Psychological Evolution

Psychological Evolution

By L. (last reviewed on September 11, 2008)

Human beings have gone a long way from Homo-Ergaster to Homo-Sapiens over the last two million years, slowly adapting to survive and becoming more and more intelligent. Their intellectual potential has reached the point where there is virtually no need for any more physical evolution: if it gets colder, they wear coats; if it gets hotter they use air conditioners; if they get sick they develop medicines, etc. Does that mean that they are done evolving? If they were done evolving they would have absolutely no obstacles to their survival.

While they may have been able to overcome most natural obstacles, during this process human beings have created new obstacles that have resulted in the current problems afflicting humanity. First and foremost, by overcoming so much of their natural obstacles they have enabled human beings’ rate of survival to soar past their original rate of survival when they first evolved into Homo-Sapiens. The obvious consequence of this is the continual increase in human population. Many will in fact say that the main problem afflicting humanity is its extremely large population. I respectfully disagree: the main problem afflicting humanity lies in its belief on what it needs in order to survive. Anyone who remembers their Biology class knows that human life requires three things to survive: nutrition, water and oxygen. All other things that have been added to that list as being “indispensable” to their survival are nothing but part of humanity’s never ending quest for absolute comfort. Every day they add something to that list, and most of the time they tell themselves that it’s something little so it does not make a difference and therefore it is ok to add it to that list. The problem is that every time they add $1 worth of resources in new “indispensable” things to the list of what a person needs to survive, when applied to the entire human population it means that they have added almost eight billion dollars worth of resources that they need to extract from nature in order to supply humanity with this new “indispensable” item; not to mention the energy that needs to be extracted from nature in order to allow us to convert the resources into this new item and the resources used in order to maintain the machines that are used in this process; and of course, all the byproducts released back into nature during this process.

The dynamics between humanity and nature is two folded: the rate at which human beings extract resources from nature and release byproducts in the process of using those resources (which I call the “human effort”); and the rate at which nature replenishes the extracted resources and recycles the byproducts released by human beings (which I call the “nature effort”). As long as the latter is grater than the former human beings would be fine. Until not long ago human beings never really had to worry about running out of resources because nature was always able to replenish the resources they extracted so that it seemed like there was an unlimited amount of resources in nature for them take. Moreover until just relatively recently nature was able to recycle the byproducts released by humanity at a greater rater than humanity released them. However, this has changed. Since humanity is constantly increasing the amount of resources that are needed to satisfy their population they now extract far more resources than nature can replenish and release far more byproducts than nature can recycle: they use far more fossil fuels than nature is able to produce; they release far more carbon dioxide than nature can clean; they destroy the ozone layer much faster than nature can heal, etc. Scientists have already concluded that if this trend continues human beings will ultimately destroy the very nature that is responsible for the resources that keep it alive and recycle its byproducts, which would have catastrophic results, one of them possibly, and very likely, being human extinction.

This is where psychological evolution comes in: humans may have reached the point where they do not need to evolve physically anymore; therefore, the next step in evolution must be psychological. Human beings must change the way they think if they are to avoid destroying nature, i.e. to make the “human effort” become lesser than the “nature effort” as it should be; the only alternative being to massacre a large part of the human population, which I – and hopefully everyone else – am strongly against.

The reason why I call this “psychological evolution” and not just a “psychological change” is that it involves changing the fabrics of the human psychological nature; much like the human physical nature has changed over the many steps of evolution. It may not be an easy endeavor – I am sure many will call it impossible – but it is a necessary one to human survival; once more, much like the physical changes throughout human evolution were necessary to its survival – which I am sure if they had enough cognition to analyze at the time they would also have called it impossible.

In order to explain how this “psychological evolution” will, or at least should, happen I have used some of the theories on human thought and behavior postulated by some famous psychologists and some of my own theories on the same matter. Instead of introducing each of these theories at the time of use I have listed the famous theories as follows:

• Freud’s theory on the Id, Ego and Super-Ego and repression: the human mind is divided in three parts: the Id, which is responsible for people’s instincts and unconscious; the ego which can be summarized as the reasoning and common sense; and the Super-Ego which is basically the person’s conscience. While the Id tells people to act based on their instincts and desires, the Super-Ego tells the person to follow their conscience and do what is “right,” the Ego being the battlefield between the other two. As for repression, it is the idea that the human mind will repress ideas and memories that don’t feel “good” for the individual into the Id, which then sometimes lets these repressed ideas slip into the Ego and affect the person’s reasoning even if they don’t realize it.

• Erikson’s theory on identity: that a person’s identity is created or modified during identity crises where the need to understand oneself become necessary in order to overcome an external event
• Adler’s theory on motivation for human behavior: that a person who feels inferior will feel the need to overcome their “inferiority” and this need will control their behavior; on the other hand, a person who feels superior will feel the need to protect and maintain their “superiority” and this need will control their behavior.
• Roger’s theory on human nature: that people are intrinsically good and friendly, that when they become otherwise it is due to assimilating unkindness from others.
• Horney’s theory on neuroses: that people’s behavior is a result from the necessity to fulfill their need for affection, power, retirement and subjection; and that neuroses are a result from being unable to fulfill these needs.
• Maslow’s theory on human behavior: that people’s behavior is a result from the necessity to fulfill their physical, safety, affection and aesthetic needs.
• Skinner’s theory on learning: that people learn to do what rewards them and avoid what punishes them.
• Frankl’s theory on neuroses: neuroses are resulted from conflicts between values and that people’s behavior is a result on their goals for the future and their purpose; moreover, those who believe in the after-life partially behave based on their goals for the after-life.

If the main problem afflicting humanity is the fact that humans are constantly increasing the number of things they consider “indispensable” for their survival, the solution is changing the part of their psych responsible for what they think they need. According to Horney and Maslow human behavior is driven by the necessity to fulfill their needs; therefore, by changing what human beings believe they need or how much they need it, their behavior would change as a consequence. The behavior change would be extracting fewer resources from nature and releasing less byproduct, eventually making the human effort lower than the nature effort. This change in their psych is essentially the next evolutional step in the human future. Moreover, it is a very hard step to take since it’s based on changing one of the most established human beliefs, that is, what they need. Besides changing a very strong belief it also involves changing the thought process involved in resolving conflict of beliefs. The following is my theory on what happens when a person is faced with a new belief: (note that parts of my theory are based on some known theories based on conflict resolution and theories on human behavior)

As postulated in the Dissonance Theory (not sure who’s responsible for it), when people are faced with a dissonant belief (that is, a belief that contradicts a pre-existing belief) they have three options: the first is to remain adamant about their pre-existing belief and fight the dissonant belief; the second is to accept the dissonant belief and let it replace the pre-existing belief; the last is to ignore the dissonant belief and continue to believe on the pre-existing belief.

My theory is that the choice the individual makes is based on two very strong forces: the first being “herd behavior” where people tend to go along with a group in order to have a sense of belonging. This in fact seems to show that Horney and Maslow are right to some extent since they postulated that people’s behavior is in part a result of their need for affection and power (Horney) and love and security (Maslow), all of which are often offered to the individual by the group, thus, the individual, seeing an opportunity to fulfill these needs in the group, choose to believe in what the group believes even if it may contradict the individual’s own belief.

On the other side of the balance, however, sits the individual’s confidence and conscience. These will tell the individual to hold on to their belief even if it means to go against the group. I personally believe that a person’s confidence comes from, mostly, their first few years of life, as a consequence of their first successes or failures, which is one of the reasons why it is so important for parents to help their children when they’re young. I agree with Skinners theory on learning, that is, that people will learn to do what rewards them and avoid what either punishes or does not reward them; therefore, when a child is learning new things for the first time it is important for parents to help them through their struggles, providing reassurance or praise whenever appropriate. It is much easier for a child who starts confident to remain confident and gain more confidence; on the other hand, when a child loses their self-confidence on their first years, it becomes much harder to regain it later on. Once the child starts to go to school and start their academic life, it becomes the teacher’s job to be a second provider of reassurance and praise.

Conscience is a much more complicated asset. While with confidence one either has it or not and how much they have, when it comes to conscience everyone has it, the question being what one’s conscience tells them to do. The way a person’s conscience evolves depends to a great extent on their self-confidence and on the method of teaching the person’s parents and teachers use. If the child’s parents and teachers are very strict and authoritarian, the child will be taught to do as they are told without analyzing, understanding and agreeing to do what they are told to do; or they may sometimes become unreasonably defiant towards parents and teachers and other people with more authority besides having other unreasonable conduct – and while I have no extensive psychiatric knowledge the latter resembles, in my opinion, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, a psychiatric disorder with onset during childhood where the aforementioned unreasonable behavior is the basis for the diagnosis. On the other hand, when a person has parents and teachers that sit down with them and explain to them why they should do what they are being told to do the child starts to build a conscience of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. Moreover, when a child has enough self-confidence, they will question the orders they receive. Parents should be careful at this point; most parents fill insulted when their child questions an order because they think the child is simply trying to defy their authority; however, sometimes the child is simply trying to understand what they are being told to do. When this is the case, parents and teachers should rather feel complimented because it shows that they did a good job of teaching their children to have confidence. They should then explain to the child why they are telling the child to do whatever is it they are telling them to do; parents often don’t want to do this because they are telling the child to do something that maybe the parents themselves should be doing, in which case they should not ask the child to do it to begin with. On the other hand if there’s no specific reason and the parent is just asking for a favor, then they should explain to the child that they are just asking them to do a favor and it is a good skill to have to be generous to people and help others, of course, always analyzing these favors so that they are not abused or told to do something they shouldn’t do. Some might say that it is too much trouble to explain to a child why they should do something every time they have to ask the child to do something; however, when you explain to the child right from wrong from the time they are young, the child slowly builds up a library in their subconscious with what is right and what is wrong. As the child gets older, it becomes much easier to explain to them more complicated things because they already have a basic idea of what is right and what is wrong. Also as the child grows and reaches adolescence, if the parents and teachers did a good job of teaching the child to be self confident and did a good job of explaining to the child why they should do or not what they are asked to do, the adolescent will be much less susceptible to other adolescents ill intended who might offer them drugs, or ask them to help them do things they shouldn’t. Another aspect of a person’s conscience is defined by role models. A child who has parents that drink alcoholic beverages often while the child is watching them is more likely to end up drinking than a child who has never seen anybody drink. However, sometimes even if the child has no good role models they might still end up with a positive aspect in their conscience. This happens because when a child with strong confidence and a good sense of right and wrong sees their role models display a bad habit they end up “reverse assimilating” that habit, that is, they see the role model doing it, but because they know it’s not a good thing and have strong confidence, they decide to not follow on the footsteps of the role model; I personally had someone in my life that used to say “do as I say but don’t do as I do”. Of course, this depends on whether the child’s parents and teachers did a good job of developing the child’s confidence and driving their conscience in a positive direction. Eventually, when a person’s self-confidence and conscience reach a certain level, they start to complement each other in a new level: a person with sound consciousness will never become over confident or “under” confident because they have a good understanding of what they are capable of and what they are not; moreover they know the dire consequences of becoming either. On the other hand a person with good confidence never lets others their beliefs be changed by other people unless the new belief is “better” than the pre-existing one, that is, they are less susceptible to being affected by “herd behavior” or peer pressure.

Back to the dissonance theory, whether the person ends up accepting a new belief, refusing it or ignoring it depends on peer pressure, self-confidence and conscience. If the person has low confidence and “weak” conscience, they will most likely decide to believe on whatever the people around them believe regardless of whether the new belief is “better” than the old one simply because they group offers the individual the opportunity to fulfill the individual’s natural and “artificial” (the non necessary needs that are assimilated by the individual as they grow older) needs. If the person has strong self-confidence and conscience, they will observe the new belief, analyze it, understand it, and based on their own values of what is right and wrong, will decide to accept the new belief or refuse it, even if that is not the widely accepted opinion (even if accepting the new belief seems to be the easiest way to fulfill the individual’s needs, a person who is confident on their own capabilities and is conscious of other ways of satisfying those needs besides just going along with a group will choose to seek the method that does not involve giving up their own beliefs or identity) . The conflict is well represented by Freud’s Id, Ego, and Super-Ego model: the Id being represented by the necessity to be accepted and go along with the group; the Super-Ego being the person’s confidence and conscience; and the Ego being the battlefield between the other two, where the individual rationalizes whether to keep the old belief or accept the new one.

As postulated by Erikson, some belief conflicts have so much effect on the individual that it can change the individual’s identity. Once the individual resolves the conflict, or if they aren’t able to, the choice belief eventually sinks in the individual’s sub-conscious and becomes a part of whom they are; whereas if the individual isn’t able to resolve the issue, the conflict itself sinks into the sub-conscious and affects the individual indirectly when an external event related to the conflicting beliefs take place in their lives. Once a belief changes the person’s identity and becomes part of whom they are it becomes very hard, almost impossible, to change that belief, thus causing a reverse change in identity. In fact I believe this is how many people become addicted to different habits and why it is so hard to fight those addictions, but then again that’s beside the point here.

Back to the initial issue: considering the aforementioned theory on belief conflict, how does one change an adult’s psych so they start to believe they don’t need the things that they previously believed they needed? While it is possible, it is pointless in large scale for the purpose of bringing about psychological evolution. Once the it becomes part of the person to believe that they need something, be it drugs, or make up, or watching sports, or anything else, getting rid of that belief becomes virtually impossible; moreover, the average person believes that they need so many things that they really don’t that in order to get the person to lose those beliefs would be to ultimately strip the person of their identity and would most likely cause the person to go into a radical identity crisis that would end up making the person worse rather than better.

Is it impossible then to take this step in psychological evolution? No. The answer is not to change people who have already let these beliefs become part of what they are but rather to change those who have not, that is, children. While it may be virtually impossible to introduce beliefs that contradict an adult’s identity, it is not as hard to introduce a belief that what they have become is not who their children should be. That is, parents and teachers and whoever else deals with children have to learn that these beliefs of need for things that really are unnecessary for human survival and just waste resources that are needed for necessary things should not be, for the lack of a better word, “doctrinated” into children’s identities, on the contrary, children should be taught to not want these things. Moreover, people should attempt to not expose children to these things in a way that makes them desirable or rewarding since as postulated by Rogers, a person tends to add to their behavior whatever rewards them and avoid whatever punishes or does not reward them.

The problem at this point ceases to be completely psychological and becomes in part sociological. It involves limiting free will so that business that rely on selling products that are intrinsically a waste of resources are not allowed to use commercials and other forms of media to convince the public, which includes children, that these products are needed. I am sure nobody will deny that the media has incredible influence on children. Also, since in this case children would be taught to not want these products, virtually all the business that rely on these products would destined to end up bankrupt unless they chose to make their product truly “useful and needed” by society. But I am sure many people would disagree with this step, and I can appreciate the disagreement when I analyze the way our society is built and functions. Try making a law prohibiting the production, advertisement, and sale of alcoholic beverages for example: the people who produce and consume alcoholic beverages will protest. But here’s the question I would ask myself: “I can only live about 100 years or so; is it worth sacrificing the future of mankind just so that I can get something that at some point in my life someone convinced me that I needed when I really don’t?” and “Do I really want my children to be stuck with these habits?” Personally, I believe it is worth sacrificing the “unnecessary comfort” of a generation so that all future generations may have a better future, if any at all. Will anybody agree with me? I personally doubt it; but unfortunately, I don’t believe there’s another way to save humanity from self destruction; except of course for the previously mentioned alternative, that is, to indiscriminately massacre part of humanity whenever the number of people reaches the point where the human effort becomes greater than the nature effort. But that wouldn’t be evolution, it would be ignorance, stubbornness, stupidity, selfishness but more importantly than all it would in my opinion take away our right to call ourselves even Homo-Sapiens, which stands for Wise Men.