The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - In Spite Of... | Frankly #11

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

We are a product of evolutionary processes - certain categories of behaviors made our ancestors more 'fit' depending on the environmental/social circumstances in the past. One of these behaviors - 'spite' - is when an animal (or human) actively does something against their self-interest as long as it hurts their competitor more. In a post growth world I expect - and fear - that this dynamic will become more prevalent at micro scales in our daily lives but also - and of more immediate concern - at the macro scale of nation states. I thought it worth a short video to explain spite, to understand it, as a small thread of awareness in hopes of avoiding it. We are going to need as much pro-social (as opposed to anti-social) behavior in coming decades as possible. A short reflection, on the concept of 'spite'. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/frankly-11-in-spite-of To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocoFGelQ3vE

Hello, good humans. Nuclear war is in the news, where one nation damages another nation, but also at a cost to themselves. Today, I want to reflect on this dynamic of spite, because as we head into the great simplification, we're going to need pro-social behavior more than ever. So I thought it would be worth spending a few minutes reflecting on the phenomenon of spite. So let's unpack this. First of all, from an evolutionary perspective, there's a concept called relative fitness. Relative fitness is in ancestral times, either humans or animals. What offspring survived and able to reproduce relative to one's conspecifics or conspecifics or other members of the species,

had an evolutionary advantage over time. So if 200,000 years ago, there was a human who lived to be 60 years old and he was very happy, very healthy, very fit, but he had no children, from a relative fitness standpoint, he was massively out-competed

by another human who died at 28, but had four surviving children that would then in turn to reproduce themselves. So relative fitness is leaving more copies of your genes in the next generation relative to your competitors, which retrospectively is the other organisms. This is in contrast to absolute fitness, which is how many are. offspring you had or physical fitness, which is how good a shape you're in. So from a biological sense, relative fitness is the currency of evolution. Now, of course, we don't actively pursue relative fitness in today's world. We just pursue the same neurotransmitters of our successful ancestors. We're adaptation executors. But I digress. Relative fitness, very important. So from a game

theoretical evolutionary matrix perspective, there are four types of behavior in the natural world, animals and humans. The first is selfishness where I do a behavior to get a resource. I expend an effort and the payoff is to me and my opponent or someone I'm competing with. with doesn't get anything or gets negative. The second is cooperation where an organism coordinates and cooperates with another organism so that they both get a positive payoff from their collaboration to wild dogs coordinating to kill a wartog or two humans starting a business together that have different skills and they end up having more profits than either one of them could have individually cooperation. The third category is altruism, where there is a cost

to an individual and a benefit to some other genetically non-related individual. This is very rare in nature, though there is a phenomenon called reciprocal altruism, which is very common in humans. And it was evolutionarily adaptive because most of our 15,000 prior generations of Homo sapiens. We lived with kin and close friends and relatives. And so there were repeated iterations. We would do a favor for someone else at a cost to ourselves and no immediate benefit. But we know that we would eventually get a benefit because we knew people around us and we would have repeated interactions. The fourth quadrant, which is the subject of this, frankly, is spite. Spite is when we incur a cost to ourselves from an evolutionary perspective,

but there's an greater cost that incurs on someone we're competing with. So a hyena might be injured as long as it killed a jackal or something like that in order to have more surviving offspring. Spite is very common in the animal world and in the human world, which I'm about to talk about. So if you think about the broad arc of time, for most of our history, we had very flat economic stability. We were in symbiosis with our natural environment in small tribes of humans on the Savannah. In that environment, cooperation was the dominant human behavior, where we would coordinate and cooperate with people in our tribe in order to get resources, defend from predators, and also we would cooperate against other tribes. So this was, cooperation was the name of the game

under a stable economic scenario. But the last two centuries, we've had this massive increase, in economic growth and opportunity. In that period, selfishness was the dominant behavior because we didn't necessarily need our tribe or need to cooperate with others because there was so much energy, surplus, and goodies floating around that we could just look out for number one and leave other people behind. If we worked harder and we didn't care about externalities and we were not so pro-social, we could look out for our self-interest and grow more than the others.

So during this upswing of the carbon pulse, selfishness or individually selected behavior was dominant. But as followers of this podcast know, we are approaching a period of the end of growth where there's either flat or eventually declining growth. And in that period, from an evolutionary perspective, if humans perceive that they can no longer get ahead by self-directed individual selfish behavior or by cooperation, it actually in someone's mind, consciously or subconsciously, make sense to incur a cost by creating a greater cost to others. Okay. So from a micro perspective, this might be a economically disadvantaged person, seeing some rich person adding solar panels to their houses and casting rocks at the solar panels. So right now, there are many people on both the left and the right side of the political spectrum actively trying to reset the economic system at a likely cost to their own. comfort, convenience, and security. They're willing to do this as long as other people lose more.

Now, I understand the sentiment for this, but the fragility of the global supply chain and geopolitical system make this spite gambit for relative fitness, a much bigger risk to absolute fitness survival than most people realize. So in this sense, capitalism has enabled us to, blame capitalism. And I worry that as we head from a growth economy to a post-growth economy, as we had from a centralized economy to a decentralized economy, how frequent spite will be as a behavioral driver. On a more macro level, of course, there is the big daddy of spite, which is in the news this week, which is the purpose of this, frankly, podcast, nuclear war. If there is a nuclear exchange in our world, it almost certainly short-circuits the complexity and momentum of the

global economic and financial system. So why would someone do that? Well, first of all, there could be an error. But second of all, is if we perceive that the pie is getting smaller, then it makes sense to hurt others economically as long as we lose less. And I can't get in the minds of the world leaders on this situation, but we have been in this rising tide lifts all boats situation. And now there's an approaching phase shift where spite is a viable driver of behavior. And the reason I'm posting this is just like a bee or a spider in your hair shouts louder

to our brain than the potential of a car crash, the immediate calculus of new, exploding a nuclear bomb in another country outweighs the recognition of the unbelievable. horribly horrible consequences this will have for the people in the country that launched it, that received it, the entire world, the biosphere, and the future. So spite as an evolutionary impulse is kind of a supernormal stimuli that will result in disastrous consequences at the macro level. So what's the purpose of this short reflection? I teach my students about motivated reasoning, which is kind of confirmation bias when we have a strong

opinion about something and then we see something in the news that is a counter argument. We actually dig our heels in and react stronger to our opinion. We have confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. The antidote to motivated reasoning is understanding what motivated reasoning is. So I would argue that understanding spite and the reasons for it are the precursors to a prosocial reciprocal response to short-circuiting it. Again, on this podcast, on these Franklies, I am more an expert of the challenges and the constraints we have than the solutions and the responses.

but I think spiked as an increasing behavioral proclivity for humans is something we have to be aware of and try to avoid. Thank you for listening. Something more positive next week. Have a good weekend.