A Brief Clarification on Human Behavior | Frankly 78
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Recorded November 21, 2024)
Two weeks ago, in a Frankly called The Battles of Our Time, Nate commented on human behavior and said that, in today's world, only three to four percent of humans are going to do the right thing and appeal to the 'better angels' of their nature. Today's Frankly is a follow-up and clarification of what he meant.
It's true that humans are deeply influenced by our evolutionary past. It is also true that our current economic structures, cultural norms, and the inner workings of the superorganism shape our actions. But the majority of our history as a species paints a more optimistic picture than our current behavior might suggest.
If we take a deeper time lens, it becomes obvious that, in order to navigate the challenges of the future, perhaps we need not look to technological innovation – but instead must return to the intrinsic values and pro-social nature of our past. Ultimately, we as individuals, and as a species, are plastic. The biggest predictor of our behavior is conforming to what others do, and what others do is going to change in the future… because it must.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. I was just at a conference three days ago and I was given a talk and I started |
| 0:06.8 | greetings. People looked at me like I was crazy because they don't know, of course, about the |
| 0:13.5 | Franklies. Two weeks ago, I had a frankly on the battles of our time and I want to issue |
| 0:19.8 | a clarification on something I said on |
| 0:22.9 | human behavior about the fact that in today's world only three to four percent of humans are |
| 0:30.5 | going to do the right thing and appeal to their better angels of their nature. |
| 0:40.8 | And today I want to clarify what I meant by that. |
| 0:42.9 | So first of all, before I get into that, |
| 0:45.8 | one of the things I'm absolutely the most confident about in my synthesis of the human predicament |
| 0:48.6 | is that our brains and our neural architecture and our behaviors are as much a product of our evolutionary |
| 0:57.8 | past as our bodies, as our hair, as the sclera in our eyes, as our red lips, as the limbic |
| 1:06.5 | lumbar ridges in our eyes and the bipedalism and all of those things. |
| 1:14.6 | Our brains and our behaviors, our jealousy, our envy, our status, our short-term focus, our |
| 1:21.9 | cognitive biases, all those things are a product of 290,000 years living in small bands in |
| 1:30.5 | the Pleistocene and millions of generations of pre-humans before them. |
| 1:37.7 | Most of our evolutionary past, we did prosocial things. |
| 1:44.3 | That was like the driver of our strong reciprocity behavior in small bands, |
| 1:51.1 | where we not only punished cheaters, |
| 1:53.5 | but we punished those who didn't punish cheaters. |
| 1:56.9 | This exists in the animal kingdom. |
| 1:59.6 | There is grooming and punishing of alpha males in ape species if |
| 2:07.0 | they are too hard on conspecific and lots of examples of this social reciprocity in the animal |
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