, we, now, are easy prey for those who assert, very convincingly, that they know what is good.

Delusion’s Amplifiers

These two factors, the drive for status in a competitive world, and the reason/complexity fallacy are, I suggest, the two major human perversions behind all human delusion.

They would, however, be impotent in the absence of three collaborative linchpins that uphold and compound the behaviours that result. They are narrative, our brains reward systems, and the influence of the social hormones.

In this chapter the first two of these, narrative and the role of our brains reward systems, will be outlined, followed by a description of a particular, but widespread form of delusion, cognitive dissonance. The role of the social hormones is looked at in the next chapter.

We humans live by narrative. Like the sun, the wind and the rain it is a taken-for-granted background to which we, absorbed in its content rather than its power, generally take very little notice. Narrative, however, wields quite extraordinary power.

Two examples must, for the moment, suffice. They are the power of social media, that is credited, for instance, with inciting genocide,3,4 and, more constructively, the transformative power of cognitive therapies.

These potentials derive from the capacity inherent in narrative, for affecting our emotions, our hormonal functioning and, through them, our values and our attitudes. These give it the ability to influence our automatic responses and how, with deliberate intention, we act.

Our intentions, however, when influenced by the illogic of the reason/complexity fallacy, can reflect our delusions as easily as our wisdom.

The second collaborator is our brains’ reward systems. So as to encourage and habituate good thoughts and good behaviour, they are configured to reward them with pleasure, extending to exhilaration and thrill.

Prior to language, when humans, as with all other animals, were guided by instincts reflecting the learning of nature’s complex adaptive systems, evaluations of goodness would not have been under cognitive control.

That changed with the evolution of language, and narrative meaning. Now, our narratives do make moral judgements. Under the influence of the reason/complexity fallacy, they have the ability, indeed, to judge bad as being good.

These judgements, when passed through to our brain’s reward system, define what they deem good and will reward. They can, as a result, reward bad thoughts and bad actions as if they are good. We, in gaining pleasure from them and seeking more, can become dependently attached to such behaviour.

Effectively, we can become addicted to doing bad in the belief it is good. This is the power that narrative wields.

Cognitive Dissonance

A basic delusion arising through these processes is cognitive dissonance. It is the tension created in the mind when it knowingly and simultaneously adopts attitudes and beliefs that contradict each other. It is a natural consequence of “the ends justify the means”.

Doing bad while needing to perceive ourselves as good in order to gain self-esteem, is cognitively dissonant.

It has two causes. One is our acceptance of dissonant social narratives that portray bad as good. The other is the justifications that we ourselves create. These can range from “It wasn’t my fault, I had to do it, I had no choice”, to “everyone does it, it’s no big deal”, to “I’m the good guy, they deserved it”. Either way, we convince ourselves that our bad actions actually are good.5

The difficulty with this is that, whichever of these routes we take, once we have convinced ourselves that our bad behaviour actually is good, this will be the ruling our reward systems accept. They will reward such behaviour as good.

In the absence of authoritative rebuke of such behaviour, the rewards we obtain will encourage us to continue it, gaining increasing levels of reward. The result is that any one of us can become trapped in these self-perpetuating and intensifying cycles of bad behaviour.

Three uncomfortable truths emerge from cognitive dissonance research. One is that those who hold beliefs enabling them to reconcile their dissonance, will be oblivious to their delusional nature. They truly will believe their bad behaviour is good.

A second is that such behaviours are self-reinforcing. Even their uncomfortable impact with reality is more likely to strengthen them than puncture them. Because we cannot face being bad, instead of gaining self-awareness, we redouble our efforts to convince ourselves we are good.

The third is that we are all subject to such delusions; to some extent we all justify our self-centredness and greed. We too interpret bad behaviour as good.5

These are some of the basics of human delusion. We have, however, seen that the drivers and their reinforcers are common to us all. This has the result that, as cognitive dissonance research confirms, the subtle pressures of delusion are also common to us all. Avoiding them, in our competitive, narrative obsessed world, is, to say the least, extremely difficult. So while we might find ourselves critical of the delusions of others, a little self-awareness will also be good.