This is a post about fear. The idea is that fear of being excluded is an invisible regulator of human behaviour. It is also about how to acknowledge your fear, how to practice being afraid, and how to not let it stop you from doing what you see to be right. To make that happen you have to be aware of your own fear, which is uncomfortable and unpleasant, which is why hardly anyone does it.
Being me, this is also a sketch of a theory of social dynamics based on speculations about evolved emotional responses among neurotypical humans. I begin to think I could even write code that would model this, which I’ve been dreaming of for a long time. Stay tuned.
To be clear this a sketch of a system, not a grand unified theory of human behaviour. Physcists like me—experts in dynamical models—make use of this kind of thing to help us reason about systems that are too complicated to deal with in their full glory. And this sort of model is used to understand all kinds of human and animal behaviour, from traffic patterns to epidemics. I’ve written this kind of model myself, but never been able to come up with one that looks like it might be able to capture the dynamics of what to me is the strangest aspect of human behaviour, which is putting “belonging” ahead of life itself.
So while on the one hand this may sound like the kind of fat gibberish that philosophers produced for millenia without notable enlightenment, it’s something quite different: a testable hypothesis about why people behave as they do, which is grounded in evolution and a knowledge of how biological systems commonly regulate themselves.
The specific areas of human behaviour this idea is aimed at explaining are those that have dominated world in the past few years: the failed response to the ongoing covid pandemic, and the rise of fascism in the United States.
It also has implications for my informal understanding of individual behaviour. Maybe it’ll be useful to you in that regard, as well. Simple models ideally allow both dynamical modelling of the systems under consideration, and informal reasoning about those systems.
It’s been a bit less than a year since I put “World of Wonders” on hiatus, and as well as the ongoing failure of “public health”, the rise of fascism in the United States via what’s been described as an “executive coup” brings me back to it.
I will be posting irregularly in future, focusing on skills and values useful for survival and sanity in midst of «waves hands» all this.
I’ve done a lot of reflection in the past ten months. I’ve had a lot to reflect on, mostly my failures of prediction and advocacy over the past five years, which is what has led me to think about alternative explanations for human behaviour.
My biggest failure of prediction was calling the American election for Harris. Although the uncertainty was high, I incorrectly believed that the relative enthusiasm shown at Harris rallies, and the support of celebrities like Taylor Swift, was predictive of high Democratic turnout on election day. On the other side, I incorrectly believed that the large number of senior Republicans endorsing Harris and warning against her opponent indicated that many of the rank and file would at least be willing to stay home on election day, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the other gang.
Elections are decided by turnout in the US, and based on those facts, as well as some analysis of early voting numbers, I thought a Harris win was very likely and a Harris landslide was well within scope.
I was wrong.
This is not a new thing: I’m wrong a lot. You should be too.
My failures of advocacy put me in good company: I have been pushing for clean indoor air standards for most of the past five years, as have many others with vastly larger platforms than mine and much more academic credibility than I have. We have all failed to convince a single government anywhere in North America to implement ASHRAE 241 clean air standards or similar for indoor public spaces. Instead we are currently seeing a steady stream of op-eds asking querulously “Why everyone is sick all the time?”, often with reference to the false idea of “immunity debt”.
I am a scientist, first and foremost. When the world does not conform to my expectations, I do not say, “How could the world possibly be so wrong!”, but rather, “Why does my understanding not accurately describe the world as it actually is?”
My understanding of the world led me to believe that most people would look at the concrete differences between what Harris and Trump were offering and vote for Harris. My understanding of the world led me to believe that once people realized respiratory diseases were spread by aerosols they would demand clean indoor air for themselves and others.
My understanding was wrong, and this gives me an opportunity to use the law of causality to update it.
Law of causality says that what a thing is causes what it does. This is fundamental to the discipline of science: by looking at how things behave (what they do) we build theories that describe what they are. When things start behaving in ways our theories can’t account for, we say, “That means things are not the way the theory says they are.”
This difference in attitude—the humility to let how the world behaves guide what we believe about it, rather than insisting that it conform to what think it should be—is what separates the scientific mind from the unscientific one.
I used to believe that the discipline of science was something that most people could probably manage with a little bit of effort. The past few years have shown me how wrong I was about this. The discipline of science is fantastically hard. Far harder than I imagined, and my theory for why this should be is rooted in a new understanding of what motivates human beings.
I had thought that most people were motivated by their own well-being and the well-being of those around them, particularly those they cared about. This led me to predict that most people would pick a conventional leader with a message of hope and positive policies for improvement over a convicted felon who promised to be rule as a dictator. I also thought that once people understood that covid was airborne and could kill or disable them and people they loved, they would insist on cleaner indoor air, and take up wearing an N95 indoors in public while we got that sorted.
I was wrong about all of this, and while there are various moves I could make in response, the simplest by far is to acknowledge that most people are not motivated by their own well-being or the well-being of those they care about. More complex alternative moves include insisting that people are stupid, and while motivated to care about themselves and others, they just don’t have the brains to know what’s good for them. I don’t buy that. I don’t think people are that stupid. I think they’re motivated by things other than facts about external circumstances, like being sent off to death camps or being disabled by covid.
This is not a new idea for me, but recent events have crystalized my thinking on it, which goes like this:
Neurotypical human beings do not care about anything except the success of their gang and their status within their gang, and the reason why people are this way is because of fear, which is an evolved negative feedback mechanism that keeps human gangs stable.
I’m using “fear” here differently from how it’s sometimes used in cultural anthropology, where it refers to fear of formal retribution. Fear, guilt, and shame cultures are all depend on cognitive processing of feelings people are aware of, and are specific to their particular cultural milieus. The fear I am talking about here almost never reaches conscious awareness, and is a near-universal feature of the human condition, regardless of cultural circumstances. It is what allows any human group to have a culture, to function as a coherent whole, no matter what its cognitive basis.
Humans are a pro-social species. They live in large groups and coordinate complex actions without a great deal of effort. They’re very good at it. This is what has made it possible for humans to “fill the Earth and subdue it”. Cultures consist of gangs, which are groups of humans who identify with a common idea, story, or person (leader, guru, what-have-you.) Gangs can exist in a nested and overlapping hierarchy, more a graph than a tree. The culture itself is a gang.
Being part of at least one gang is a matter of survival for neurotypical humans, as much as being in the water is a matter of survival for a fish.
In Darwinian terms, the combination of your gang’s success and your status within your gang is the single biggest influence on your odds of reproduction, which means humans have been selected to both be enormous assholes—which helps them rise in status within their gang—and selfless altruists—which helps their gang succeed. That these two things are fundamentally, profoundly, and inexorably in conflict with each other is one of the defining aspects of the human condition.
It is also just the kind of thing nature does.
Regulation via a balance of opposing processes is extremely common in biological systems.
Western science views the world in terms of balance. In physics and chemistry, conservation laws ensure our descriptions of nature respect the balance of mass and energy and momentum. Geology is grounded in our understanding of the balance of tectonic forces. And in the biology, the opposition of creative and destructive processes is vital to our understanding of how organisms achieve balance (homeostasis).
For example, bone contains both osteoblasts and osteoclasts: the former are specialized cells that create new bone, the latter are cells that destroy bone that already exists. This allows bone to be remodelled under stress—growing denser, for example, when we spend a lot of time lifting heavy loads—and to heal when damaged, letting spurs or fragments be resorbed while new bone forms across breaks.
The regulation of social behaviour via a balance between selfish individualism that raises one’s own status within the gang, and group-oriented collectivism that increases the success of the gang as a whole, is an entirely ordinary biological process of this commonplace kind.
As with the bone example above this kind of balanced regulatory mechanism allows the system to adapt to stresses and insults and changing circumstances in flexible and dynamic ways, although as with any dynamical system, the limits of stability are finite. It’s possible for internal or external forces to push a system with this kind of regulation outside of the zone of stability.
In the case of human behavioural regulation, the two opposed processes—selfish individualism and altruistic collectivism—are only meaningful within a gang context, which is where normal humans live. A lone castaway on a desert island is not an individualist: they are an individual. And they have no collective to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of.
In any biological system regulated by the balance of opposing forces, there has to be something that modulates the balance, tilting it toward one side or the other in response to external pressures. In the case of bone, it is literally pressure or stress that does this: under pressure the osteoblasts and osteoclasts remodel the bone to ease the external stresses.
In the case of the balance of human forces, fear of exclusion is a plausible candidate for a similar regulatory role.
In every human culture ostracism and shunning are extreme sanctions, and solitary confinement the most extreme of all.
To punish his adulterous (and probably treasonous) daughter, the Roman emperor Augustus banished her to a small island off the coast of Italy. There was a well-appointed villa on the island. Unlike some exiles, she had good access to food, although probably not whatever passed for haute cusine in Augustan Rome. She was denied access to wine and the company of men, but otherwise left to herself.
This was considered a dreadful punishment.
For a non-social species—bears, say—the forced separation from others of its kind would be no big deal.
For neurotypical humans it’s the biggest deal of all.
I’m emphasizing neurotypicality here because for at least some neurodiverse humans—ones like me—being solitary is a balm, not a punishment. I am deficient in the social intelligence, or social perception, that neurotypical humans have, and while I can fake gang membership well enough to get along in many situations, actual belonging is something that happens to other people.
For any group to organize itself there has to be some kind of motivating mechanism that serves as an organizing principle. This principle is what enables individuals within the group to coordinate their individual actions with others in the group. Because evolution acts on individuals, there has to be something that motivates individuals, but organizes the group as a whole. That is, there has to be emergent behaviour, where the forces influencing individuals produce structure and behaviour at the group level.
For flocking birds, for example, three simple rules of individual behaviour produce flocks that are realistic in both structure and motion.
There is a conceit that among humans that reason serves this purpose, but reason is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to the vast majority of routine social behaviour, which is the kind of behaviour I’m concerned with here. Neurotypical humans do a tonne of this stuff. They chat with each other, play sports, go to the theatre or the movies or to see a band. They socialize. They engage in behaviour that is designed to do nothing but establish and maintain group coherence in the form of like-mindedness and similarity of behaviour, which is what allows group members to work together efficiently and effectively. It’s this social behaviour I want to focus on, because once we understand it, the rest follows.
For a group to be self-organized, for group behaviour to emerge from individual motivations, most individuals must be similarly motivated and the motivation must lead to self-correction relative to the group. Even if there are blocs within a group that are pursuing different ends—as there may be subflocks within groups of birds—having the same underlying rules of behaviour still creates an overall coordination between them.
My contention is that the most important motivating mechanisms in for individual humans in this regard is fear. Fear of being left out. Fear of being different. Fear of being excluded or ostracized. Fear of being alone.
This is not really a revelation: as I said above, it is a commonplace that fear of exclusion is so fundamental to humans that it is universally used as extreme punishment. Contending this is not the case would be require denying well-established facts.
All I’m contending is that as well as being this huge big thing when it comes to formal punishment, fear of being excluded, different, odd, or an outsider also dominates routine day-to-day social behaviour, because demonstrably most neurotypical humans will do anything—even kill and die—to avoid it.
But it’s important that avoidance of this fear is so deeply ingrained, and humans are so good at it, that most of them aren’t even aware of what’s happening.
The negative feedback mechanism fear-avoidance triggers is so effective that the individual experience of fear is never allowed to rise above the most minimal level. At the first hint the of fear of being seen as different, the individual corrects their behaviour to avoid it, and by doing so allows the coherent behaviour of the group to emerge.
This also happens preemptively, because the human brain and nervous system aren’t just reactive, they’re predictive. Normal humans rapidly figure out what social situations and behaviours have a good chance of inducing fear of being seen as different and then they avoid them.
So even though this fear is the primary cause of a great deal of routine human social behaviour—what clothes we wear, how we walk, the kinds of conversations we have, and with whom, and the kind of language we use while having them—it is hardly ever experienced.
This is normal in feedback control systems: the “error signal”—which is the difference between the desired level and the actual level of the control variable—is kept as small as possible. In a thermal control system I work on, the error signal is rarely more than a few hundredths of a degree, controlling a temperature of over 40 C. If the system was conscious, and you asked it if temperature was important to it, it might well say, “I never notice the temperature. I’m never hot or cold. Avoiding temperature extremes just isn’t important to me.”
Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? Why—how—would there be conscious awareness of something that was controlled away at the subconsious level?
Most people think avoiding fear isn’t something that’s important to them because they’re doing it so well and so automatically that they’re never even aware of it.
In the cases when this fear does become explicit—first dates, job interviews, speaking or singing in public—it can be debilitating, and if we don’t handle it well it can become deadly. Most people dread these situations and avoid them as much as possible, only acquiescing to them when something vital like “ever being in a relationship” or “having a job” is on the line.
Fear of being seen as different is the most important regulator of human social behaviour because it provides negative feedback: unlike love or joy or even anger, when something induces fear we act to avoid it and the fear goes away. We are back in equilibrium. Back in balance. Negative feedback can produce stability. Positive feedback can’t.
Only two emotions have strong negative feedback in the people feeling them: fear and disgust.
Some others, like anger and sadness, produce negative feedback in other people. Anger, when expressed, is supposed to get other people to stop doing whatever it is that’s annoying us, and sadness motivates others to give us solace, which may at least blunt our grief.
The rest—joy, curiosity, anticipation, love—motivate us to do things that make more of whatever we’re feeling. Those are positive feedbacks, and require external constraints to limit them. For example, nobody’s behaviour but mine is modified by my joy in building a boat, and the negative feedbacks that keep that joy from running away with me aren’t emotional but economic: I have only so much money and time. If I ignored those I would have a compulsive disorder, which is a positive feedback let run free.
And while emotions that have positive feedback can play a role in emergent behaviour among people who experience the same feeling and who get together and share it, the joy someone might feel in dancing or going to a concert or attending a political rally or goose-stepping down the Unter den Linden is inevitably tempered by external factors, like the need to sleep or earn a living or the arrival of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Because of this, emotions that give positive feedback tend to organize groups episodically, not continuously.
Only socially-relevant negative feedbacks can produce stability, and fear being seen as different is by far the most effective. Disgust is less important and primarily aimed at physical, rather than social, phenomena. An open sewer pipe is disgusting (trust me on this) but not something anyone is in a social relationship with (one hopes).
Contagious anger—literally “out-rage”—can serve as a source of positive feedback between people, but like any system governed by positive feedback, this leads to a self-limiting crescendo that often ends catastrophically. At some point non-linearities due to external factors always kick in.
Only the negative feedback of ubiquitous fear reliably produces social stability as people go through the routines of their daily lives.
Did you ever get the feeling there was some invisible force orchestrating events in the world around you?
You were right: it’s fear. Yours and everyone else’s.
In the routines of ordinary life, this leads to stable, predictable social interactions, but when the extraordinary takes over the institutions we routinely inhabit, it can lead to some very bad outcomes.
For example, there has been a lot of gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair in the West of late as liberals have said some variant of: “I can’t understand why anyone would… vote for Musk… bend the knee to Musk… not stand up to Musk…”
Janet Petro, Director of NASA, put her name to a letter implementing Musk’s executive order ending diversity, inclusion, equality, and accessibility initiatives across the US government. Petro isn’t an idiot or an ideologue. She’s a coward.
Republican Senators voted to approve Musk’s choice of Defense Secretary, despite that person being obviously unfit. They did so because they are afraid.
Department of Justice lawyers are presenting transparently false claims as defenses in court of Musk’s unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship. They are doing so because they are afraid.
Their fears are mundane in the most literal sense of the word: they are afraid of losing status within their neurotypical gang. They are afraid of exclusion. Not unemployment, not physical harm, not being sent off to camps (yet… although since I wrote the first draft of this plans for a concentration camp have been announced), but being ostracized, becoming outsiders, looking weird or weak to the other members of their gang. These are ordinary fears, of the kind that guide your own decisions on dozens or hundreds of small things every day.
But no one is supposed to talk about this. People take it for granted that everyone is more-or-lesss fearless, despite living lives that are in vitally important ways routinely regulated by fear.
Art can get at it in sufficiently fantastic circumstances. In the classic science fiction film “Blade Runner”, Roy Batty isn’t talking about being a replicant when he says to Deckard: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” He’s talking about being a human.
To the extent humans living without any obvious external coercion are never-the-less unfree, it’s because fear is causing them do what they do. Fear they are afraid to admit to.
When sociologists talk about this, as Barry Glassner does in his book “The Culture of Fear”, they frame fear-motivated behaviour as something extraordinary, unusual, even unique to our present age. This is not only historically myopic—modern fears have nothing on the ancient or even relatively recent world—it misses the key point I’m arguing here: that almost everyone’s behaviour is being regulated by fear all the time. When we modify our behaviour to reduce or avoid fear of being seen as different, when we respond to the tiniest error signal in our fear feedback loop and naturally alter our behaviour to damp it back down to zero, we are acting out of fear.
This is not an inherently bad thing. It’s just how human beings live. Neurotypical humans are incredibly successful as a species because they are so intensely pro-social, and fear of standing out in ways that don’t enhance their status within their gang is what makes those gangs so stable, capable, and powerful. Everyone fearlessly doing their own thing would be a disaster for humans just as much as trying to live on land would be a disaster for fish.
But it’s a bad thing when human society becomes disregulated, and the worst people, often driven by their own outsized fears—fears they would rather die than admit to—take control.
In that case, fear is our enemy, not our friend, and to make it otherwise we need to be aware of it, to admit to our fear, and to practice living with error signals that are way outside our ordinary comfort zone.
No one wants to admit that their behaviour is regulated by fear. Being afraid carries with it considerable social stigma, in part because it implies a failure of the regulatory mechanism that is supposed to keep us in line, to keep us part of the gang, and to keep the gang co-ordinated and cohesive and strong. That makes us afraid: it’s meta-fear, Roosevelt’s fear of fear itself.
If our fear becomes noticable, if it becomes something we can feel in our heart, in our stomach, in our guts, it means the error signal has grown large, which can only happen if the regulatory mechanism that is supposed to correct our behaviour has failed.
That makes us dangerous.
The SF novel Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold opens with the heroine thinking to herself, “I am afraid” and ends [SPOILER ALERT] with the heroine rolling the severed head of her nemesis down a boardroom table like a bowling ball, and telling the gathered generals, “I’m tired of your stupid war. End it.” They do.
People who are afraid to admit that they are afraid, who are afraid to think those dangerous words “I am afraid”, don’t do things like that. They can’t. They’re afraid to.
And that means they are unable to process their fear as fear when the memo comes down telling them that they are obligated to report any instances of wrongthink they observe, and that “failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”
Faced with a situation like that, we have two choices: courage or cowardice.
Courage: Name what they are feeling. Say, “I am afraid” and act bravely in the face of it. Honourably. Courage is right action in the face of fear.
Cowardice: Deny what they are feeling. Deny that they are afraid and instead make excuses for themselves. “I’m not afraid, but if I don’t do this, someone else will,” or “I’m not afraid, I just can’t afford to lose my job right now” (How about your country? How about your liberty? How about your rights? How about your soul? Can you afford to lose all of those?) Or the tried and false: “I’m not afraid, I’m just following orders.”
I believe that the average person who has just enough courage to close their eyes and take a deep breath and say, “I am afraid” almost certainly has enough courage to go on to do something right. Maybe in a small way. Maybe in a way that just gums up the fascist works a little bit. But more than nothing. More than collaboration. More than being a quisling.
There is nothing wrong with being afraid of exclusion from a group: it is the most natural feature of the human condition.
But the denial of our own fear is the gateway to hell, the most fundamental betrayal of ourselves, and a betrayal of any gang worth belonging to.
Fear denied is fear triumphant.
Names have power. Words have power.
Saying, “I am afraid” is naming one of the biggest influences on our actions, and naming gives us power over it. We can let it surface, and not respond to it but mindfully contemplate it.
Most of us don’t do this, and I can give you a very simple, very strong, piece of evidence for this: hardly anyone is wearing an N95 as a matter of routine in indoor public spaces. Not in health care, except when it’s mandated. Not on the bus. Not on the subway. Not on a crowded ferry full of coughing and sniffling people.
And everyone is complaining about how sick they’ve been.
Why don’t they N95, which would dramatically reduce the level of illness they experience? I’ve asked people, and the answer is some variant of:
“Because I would be the only one doing it.”
That’s something only a neurotypical human letting their behaviour be regulated by fear of exclusion from the group would say. It otherwise makes no sense.
And it is being said in the face of death. In the face of disablement. In the face of killing and disabling other people.
Because killing or dying matter less than the risk of being excluded. Or even feeling excluded. Because feeling excluded produces fear.
“I am afraid.”
That’s the honest answer to the question of “Why not N95?”, left carefully implicit by the answer actually given.
And I would challenge everyone who doesn’t N95 to take up a simple challenge. Go about some routine public indoor activity. Shop for groceries. Take the bus. Go to the movies. And wear an N95.
Then pay attention to how you feel. Be mindful, not in the “empty your mind while breathing in one ear and out the other” sense, but in the sense of paying close attention to what you are feeling.
Because what you are feeling is fear, in the sense I’m using it here. That discomfort. That desire for this to stop happening. That’s fear.
And when you feel that say, aloud or to yourself: “I am afraid.”
If you keep up a practice like that, you’ll know what you’re feeling when the knock comes on the door, when the memo arrives giving you a choice between ratting out your co-workers or risking your job, when your company announces it needs more misogynist energy, or that a big order has just come in to help build the latest concentration camp. And knowing what you’re feeling, you’ll have a better chance of refusing to do something you will regret for the rest of your life.
It’s quite an experience to name your fear. That’s what it is to be free.
A most excellent assessment of the human condition. As Hilary said powerful and thought provoking.
Great to have you back, sir. I found you on BlueSky as well. Will go over the article in more detail and comment in the next couple of days.