Nostradoofus

Morality is a mutually agreed behavioral rule set that arises among groups to assign immediate personal benefits and costs to positive and negative externalities. Specific rules, then, are adapted to the specific externalities in a given group in response to awareness of the externalities.

Examples. Random killing always has negative externalities for all groups, so murder remains universally wrong. But when penicillin, birth control and welfare are invented, the externalities of STDs and starving unwed mothers are reduced, so premarital sex becomes de facto acceptable after millenia of taboo.

Obesity has both a personal externality (you live poorly and die early), as well as a public externality (health costs). A newly developed country like South Korea gains awareness of this only over time, so the moral rules don’t respond immediately. So one would expect a brief explosion of obesity, followed by a recovery.

But wait a minute. For decades, the US has enjoyed a diet rich in fat and sugar, and practically unlimited in quantity. Beginning about 40 years ago, 3 simple rules (eat only when hungry, no sugar, no saturated fat) became widely known and publicly promoted. So why did the obesity epidemic began only 15 years ago? Are we becoming immoral?

Possibly, but there is another potential explanation: some new cause of obesity, for which there is low awareness.

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Ever noticed how a few people manage to attain high station with few exceptional skills, other than a dogged refusal to admit mistakes? Psych studies have proven that most people value consistency more than accuracy in a leader. So maybe there’s an evolutionary explanation.

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposes evolutionarily stable states (ESS), in which subgroups within a species tend to have certain characteristics. These characteristics, he asserts, are adaptive as long as they do not occur in too large a proportion of the overall population. Whether such evolution occurs at a genetic or social level, it has implications for human behavior.

I assert an evolutionary environment (social or genetic) that produces the kind of leader you think you hate, but actually you love: the guy who never, ever admits weakness or error. Examples are everywhere, from Carly Fiorina to George W. Bush. But the best one is Saddam Hussein.

When Saddam emerged from an underground hole to find himself surrounded by hundreds of armed U.S. troops, what did he say? Not “Please don’t kill me.” Not “Could it be that I’ve gone too far?” No, his documented response was, “I am the president of Iraq. I am prepared to negotiate.”

This goes comedically far beyond overplaying one’s hand. Yet it’s not unusual among alpha males. I assert Saddam, like many autocrats both political and corporate, reached and attained his position by either having or developing a blindness to personal weakness. And others followed him because the brain has evolved to view self-assurance as a reasonable proxy for effectiveness.

It’s easy to see an evolutionary path that would end up here. We know that there exist evolved pseudo-reasoning heuristics in the human brain. This evolved pseudo-reasoning has been shown to explain why people tend to overvalue lottery tickets, for example. You can see how there might evolve a heuristic that equates a leader’s self-confidence with one’s own safety, thereby increasing offspring. You can see how this tendency might increase the more fearful a follower becomes.

But if this were to evolve, you can also see how a parasitical ESS could evolve: a subgroup that evolves no skill except blind self-confidence, which it uses to gain and retain a leadership role, thereby increasing offspring.

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The power behind extreme fundamentalists, both Muslim & Christian, is that they’re right about moral decay. Though wrong about much else, they enjoy popular following by having correctly identified a problem.

You can define moral decay broadly as “Percentage of TV shows I won’t let my 5-year-old watch.” Currently about 90%, up from about 40% fifteen years ago, and 10% thirty years ago.

Most things you won’t let your toddler do are things you shouldn’t be doing yourself. Think about it.

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At the very limit (and I mean the very tip of the statistical tail), certain extreme Christian and Muslim fundamentalists resemble each other in their adherence to this manifesto:

1. Certain they are right.
2. But that’s not enough: you must also be wrong.
3. But that’s still not enough: must coerce you to be right, like themselves.
4. By any means necessary.
5. Believe every part of the Old Testament except “only God may judge man.”
6. Love weapons.
7. Big embarrassment to moderates in their own religion.

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