Human Nature - Asset or Liability?

Here's A Thought...

Imagine that you can’t find one of your good, black shoes.  You know you wore them on Tuesday and you are certain you'd have remembered if you'd come home wearing only one shoe.  You need those shoes for an interview and, in spite of the fact that you can’t explain why they aren’t both in their usual place, you are absolutely sure the missing shoe must be in the house somewhere.  

Maybe the dog took it? 

Maybe you kicked it under the sofa and don’t remember? 

Maybe someone moved it from where you so carefully put it?

No matter how frustrating it might be, you won’t stop searching for your shoe until you find it.  You persevere in your search because of your absolute conviction that the missing shoe must be somewhere in the house.

And you're right.  

After hours of searching you find your missing shoe at the bottom of the laundry basket.

Now let’s imagine you’ve misplaced your sunglasses...  

The sun is shining brightly and you’re about to take off in your car so you really need to find those sunglasses otherwise you are going to have to squint-drive the entire time.  

You begin your search in all the places you think your sunglasses might be. The table in the hallway.  The kitchen.  Your bedside locker.  At the bottom of your handbag.  In the glove compartment of the car.  Even under the seats in the car.  No luck.

You become disheartened.  

You think back to yesterday.  

You think you remember wearing your sunglasses but then… maybe you’re mistaken, maybe you weren’t wearing them.  Or even if you were, could you have left them in the shop when you went in to buy milk on the way home?  Or maybe you left them in your friend Tom’s house on Sunday?  Perhaps they fell out of your pocket and you didn’t notice? 

You have no confidence that your sunglasses are in the house and so you stop your search and resign yourself to having lost them forever. (Unless Tom found them - you can call him later to check).  

As it happens you put your sunglasses on the mantlepiece the day before and the cat knocked them off and they slid under the sofa.  But you don’t find those sunglasses until weeks later when you move the sofa to vacuum underneath. 

Here's A Thought...

Imagine that you can’t find one of your good, black shoes.  You know you wore them on Tuesday and you are certain you'd have remembered if you'd come home wearing only one shoe.  You need those shoes for an interview and, in spite of the fact that you can’t explain why they aren’t both in their usual place, you are absolutely sure the missing shoe must be in the house somewhere.  

Maybe the dog took it? 

Maybe you kicked it under the sofa and don’t remember? 

Maybe someone moved it from where you so carefully put it?

No matter how frustrating it might be, you won’t stop searching for your shoe until you find it.  You persevere in your search because of your absolute conviction that the missing shoe must be somewhere in the house.

And you're right.  

After hours of searching you find your missing shoe at the bottom of the laundry basket.

Now let’s imagine you’ve misplaced your sunglasses...  

The sun is shining brightly and you’re about to take off in your car so you really need to find those sunglasses otherwise you are going to have to squint-drive the entire time.  

You begin your search in all the places you think your sunglasses might be. The table in the hallway.  The kitchen.  Your bedside locker.  At the bottom of your handbag.  In the glove compartment of the car.  Even under the seats in the car.  No luck.

You become disheartened.  

You think back to yesterday.  

You think you remember wearing your sunglasses but then… maybe you’re mistaken, maybe you weren’t wearing them.  Or even if you were, could you have left them in the shop when you went in to buy milk on the way home?  Or maybe you left them in your friend Tom’s house on Sunday?  Perhaps they fell out of your pocket and you didn’t notice? 

You have no confidence that your sunglasses are in the house and so you stop your search and resign yourself to having lost them forever. (Unless Tom found them - you can call him later to check).  

As it happens you put your sunglasses on the mantlepiece the day before and the cat knocked them off and they slid under the sofa.  But you don’t find those sunglasses until weeks later when you move the sofa to vacuum underneath. 

In this very domestic thought experiment the difference between your search for your shoe and your search for your sunglasses is entirely based on your beliefs and attitudes.  You are more willing to search for the shoe as you believe it must be somewhere in the house. You’d never accidentally leave a shoe you’ve been wearing behind somewhere - something that could easily happen with sunglasses. If you had believed the sunglasses were in the house you would, most likely, have found them.  

In his book, The Quantum Rules, Kundal K. Das explains that in all of nature - including human nature - we will always opt for using the least amount of energy necessary to accomplish any task.  This is known as the principle of least action.

“Just as good financial practice suggests we should be thrifty with our money, nature is thrifty in its usage of energy and it so happens that this energy thriftiness of nature determines all the dynamical laws of the universe as regard to how things move and change in time.” (Kundal K. Das, The Quantum Rules, 2014)

So it isn’t (mostly) then that we are too lazy to look for lost sunglasses, it’s just that given that we can’t be sure the expenditure of energy is worthwhile we stop our search sooner than we stop searching for the lost shoe. 

So how might the principle of least action impact on our attempts to solve the many problems in the world? 

In this very domestic thought experiment the difference between your search for your shoe and your search for your sunglasses is entirely based on your beliefs and attitudes.  You are more willing to search for the shoe as you believe it must be somewhere in the house. You’d never accidentally leave a shoe you’ve been wearing behind somewhere - something that could easily happen with sunglasses. If you had believed the sunglasses were in the house you would, most likely, have found them.  

In his book, The Quantum Rules, Kundal K. Das explains that in all of nature - including human nature - we will always opt for using the least amount of energy necessary to accomplish any task.  This is known as the principle of least action.

“Just as good financial practice suggests we should be thrifty with our money, nature is thrifty in its usage of energy and it so happens that this energy thriftiness of nature determines all the dynamical laws of the universe as regard to how things move and change in time.” (Kundal K. Das, The Quantum Rules, 2014)

So it isn’t (mostly) then that we are too lazy to look for lost sunglasses, it’s just that given that we can’t be sure the expenditure of energy is worthwhile we stop our search sooner than we stop searching for the lost shoe. 

So how might the principle of least action impact on our attempts to solve the many problems in the world? 

What is our default human nature?

The Bahá'í Writings point out that human beings are, “…endowed with two natures: one tendeth towards moral sublimity and intellectual perfection, while the other turneth to bestial degradation and carnal imperfections.” 2

In other words, we are naturally both good and bad.  For all of us how our natures manifest in the world depends primarily on how we use our potential for either good or bad.  

Our animal nature is wired for survival and so we tend to easily learn the things we need to do in order to survive - eat, sleep, be safe, procreate etc. If we didn’t learn these things everything else would be academic as we wouldn’t be alive to worry about any of it. 

In his book, Moral Tribes, Harvard Psychology Professor, Joshua Greene, describes this part of human nature as being similar to the automatic setting on a camera.  These are enormously useful preprogrammed settings that serve us well in many situations.  However, just like a really good camera we are also lucky enough to have a manual mode in our brains, Greene describes this manual mode as 'controlled cognition'which is designed to deal with problems and situations that can’t be dealt with by using our automatic settings. 

It might be possible to understand how this works inhuman beings if we look at the notion of ‘second nature’. In English - and most likely other languages -  we speak about something becoming ‘second nature’. In other words, something that becomes a default position for us that takes over from the original default. Just as drivers automatically slam their brake foot to the floor in the event of a sudden need to brake - even when they aren’t in the driving seat. Or how musicians can pick up an instrument and play it without thinking. In fact, according to neurologist Oliver Sachs, musicians’ brains are so altered by their years of playing music that it is possible to recognise the brain of a musician at autopsy. We all have many acquired skills. They're not 'natural' insofar as they weren't present at birth as fully-fledged skills.  

Hardly anybody - even those who subsequently show great talent - comes into the world automatically able to read, write, drive, cycle or play the trombone. Through both formal and informal education these skills that form our second nature takes root in our biological and social reality. 

Notwithstanding the odd genius, the common denominators in everything we do are education and practice. If you do anything often enough it becomes second nature to you. Then, when the chips are down and you switch - as we all do - to your default natural position - you’ll switch to your second nature if you've spent long enough practicing.  

Learning to live together in a safe, harmonious and united way may well need a bit of practice. However, there are many possible gains for us as individuals and societies if we manage to learn how to happily coexist. Maybe if we practise a bit we might eliminate prejudice, discrimination, injustice, war, poverty, famine and abuse of all varieties?  Maybe we’ll be able to offer education and health care and safety to children teetering on the brink of annihilation?  Maybe this change will allow these children to grow up and contribute to the world in a positive way instead of having to struggle to survive?

What is our default human nature?

The Bahá'í Writings point out that human beings are, “…endowed with two natures: one tendeth towards moral sublimity and intellectual perfection, while the other turneth to bestial degradation and carnal imperfections.” 2

In other words, we are naturally both good and bad.  For all of us how our natures manifest in the world depends primarily on how we use our potential for either good or bad.  

Our animal nature is wired for survival and so we tend to easily learn the things we need to do in order to survive - eat, sleep, be safe, procreate etc. If we didn’t learn these things everything else would be academic as we wouldn’t be alive to worry about any of it. 

In his book, Moral Tribes, Harvard Psychology Professor, Joshua Greene, describes this part of human nature as being similar to the automatic setting on a camera.  These are enormously useful preprogrammed settings that serve us well in many situations.  However, just like a really good camera we are also lucky enough to have a manual mode in our brains, Greene describes this manual mode as 'controlled cognition'which is designed to deal with problems and situations that can’t be dealt with by using our automatic settings. 

It might be possible to understand how this works inhuman beings if we look at the notion of ‘second nature’. In English - and most likely other languages -  we speak about something becoming ‘second nature’. In other words, something that becomes a default position for us that takes over from the original default. Just as drivers automatically slam their brake foot to the floor in the event of a sudden need to brake - even when they aren’t in the driving seat. Or how musicians can pick up an instrument and play it without thinking. In fact, according to neurologist Oliver Sachs, musicians’ brains are so altered by their years of playing music that it is possible to recognise the brain of a musician at autopsy. We all have many acquired skills. They're not 'natural' insofar as they weren't present at birth as fully-fledged skills.  

Hardly anybody - even those who subsequently show great talent - comes into the world automatically able to read, write, drive, cycle or play the trombone.  Through both formal and informal education these skills that form our second nature takes root in our biological and social reality. 

Notwithstanding the odd genius, the common denominators in everything we do are education and practice. If you do anything often enough it becomes second nature to you. Then, when the chips are down and you switch - as we all do - to your default natural position - you’ll switch to your second nature if you've spent long enough practicing.  

Learning to live together in a safe, harmonious and united way may well need a bit of practice. However, there are many possible gains for us as individuals and societies if we manage to learn how to happily coexist. Maybe if we practise a bit we might eliminate prejudice, discrimination, injustice, war, poverty, famine and abuse of all varieties?  Maybe we’ll be able to offer education and health care and safety to children teetering on the brink of annihilation?  Maybe this change will allow these children to grow up and contribute to the world in a positive way instead of having to struggle to survive?

"A Distortion of Human Spirit"

"A Distortion of Human Spirit"

Before any sustainable change can take root the principle of least action means that we must consider the expenditure of energy worthwhile.  We need to believe change is possible and, therefore, worth the effort.  If we believe that as human beings we are fated to act in selfish, violent and aggressive ways then working to promote cooperation and unity and understanding is like searching for our sunglasses - not worth too much energy when it's likely to be wasted effort.  

And yet, all over the world every second of every minute there are selfless, kind, thoughtful, loving acts being performed by ‘ordinary’ people. The savage, violent acts and the big philanthropic gestures grab our attention and make the headlines but most of our societies - and all of our functional families - necessarily run on a constant supply of goodness.  Mothers and fathers and friends and sisters and brothers and children and cousins and grandparents and neighbours and even strangers are acting in kind, caring and ethical ways every single day helping to weave the part of the fabric of our world. 

It is undeniably the case that awful and cruel and negligent acts are also perpetrated every second of every minute of every day in our world.  Notwithstanding this reality most of us agree that these atrocities don’t define us as individuals, why, then do we imagine that they define humanity as a whole? 

Perhaps the real challenge is not that we are bad to the bone and incapable of change but, in fact, that much of the dysfunction we see around us is because we are not in touch with all of the potentialities within our natures.  Kindness, selflessness and heroism have become the preserve of super-heroes and saints.  Superman, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, even Harry Potter.  All possess a sort of virtue-celebrity which most of us would never hope to achieve.

All of us ordinary people have been led to believe that you have to be extra-ordinary to have these admirable characteristics. We have resigned ourselves to our ordinariness as though it was a disability.  But what would happen if we realised that all of us ordinary folk are capable of all sorts of marvellous things, and that this belief, in itself, has the potential to change the world?  If we could see this then, perhaps, all of us ordinary people would keep trying to make things better.  

“Dispassionately examined, the evidence reveals that such conduct,(aggression and violence) far from expressing man’s true self, represents a distortion of the human spirit. Satisfaction on this point will enable all people to set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.” 3

Our widespread and deeply ingrained belief in the intrinsic ‘badness’ of human beings is reflected in our  social systems and institutions.  We invest in prisons and wars and ways to punish, prevent and protect ourselves against this ‘badness’ and it doesn’t really work.  Crime, conflict and unhappiness abound in our societies in spite of the measures we have taken to quash them.  

Maybe if we begin to see the dysfunction in the world not as an inevitable outcome of our flawed humanity but rather as a, “…distortion of the human spirit…”  our approach to all of our problems might change significantly.  Instead of trying to suppress any part of our human nature we might turn our attention to developing our nature in its totality and not simply allowing our ‘automatic’ settings to dominate. 

If we are able to see that our human nature is, when properly developed, an asset not a liability then we will be able to, “…set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.”

It’ll be well worth the effort.

Before any sustainable change can take root the principle of least action means that we must consider the expenditure of energy worthwhile.  We need to believe change is possible and, therefore, worth the effort.  If we believe that as human beings we are fated to act in selfish, violent and aggressive ways then working to promote cooperation and unity and understanding is like searching for our sunglasses - not worth too much energy when it's likely to be wasted effort.  

And yet, all over the world every second of every minute there are selfless, kind, thoughtful, loving acts being performed by ‘ordinary’ people. The savage, violent acts and the big philanthropic gestures grab our attention and make the headlines but most of our societies - and all of our functional families - necessarily run on a constant supply of goodness.  Mothers and fathers and friends and sisters and brothers and children and cousins and grandparents and neighbours and even strangers are acting in kind, caring and ethical ways every single day helping to weave the part of the fabric of our world. 

It is undeniably the case that awful and cruel and negligent acts are also perpetrated every second of every minute of every day in our world.   Notwithstanding this reality most of us agree that these atrocities don’t define us as individuals, why, then do we imagine that they define humanity as a whole? 

Perhaps the real challenge is not that we are bad to the bone and incapable of change but, in fact, that much of the dysfunction we see around us is because we are not in touch with all of the potentialities within our natures.  Kindness, selflessness and heroism have become the preserve of super-heroes and saints.  Superman, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, even Harry Potter.  All possess a sort of virtue-celebrity which most of us would never hope to achieve.

All of us ordinary people have been led to believe that you have to be extra-ordinary to have these admirable characteristics. We have resigned ourselves to our ordinariness as though it was a disability.  But what would happen if we realised that all of us ordinary folk are capable of all sorts of marvellous things, and that this belief, in itself, has the potential to change the world?  If we could see this then, perhaps, all of us ordinary people would keep trying to make things better.  

“Dispassionately examined, the evidence reveals that such conduct,(aggression and violence) far from expressing man’s true self, represents a distortion of the human spirit. Satisfaction on this point will enable all people to set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.” 3

Our widespread and deeply ingrained belief in the intrinsic ‘badness’ of human beings is reflected in our  social systems and institutions.  We invest in prisons and wars and ways to punish, prevent and protect ourselves against this ‘badness’ and it doesn’t really work.  Crime, conflict and unhappiness abound in our societies in spite of the measures we have taken to quash them.  

Maybe if we begin to see the dysfunction in the world not as an inevitable outcome of our flawed humanity but rather as a, “…distortion of the human spirit…”  our approach to all of our problems might change significantly.  Instead of trying to suppress any part of our human nature we might turn our attention to developing our nature in its totality and not simply allowing our ‘automatic’ settings to dominate. 

If we are able to see that our human nature is, when properly developed, an asset not a liability then we will be able to, “…set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.”

It’ll be well worth the effort.

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