Evolutionary Psychology as a Universal Perspective
Evolutionary psychology enables people to break human behavior down beyond subjectivity. You probably aren’t as good at it as I am, but other people have already thought of plenty of other conflict resolution techniques. This is just one more you can use in conjunction with the others.
Once you can see what creates people’s perceptions, you can see what creates your own perceptions, and you can see that the same things create everyone else’s perceptions. Once you learn how to do that, you can see that if someone else has a different point of view than you do, the things that make up your point of view are affecting them differently.
This is also a good example of why people acting according to whatever they feel to be true about the world isn’t the magical solution to everything that most Anarchists think it is. Men and women each have human perceptions of the world, but they have fundamentally different variations of the same basic perceptions. How much destructive conflict is caused in the world because men and women have such hard times understanding each other?
Men and women are the best example of these things, because men and women are by far the two most different groups of people on Earth. But the different points of view of any two groups of people are caused by variations on the same human perceptions, whether they’re people from different countries, cultures, religions, or anything else.
I’m sure you’re well aware of how much Capitalists benefit by dividing and conquering other people at every opportunity. Whether it’s men versus women or Whites versus Blacks or the workers of one country versus the workers of another country, or anything else, people who have unresolvable problems are easy to manipulate. How much of the psychiatric medicine industry, the legal industry, our security culture, the prison industrial complex, our militarized economy, and our consumer economy in general do you think is caused by Capitalists preventing the public from getting sufficient education to overcome their problems themselves?
On the other hand, people who are aware of the origins of their own and other peoples’ perceptions can combine that with other basic problem-solving techniques whenever they have a disagreement with someone else. If it’s someone you’re talking to, you can ask them questions to help clarify why you have different perspectives and what it is that you perceive differently. If it’s someone you hear about on the news, you can look at their situation, look at your own situation, see how your situation created your perception, and draw a reasonable conclusion of how the other person’s different situation could’ve created a different perception that would lead to the way they’re acting.
The simple fact that we are all members of the same species proves we all have equally valid reasons for our points of view. Granted, a lot of people, like George W. Bush for instance, have expended an inexcusably small amount of effort to developing a point of view that’s adequate for dealing with their situations, but as far as common citizens are concerned, who are simply trying to get along in the world, it’s not hard at all.
The next time you watch the news or listen to the radio and see or hear some story about people who seem to be a lot different from yourself and who act a lot differently than you do, but whose living conditions you’re fairly familiar with, break it down.
Suppose they’re some Black gangstas selling crack in another part of your city. You already know they’re Homo sapiens who are attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. That means they’re either trying to survive or reproduce.
Why would they perceive selling crack to help them survive or reproduce?
What do they get by selling crack? Money. They have to take their chances on breaking the law, but they make a lot of money.
Why would running that risk to make a lot of money seem like a good idea to them?
There are a few reasons, some of which are more obvious than others.
For one, if it offers them the best chances of making money by far, it’s inevitable that some people would be willing to take that risk. From there you can break it down further, to see why the economic system in their neighborhood is so broken that they can’t get better jobs. There are any number of reasons that can happen that I’m sure anti-Capitalist revolutionaries have heard enough about that I don’t need to go into here.
Money also offers them social status. Expensive cars, expensive clothes, expensive jewelry, and such, all cost money. Those things make crack dealers’ neighbors look up to them and admire them. People want to be their friends, people don’t dare to be their enemies, they can attract women more easily, and so on. All of those things are true for corporate CEOs and Wall Street stockbrokers who make lots of money also.
Making lots of money by selling crack lets people buy a lot of things that get advertized on TV, as opposed to not being able to buy them if they worked at minimum wage jobs. Getting people to buy things is the whole point of putting advertizements on TV. If people who can’t make enough money to buy those things by working at regular jobs decide to break the law to make the money, why should it come as a surprise to anyone?
Making lots of money by selling crack lets people reach the same general social status as people in other parts of their city. Crack dealers are trying to claw their way to the top of the hill just like copyright lawyers and real estate dealers. They’re just on a different hill, which means they have to do different things to claw their way to the top of it.
Making lots of money by selling crack seems like a good idea to people if the most affluent people in their neighborhoods sell crack, if their parents were criminals, and if a lot of their friends and family and neighbors are criminals. The same thing is true for business professionals. If the most affluent people they know, their parents, and most of their friends, family, and neighbors are business professionals, being a business professional seems to be what people do, and it’s the career they know the most about.
This is not to say that you can use science to justify selling crack. But neither can you justify outlawing selling crack by ignoring science. Science is a process of identifying systems of cause and effect; in this case the reasons people do things. Science doesn’t define people’s actions as right or wrong, because those are subjective beliefs.
If people doing certain things is causing a problem, you can’t get the people to change their behavior and solve the problem unless you understand why doing those things seems like a good idea to those people in the first place. People have tried solving problems like drug trafficking and drug abuse by simply hiring more police and building more prisons, and that obviously doesn’t work.
Not labeling actions right or wrong is the whole point of science. Doing this is completely opposed to any political strategy that depends on labeling some people as bad. Once you decide that crack dealers are bad people, you’ve already reduced your choices in how to solve the problem to how to turn the bad people into good people, or how to get rid of the bad people.
By using science to see why the person perceives selling crack to be a good idea in the first place, you start by recognizing the person as someone pretty much like yourself—not a photocopy of yourself, but your social peer. Since his perception was created by the same things that would’ve created your perception in the same situation, by looking at all the things that came together to make him perceive that selling crack was a good idea, you necessarily see what things could’ve come together to make selling crack seem like a good idea to you.
Contrary to people learning about science turning everyone into cold blooded killers who think everyone is dirt, once you learn how the same things that create your perceptions create everyone else’s perceptions also, you learn that every person in the world is living a different version of your life.