Alright, why not? Why should we stop at just the physical attributes of people? Why not average their psychological and sociological traits? There must be some ideal level of extroversion and introversion or some perfect level of psychopathy. Or even the average of experiences. There's is a perfect amount of scolding, a perfect amount of failing assignments, a perfect amount of starving, a perfect amount of lead in the water, etc.
I'd like to argue the opposite point. Consider a fish school:
(click for some fairly impressive footage)If you look at it from a distance it's possible you'd think it was some sort of amorphous alien life form that came to dominate us, yet it's composed by an inordinate amount of individual fish. How do they group up like that, without being able to communicate as we do? There must be some kind of fish-psychological pressure for them to group together, right? Obviously.
But consider that the fish deeper inside the schools
(I keep thinking of them as swarms lol) is much more likely to survive predators, as those would target the outliers and the ones detached from the whole. It follows that every fish would rather be inside than outside, desperately even, but aside from when they form what is called a
bait ball they don't do much of that.
Why? Because having more eyes/senses looking out for predator is a much better way to stay alive than constantly swimming into a ball because you can't be sure if there is a predator nearby or not. I take that to mean that there is an internal conflict on a fish's psychology, one that is somewhat analogous to our own struggles:
1) To stay inside, protected from danger and comforted by the presence of peers, and survive to see the next day;
OR 2) Stay closer to the periphery, where it's more dangerous and lonelier, but where one can use it's senses and whatever tools available to scout the landscape and help the group, by extent helping oneself.
I've once read in a book that it's like humans are 3% bees or something, that we have this hive instinct that triggers in some situations like in sports, riots, parties and stuff. Take as an example Wendover Production's video on
How to Stop a Riot. It's all about dealing with the school instead of the individual fish. And I think that whatever it is we perceive as "normal" is, in some ways, our equivalent for the center of the fish school. It's where we feel the safest and where you have the most coherence with other people. If you look at kids playing they'll often pick on the differences of others, like difference means impurity somehow.
(Problem is that this normal-sense that we have is not universal, it's based on our own life experiences, and it varies wildly between person to person. Not only that, it's a moving target. It varies depending on your company, environment and a myriad of other mental cues. It varies according with what information about the past you retained and how, and how you can extrapolate what the future will look like.)
So if the fish escapes predators by staying in the middle of the school, what is it that we actually gain from trying to reach what we perceive as normal? For that I'd like to use ourselves as an example. Whenever someone new joins the discord, you'll notice that some people take a while to engage in conversation, and I'd pose that this is because they are trying to gouge our social norms, trying to figure out how to behave in a way that they fit.
If you were watching that, or other examples of group thinking, as if it was an animal documentary you might say that it's all in an effort to increase group fitness. That a group that shares more similarities is a more coherent group, and thus stronger because they can put pressure more uniformly on whenever the consensus is. This is, in a way,
China's argument when it boasts and tries to export their one-party system:
So, what is it that we gain from being on the periphery of normal? Why would we want a fractured and chaotic society, as opposed to an unified, organized and coherent one?
Because it gives us freedom to move and to change. Reaching for the center to protect oneself is all well and good, after all it's a fundamental way to cope with the world's harshness. But similar people share a similar mindset, and any mindset has it's share of blind spots. Or, alternatively, If all fishes saw from the same perspective they wouldn't be able to spot predators very well now, would you? In the same way, being comforted by your peers under a sinking ship's deck is not a very good way to stay alive/successful very long, so we have an opposed pressure to confront this normal, both in ourselves or in those around us (which could possibly be the same thing). You know some way a bait ball can end? By having a whale devour it whole:
Some whales lunge feed on bait balls. Lunge feeding is an extreme feeding method in which the whale accelerates from below a bait ball to a high velocity and then opens its mouth to a large gape angle.Progress is not a straight line, and the map is not the territory. Look at history and you'll find a myriad of examples about how something we thought was good turned out to be bad,
or the other way around. The same way that it's recommended that you have someone sober with you the first time you experiment with psychotropics, a
group composed of a variety of mindsets can tackle the same problem from different perspectives and come up with novel ways of using the tools they have available.
From the article above:
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What I'm saying is that while there might be
some ideal level of extroversion and introversion or some perfect level of psychopathy; Or even the average of experiences; There's is a perfect amount of scolding, a perfect amount of failing assignments, a perfect amount of starving, a perfect amount of lead in the water, etc. for any given individual, I don't think there is such thing for a group/society because it decreases adaptability. That's part of why that Nomad Thought/Believing Game thing that Mike mentioned in
one of the last episodes is so interesting to me, it's a way to move more freely between mindsets.
