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What counts as “normal” is human personality types? Are we engaging in a political contest with people whose brains don’t work like ours? Failing to understand one way or another will put us in a strategically weak situation. Just putting the following out as a tentative hypothesis—discussion most welcome.
In my understanding, human personality traits can be placed on continua. Bell curves are probably oversimplifications, but might serve as a starting point for discussion, with “neurotypical” being at the middle of the curve. Note however that people a couple of standard deviations in either direction can be perfectly functional socially. I’d also like to avoid any nature/nurture controversies—the empirical observations are the same either way, and where people fall on the continua certainly owes as much to life experience as to inborn traits. I’ll consider three distributions of traits—cheerfulness/depression, social intelligence, and empathy.
Cheerfulness/depression continuum
Grey pit dwellers-->wet blankets/sourballs-->neurotypical wearers of slightly rose-tinted glasses-->terminally perky
A few years back, one of my coworkers had an article hung in his cubicle describing the job performance of cheerful people versus sourballs, which concluded that the sourballs had more realistic perceptions of complex problems and were more likely to come up with deeper, more thorough and more creative analyses. The terminally perky were far more superficial. Depressed people, when evaluating their own job performances, tended to agree with others' evaluations of them--they did not underrate themselves; their performance evaluations were simply accurate. More optimistic people had higher opinions of themselves than others did.
It's well known that optimism and cheerfulness enhance the immune system and lead to better recovery from a whole spectrum of diseases, so individuals will be selected for that trait. The human norm is probably therefore having a somewhat rosy tint to perceptions of reality. However, it may well be that the tribe needs at least a few people to perceive more accurately what is really going on, and to more creatively deal with new situations, so there would be group selection for this. The price paid is that a few on the far end of the spectrum will periodically get trapped in the grey pit, the dark night of the soul. (To the extent that genetics is involved, it probably works like the distribution of sickle cell hemoglobin genes in malaria-prone regions. The price for having half the population malaria-resistant is having 25% of the population with sickle cell anemia.)
Social intelligence continuum
Expert dolphin-like divers in the social swim-->neurotypicals-->nerds/geeks-->Asperger's syndrome-->high-functioning autistics--> completely dysfunctional head-banging autistics
Human social connectedness depends on the ability of most people to read social signals. However, it is also clearly beneficial to human society to have some of its members partly stripped of that ability so that they can perceive reality logically without dealing with misleading conceptions deriving from pure social utility. That’s where we get scientists and engineers from. (Charismatic politicians are at the other end of the spectrum.) The price we pay is that a few people will be doomed to spending their lives banging their heads on hard surfaces.
I’m not discounting possible environmental causes of autism here, just suggesting that we are possibly looking at an overlay of environment-related cases sitting on top of a full spectrum of personality types within a normal range. Similarly, type I and type II diabetes are very different conditions despite the fact that they have problems with blood sugar control in common.
I think that the male/female differences come about because it can be absolutely lethal for women to be unable to read social signals emanating from those who commonly kill or maim them for such misreadings. Whether by biology or sex-role socialization or both, it is the case that girl geeks are usually somewhat less geeky than boy geeks—this enables them to mediate between boy geeks and society at large, even though they are generally unable to keep up with the junior high female “in” crowd.
Empathy continuum
Sociopaths-->near sociopaths-->soldiers/emergency workers-->the neurotypically empathic-->altruists-->hearts tending to bleed uncontrollably all over almost everything
Empathy is the human norm--we really do feel other peoples' pain. It creates social bonds because acting to relieve others’ pain relieves our own psychological distress. However, it is also necessary to be able to suppress empathy for self-defense and dealing with assorted emergencies. Your chances of survival are greatly enhanced if your emergency room team does not feel your pain, but instead treats you like a malfunctioning meat machine until your vital signs are stabilized. If we need to suppress empathy occasionally to survive, it immediately follows that a few people will inevitably turn out to be entirely too good at it--hence sociopathology. To sociopaths, others are never anything but objects to be used for their own benefit. On the other end of the spectrum are people almost incapacitated for self defense because of their intense empathy—that’s where religious traditions like Jainism come from.
Looking at phenomena like the high suicide rate among police officers and the incidence of PSTD in people exposed to battle conditions, we seem (thankfully) to not have enough people trending toward sociopathology to completely fill our needs for protection/emergency career positions. PSTD exists because the majority of our cops and soldiers are neurotypically empathic.
So, what does all this have to do with bushbots?
Of the three continua I have described, I think that they are different from us on the empathy continuum. I’d label them as near-sociopathic, not Ted Bundy-style complete sociopaths, but having the same relationship to Ted Bundy as people with Asperger’s syndrome have to head-banging autistics. The parts of their brains that process the information “How would I like it if someone did that to me?” function either poorly or only intermittently. And it’s a common enough condition that I sure wish there was a common readily recognizable term analogous to Asperger’s syndrome that we could use to describe them.
It explains at least a few things, like frinstance how rule-bound and authoritarian they are. This indicates deviation from neurotypical empathic ability. Consider how Asperger’s syndrome people deal with their inability to read social cues—they use a rulebook based on careful observation of neurotypical behavior. (#47. When a neurotypical says “How are you?” this is not actually a request for detailed information.)
Theologians, confonting the observation that people who did not share their particular religious beliefs nonetheless mostly behaved perfectly reasonably toward each other, came up with the concept of natural law. That is, inborn empathy is the foundation of human ethics and the source of the Golden Rule proverbs found in every known human culture. Lao Tzu famously observed “When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears.” In other words, discard natural human empathy and immediately you need a lot rules and regulations to make people behave ethically.
So, perhaps the bushbot insistence on punitive law enforcement and displaying the Ten Commandments everywhere reflects their self-awareness as defective people who need a rule book. Lots of sociopaths and near-sociopaths, after all, can function perfectly well in society if they decide that following the rules is more convenient and pleasant for them than not following the rules. Naturally a near-sociopath will perceive us neurotypically empathic types as “bleeding hearts,” because that’s how someone in the middle of the continuum looks to them from their position at the other end of it.
Situational sociopathology
Consider the well-known experiments of Stanley Milgram, which demonstrate clearly that just about anybody is capable of sociopathic behavior under the right conditions. This is analogous to situational depression, which results not from a generic personality tendency to be in that place on the continuum, but from specific lousy things that happen to people. Similarly, widespread situational sociopathology can result from truly threating events, like the 9-11 attacks. The urge to strike back indiscriminately will eventually fade as we get back to normal, just as we eventually recover from the death of someone close, divorce, job loss and the like.
So, we have a core group of near-sociopaths that aren’t going to change, and the rest of us who can temporarily act like them. If that first group isn’t too large, we’re in luck. All it takes to devalue the bushbot memes is for more of us to be like the actors in Milgram’s experiment. A single voice saying “No, don’t apply more intense shocks” snapped the rest of of his experimental subjects out of their befuddled-by-authority state.
Any suggestions on realistically dealing with the minority of incurable bushbots? Just let them have their Ten Commandment monuments? Go along with a really punitive legal system to some extent? What?
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