The cost of belonging to the tribe

One of the first learning experiences that we all face as children, beyond learning the principles of communication to express our basic needs, is the one of socialization: whenever we are told that "we do not hit one another when we want a toy"  or "we do not yell at each other" we are getting instruction on what the social norm is, discerning which behavior are acceptable from those which are not. And in most cases we end up learning not only to ask for things in the right way, but also that there are limitations to the wishes that we can get fulfilled and occasionally we will have to learn to live with our frustration. One of the benefits of learning this concept in the kindergarten as opposed to learning it at home is that you get to negotiate with peers (with equal rank) instead of with a clearly ranked group of siblings which could use their higher status to extract favors from the younger ones.

This social norm is very useful both to modulate the expectations of the individuals and for the society to work with as little friction as possible, and in fact most of these norms go mostly undisputed for the extent of the childhood. Only around puberty do we get the feeling that social norms are conventional agreement, that they play a necessary role in society but there is no reason to follow all of them all the time and without questioning. Teenage rebellion is the phase where our youngsters affirm their identity by questioning these norms and deciding on their own to accept (the most frequent case) or reject each one separately. This leads to behaviors that can be considered "socially disruptive" such us wearing unusual clothes, hairdos, makeup, listening to unconventional music or exercising "alternative" hobbies. Each of this transgressions is an exercise in freedom that the youngster makes, ready to sacrifice some social acceptance in the altar of self-affirmation. However, this is an expensive sacrifice, which is why in most cases teenage rebellion eventually subsides and most young adults end up being mostly socially conform.

Photo: Leonela Salazar on Pixabay

However, the fact that we as adults agree to follow the norm does not necessarily imply our acceptance. It is in the realm of politics where the citizens act to question, debate and eventually modify socially accepted norms (i.e. laws, rules and regulations) to adapt to their current beliefs. And unsurprisingly, the ability of the citizens to question the norm is part of the norm: in conservative or authoritarian regimes, debate of the laws is discouraged or even prosecuted, whereas in progressive democratic society almost nothing is excluded from a potential discussion if it has enough supporters. It the ability to contest the status quo good or bad? It depends on the available resources.

The limitation of resources is a constant problem in human life and nature at large. A cheetah trying to catch an antelope has to gauge its strength: if it underestimates the resistance of its prey, it might go without dinner or even starve to death. Among hominids, it is a well-known fact that gorillas need to spend pretty much all their waking hours looking for food to keep up with their energy consumption. Humans, on the other hand, thanks to cooking and the wider range of food that this practice offers, can feed themselves in much less time, allowing them to be less efficient in their hunting and gathering or creating a time surplus that can be used for other purposes, such as creating artifacts or cultivating relationships with other humans.

This time surplus can also be extended to the social group as a whole: if individuals do not need to spend all their time hunting and gathering, those individuals with a particularly useful skill for the group (governance, military ability, craft) could be exempt from the provision of food and obtain food in exchange for the service to the community. And the easier it gets to feed the people, the higher the amount of individuals that can devote their time to other tasks, including some which might not be necessarily in the immediate interest of the community, such as science of philosophy, but whose contribution might be helpful in the future. Free thinkers belong to this category: people of no direct use to the society but that, by contesting the current rules, might help improving the overall well-being of the society.

One problem in any society is the amount of debate that is allowed, in part because the time and effort that the debate takes, in part because any rule that is under question intrinsically elicits a lower degree of compliance. That is probably the reason why, during the colonial expansion to the west of the US religious communities fared better than secular or atheistic ones: while the first ones where driven by god-given rules that required very strong compliance and left very little space for debate, many the latter ones died from fractious discussions and lack of commitment to the common cause. When the resources are tight there is not much margin into how much inefficiency the system can support before it goes in the red. But how is the situation today?

In modern Western societies the surplus of food and many other essential services is so big approximately only one in ten adults would have to work to provide sustenance for everybody. This leaves a lot of room to have artists, scientist, politicians, and other costly features like subsidies for disadvantage people or unemployment protection. Is there enough time and production surplus to warrant public debate? Undoubtedly so, but debate is not always welcome.

Yesterday Karen forwarded to me this cartoon by Scottish media consultant James Melville, where a few people walking under the sign "analyzing the facts" are accused of being "terrible people" by a huge crowd walking under a sign reading "following the narrative". This drawing is nothing but a very vivid depiction of the tension between those who are (reasonably) comfortable with "official" news stream and those who are willing to dig a bit deeper to check for inconsistencies or even intentional inaccuracies. Most of the time they will come empty-handed and have to go through the shame of "I told you that there was nothing fishy", but without their repeated efforts many outrageous iniquities would go forever unpunished.

So I would like to close up by asking you all to keep an open mind: it is true that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" but sometimes it is necessary to open your eyes to even seen any cracks in the narrative that we are being presented. Try giving every idea a serious consideration, because you never know when someone is going to say that the world revolves around the sun and not the other way around. Have a nice evening.