THE HUMAN MIND DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK WELL in the modern world because the human mind is not modern. As noted, it was shaped by the conditions when humans were hunters and gatherers and nature was much less “tamed.” For example, in those earlier times, humans would only occasionally have had access to sweet things like fruit and only in perishable quantities. It makes sense that when they found sweet things, they would eat their fill. There was little danger that the sweets would make them fat (they got lots of exercise anyway). Not so today. Sweets are plentiful. When we give in to our strong desire to eat them, we now get fat.
This story about the human mind is true, as far as it goes. But there is also something wrong with it. What makes humans truly special—different from any other animal—is how adaptive they are to new conditions. This is due to the fact that humans invented culture. Culture allows humans to store knowledge, learn a good deal from each other, and partially protect themselves from the whims of nature, chance, and natural selection (“the survival of the fittest”).
So why can’t we humans stop doing stupid things like eating too much sugar? If our “old mind” tells us to eat and eat more, why doesn’t culture (or the “good sense” it is supposed to impart to us) tell us not to? The answer to this question is usually that humans have a hard time with delayed gratification. They know getting fat will be bad, but they are faced here and now with a luscious piece of cake that they really want. Yet it isn’t true that humans always have trouble with delayed gratification. Exercise clubs are often full, and many teens even delay a short-term pleasure to get into an elite college.
So questions remain: When are humans good at delayed gratification and when aren’t they? When can they stop doing what they want in the short run to get what they want in the long run?
The answer to these questions is, I think, fairly simple in theory, though not in practice. It has to do with how culture works. If I want “X” now (say, a piece of cake) and I also want “Y” later (say, being thin), I will choose “Y” over “X” only if my desire for “Y” is stronger than my desire for “X” and sufficiently stronger to overcome the hold “X” has on me by being immediately present and available (a powerful force on humans). What makes something more desirable than something else and desirable enough even to create delayed gratification? The answer to this question resides in the workings of two powerful cultural forces: status and solidarity.
Humans are social beings in the sense that they strongly orient toward others. In all cultures, all humans can have two different orientations toward other people. Sometimes they orient toward others in terms of status and other times they orient toward others in terms of solidarity. On the one hand, we want status and respect for ourselves and we also want to offer status and respect to those we admire or fear in some fashion. On the other hand, we want solidarity with others, a sense of bonding and belonging with people we think or hope are “like us” and will count us as “one of them.”
Of course, status and solidarity are in the eyes of the beholder. Someone has high status because others cede status or give respect to that person. One and the same person can be viewed as high status by some and low status by others. Someone is bonded to us, and we to them, because we treat that person and they treat us as “one of us,” equals, peers, or even intimates. We humans create status and solidarity by how we think, value, and behave.
A person can orient toward the same person or group in terms of both status and solidarity in different situations. Status and solidarity can be relative to context. Years ago I knew a number of families who had sons who were priests. They treated their sons in some cases in terms of solidarity and intimacy, as a family member, and in other cases in terms of status and deference as a “man of God.”
When we orient toward someone in terms of status, either because we feel they are higher status than we are or because we feel we are higher status than they are, we engage in relatively formal talk and behavior. When we orient toward someone in terms of solidarity, because we feel we are equals and alike, friends or intimates, we engage in relatively informal talk and behavior. How we treat people can be negotiated. Sometimes we engage in mixtures of formal and informal talk and behavior with people whom we want to orient toward somewhere between solidarity and status (this is one way that some cultures orient toward strangers).
For each of us, there are not just individuals we treat as high status (or low status); there are also groups of people we orient toward this way. And, for each of us, there are not just individuals we treat as equals, friends, or intimates, but groups we orient toward as being “like us,” with whom we feel or want solidarity and bonding (for example, for many people, family is one such group, and for some, an ethnic group is).
Let’s refer to groups that we feel are high or low status as “status reference groups.” Let’s refer to groups that we feel connected to in terms of equality, friendship, or intimacy or some other form of belonging as “solidarity reference groups.”
Status reference groups and solidarity reference groups affect our behavior. We want to imitate the behaviors, styles, and values of our high-status reference groups (and, remember, these are often different for different people). We want to do this to show and, perhaps, gain respect. But we also want to imitate the behaviors, styles, and values of our solidarity reference groups. We want to do this to show and gain belonging and bonding. Thus, we can behave in different ways in different contexts, depending on how we orient toward status or solidarity. Sometimes we feel conflicted. Should I order beer to show solidarity with my buddies or wine to show my appreciation for the “high life”? Should I date women I like or women who make me look important? Should I listen to country music in deference to my roots or classical music in deference to my education and refinement (at least in front of “refined” people)?
Let’s return to why we eat sugar and get fat, even when we “know better.” The desire to be thin requires me to see a reference group that values thinness as more important for my actions than either a reference group that does not (if I have one) or just the immediate desire to eat. That reference group could be a status one (“upper-class people are thin”) or a solidarity reference group (“my family values hard work and moderate habits”).
They key point here is that it is not the “truth” of claims like “Being fat is bad for your health” that drives humans to engage in delayed gratification. Rather, it is a desire to achieve solidarity with or status among a reference group that values thinness or concentrates on a “healthy lifestyle” as a value.
It is our desire to be like those we feel bonded to or, on the other hand, those whom we view as high status that drives us. It is not “truth” per se. And, again, we can feel torn both ways. All my drinking buddies have beer bellies and I want to be one of the boys, so I should order another beer. But I also want people to view me as attractive like the beautiful people in the magazines, so maybe I should forget the beer and even the boys.
Some people spend time in the sun even though they know it can cause cancer because, down deep, they believe tanned people look better and thus have a certain status. Nonetheless, people readily stay out of the sun when they are aligned with a reference group that wants to live longer or thinks “pale is beautiful.”
I have, like lots of Americans, gained and lost weight many times in my life. When I gain about fifty pounds, my alignment with the status of being thin is triggered and I go on a successful diet. Until then, my alignment with people who don’t stress “lifestyle” and the media hype around thinness is stronger, abetted by the pleasure of immediate gratification. So I bounce back and forth.
We humans bounce around like billiard balls bouncing off the edges of a pool table, buffeted by different orientations toward different reference groups with different values and ways of being in the world. Further, the modern world gives us humans more possible reference groups and more ways to define status and solidarity than ever before in history.
So this is yet another example where “truth” takes a back seat for humans. The truth of claims like “Being fat is bad for your health” or “Going out in the sun can cause cancer” is not irrelevant to us, of course. But it does not move us as deeply as do the forces of status and solidarity, as well as the power of immediate gratification. Furthermore, untrue claims can work just as well if they play into the workings of status and solidarity. Believing that lots of exercise will make us look like a movie star is motivating, even if we know, down deep, it really isn’t true.
So humans can be perfectly good at delayed gratification if their desire to orient toward a particular reference group is strong enough. Rich kids put off immediate gratification because everyone in their family and setting has gone to college (solidarity). The poor kids do so because no one in their family and setting has done so and they want to achieve something like the “important” people they see in the media (status). Or, perhaps, the poor kid doesn’t want to go to college because he or she fears it will rupture solidarity with family and friends.
We humans have a built-in desire to show solidarity with family and local communities even if they do not deserve it. We do not, after all, choose our families. We have a built-in desire to gain respect and try to achieve status, even if the high-status people and groups we aspire to be like do not deserve our respect. But we don’t always make good choices about either whom to bond to or whom to respect and whose respect we seek to earn.
Status and solidarity are forces that the media, politicians, PR firms, and ad agencies seek to manipulate. They try to convince small-town Americans to feel solidarity with other “real Americans” (a group that, in reality, does not exist). They try to convince people that corporate CEOs who abuse their employees and trash the environment are high status and worthy of respect. They claim that working-class whites and blacks should not feel solidarity and common cause with each other. They try to tell Americans that we are “exceptional” and superior to others, even when more Americans die for lack of health care than people in any other developed country. They even try to tell us that we Americans have the “best” health care system in the world, without bothering to mention that for those with no access to it, it is one of the worst.
If we wanted to avoid being duped, if we wanted to orient toward “truth” (or, at least, evidence), then we would have to be able to make good judgments about the worth of our (perhaps many) different status reference groups and solidarity reference groups. We would have to ask questions like: Who should I really feel bonded to and why? Who should I see as worthy of esteem and why? Should I feel good about being “one of the boys” at the bar or “one of us” as a professor? Should I esteem working people or corporate board members or both? Should I, as an American, feel solidarity with other Americans as co-citizens or not? What about solidarity with others across the world as fellow global citizens? Should I always place kin over strangers? Is my social group or culture really higher status or more worthy of respect than someone else’s?
Such questions are the sorts we will later call “complex questions.” Answering such questions requires access to lots of data and access to the workings among many variables that most people most of the time have no access to. Such questions are very hard to answer minus a research project that most people don’t have the time or resources for. Even then they are hard to answer. For example, though I myself hold corporate CEOs in low esteem, I have no access to any wide sample of their daily behaviors, let alone the complex causes of their behavior (other than greed). Faced with an inability to answer complex questions about who deserves our solidarity and who our esteem, we fall back on our mental comfort stories, where and when we were born, the always-limited experiences we have had, and the groups to which we have access, if only via a magazine.
But the real issue arises when our allegiance to a status or solidarity group ends up taking our lives in directions we later regret or even regretted as we took them. It is hard for us humans to make decisions in these domains. For humans, status and solidarity are strong forces. They are what allow us to place different choices (e.g., have cake or be thin) into hierarchies and sometimes engage in delayed gratification. We have to orient toward some groups. We have to make choices about what sort of people are worthy of solidarity or status; otherwise we would always just engage in immediate pleasure and have no real value system at all. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
In the modern digital global world, we “moderns” are faced with a great many groups to bond to or to view as high enough in status to want to join or to respect from afar. Facebook and other such sites often list people as “friends,” a term of solidarity, when some of them, in reality, barely know each other. Magazines and other media call for us to admire faux celebrities with no visible talents other than shameless self-promotion.
More and more complex questions arise: Should I feel more solidarity with people in other countries who share my lifestyle or values or with fellow citizens who do not? Should I aspire to join or respect high-status groups whose values badly conflict with people with whom I feel solidarity? Should I retain solidarity with people or groups whose values conflict with high-status groups I have joined or aspire to? How many of my decisions are “my own”—if any—and how many are the outcomes of the ways I am jostled by people and groups demanding solidarity or status?
People in some countries see themselves as “individuals.” They believe that it is not groups that shape what they do and who they are. It is just themselves as individuals loyal to their own sense of self, marching to their very own drummer: “I gotta be me,” “I did it my way.” But imagine for a minute that there were no people or groups whom you oriented toward in terms of either status or solidarity. How would you determine who you were and how you should act? There would be no reference points, no points of comparison and contrast, nothing to be for or against. You would be nobody doing nothing. If you have done it your way, and no one else’s way, then you are probably in a padded room. Or, at least, you are very lonely.
For us humans, there is no asocial starting point, no asocial ending point. The English word “idiot” is derived from the Greek word idiōtēs meaning “individual,” itself derived from idios (private, one’s own). It’s interesting that our English word for stupid comes from the Greek word for a person viewed just as an individual apart from the social body. It is the push and pull of status and solidarity that make people “public,” visible, and what they “are.”
In the next chapter we turn to the power of naming. Words and language are the very foundation of human intelligence. Yet words can make big trouble for us humans.