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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Ten - The hive Switch - Continued
2. Durkheimogens
[Haidt points out that the Aztecs used psilocybin mushrooms] called teonanacatl -- literally “God’s flesh” in the local language... Teonanacatl took people directly from the profane to the sacred in about thirty minutes... Religious practices north of the Aztecs focused on consumption of peyote, harvested from a cactus containing mescaline. Religious practices south of the Aztecs focused on consumption of ayahuasca... a brew made from vines and leaves containing DMT (dimethyltriptamine).
p229 These three drugs are classed together as hallucinogens (along with LSD and other synthetic compounds) because the class of chemically similar alkaloids in such drugs induce a range of visual and auditory hallucinations. But I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as “religious” or “transformative.”
Most traditional societies have some sort of ritual for transforming boys into men and girls into women. It’s usually far more grueling than a bar mitzvah; it frequently involves fear, pain, symbolism of death and rebirth, and a revelation of knowledge by gods or elders. Many societies used hallucinogenic drugs to catalyze this transformation. The drugs flip the hive switch and help the selfish child disappear. The person who returns from the other world is then treated as a morally responsible adult. One anthropological review of such rites concludes: “These states were induced to heighten learning and to create a bonding among members of the cohort group, when appropriate, so that individual psychic needs would be subsumed to the needs of the social group.”
p230 When Westerners take these drugs, shorn of all the rites and rituals... they often have experiences that are hard to distinguish from the “peak experiences” described by the humanistic psychologist Abe Maslow...
May I just say how annoying it is when Haidt uses nicknames like “Abe” instead of “Abraham?” Wiki search can find Maslow using “Abe” but in many other cases I’ve had to figure the name before I could find the link, and on occasion the actual name was not my first guess.
[Results of a study giving psilocybin to divinity students (And Giving Psilocybin to Divinity Students would be yet another great book title)] ...They found that psilocybin had produced statistically significant effects on nine kinds of experience: (1) unity, including loss of sense of self, and a feeling of underlying oneness, (2) transcendence of time and space, (3) deeply felt positive mood, (4) a sense of sacredness, (5) a sense of gaining intuitive knowledge that felt deeply and authoritatively true, (6) paradoxicality, (7) difficulty describing what had happened, (8) transiency, with all returning to normal within a few hours, and (9) persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior.
Would divinity students really be the best subjects for a study like this? I would think you might learn more from studying delinquents or just average students.
[25 years later] ... One of the psilocybin subjects recalled his experience like this:
All of a sudden I felt sort of drawn out into infinity, and all of a sudden I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation. . . . Sometimes you would look up and see the light on the altar [in the chapel] and it would just be a blinding sort of light and radiations. . . . We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.
(Note 24. Only one of the control subjects [in the study, they were only given vitamin B,] said that the experiment had resulted in beneficial growth, and that, ironically, was because it convinced the subject to try psychedelic drugs as soon as possible...)
3. Raves
p231 ... in the 1980s... advances in pharmacology made a host of new drugs available to the dancing class, particularly MDMA, [ecstasy] a variant of amphetamine that gives people long-lasting energy, along with heightened feelings of love and openness...
... Here is... [Tony Hsieh’s] description [of a San Francisco rave]:
...As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational person in a group, I was surprised to find myself swept with an overwhelming sense of spirituality -- not in the religious sense, but a sense of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the universe. There was a feeling of no judgement. . . . Here there was no sense of self-consiousness or feeling that anyone was dancing to be seen dancing... It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness.
p233 [Haidt about his students] ...I have a new appreciation for the zeal with which they throw themselves into extracurricular activities, most of which turn them into team players... I see them searching for a calling, which they can only find as part of a larger group. I now see them striving and searching on two levels simultaneously, for we are all Homo duplex.
Did you notice how I didn’t bold “striving” there? I can quit whenever I want.
The Biology of the Hive Switch
If the hive switch is real -- if it’s a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding -- then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones. It’s not going to be a spot in the brain -- a clump of neurons that humans have and chimpanzees lack. Rather, it will be a functional system cobbled together from preexisting circuits and substances reused in slightly novel ways to produce a radically novel ability...
(Note 26. There are two other candidates [for a cause of the hive switch besides the ones mentioned below] that I won’t cover because there is far less research on them. V. S. Ramachandran has identified a spot in the left temporal lobe that, when stimulated electrically, sometimes gives people religious experiences... And Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause 2001 studied the brains of people who achieved altered states of consciousness via meditation. The researchers found a reduction in activity in two areas of the parietal cortex that the brain uses to maintain a mental map of the body in space. When those areas are quieter, the person experiences a pleasurable loss of self.)
[Talk about Oxytocin and “the mirror neuron system” -- the way our brains react to things we see happening to others as though they were actually happening to us.]
p235 ...People feel each other’s pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates. Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile. The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile...
p236 [Another study] ... people don’t just blindly empathize; they don’t sync up with everyone they see. We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.
Hives At Work
p237 [Some background on corporations] This legal fiction, recognizing “a collection of many individuals” as a new kind of individual, turned out to be a winning formula. It let people place themselves into a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential for gigantic rewards.
...During the twentieth century, small businesses got pushed to the margins or to extinction as corporations dominated the most lucrative markets. Corporations are now so powerful that only national governments can restrain the largest of them (and even then it’s only some governments, and some of the time).
This is either an alternative or supplemental view of the economic world from Robert Persig’s "the Giant."
...The gains from cooperation and division of labor are so vast that large corporations can pay more than small business and then use a series of institutionalized carrots and sticks -- including expensive monitoring and enforcement mechanisms -- to motivate self-serving employees to act in ways the company desires. But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership) has its limits. Self-interested employees are Glauconians, for more interested in looking good and getting promoted than in helping the company.
In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital -- the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost... Hivish employees work harder, have more fun, and are less likely to quit or to sue the company... they are truly team players.
...
p238 ...people evolved to live in groups of up to 150 that were relatively egalitarian and wary of alpha males... (Note 46. The number 150 is sometimes called “Dunbar’s number” after Robin Dunbar noted that this very roughly seems to be the upper limit on the size of a group in which everyone can know each other, and know the relationships among the others; see Dunbar 1996. [This is also roughly the size of a modern infantry company]) A leader must construct a moral matrix based in some way on the Authority foundation (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the Liberty foundation (to make sure that the subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation (which I defined in chapter 7 as a response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions).
Detroit failed spectacularly at the Liberty foundation. Unionized auto manufacturers created a situation where the corporation was divided into two subtribes, one for management and one for workers. And the two tribes identified more with their counterparts in other corporations than with their opposites in the same corporation. The result was what you would expect.
...with a few institutional changes you can create environments that will nudge everyone’s sliders a bit closer to the hive position. For example:
- Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by... ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity. A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday... You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.
- Exploit synchrony. [Moving together as with Toyota morning calisthenics, group chants and ritualized movements, singing together.]
- Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals... Intergroup competitions, such as friendly rivalries between corporate divisions, or intramural sports competitions, should have a net positive effect on hivishness and social capital. But pitting individuals against each other in a competition for scarce resources (such as bonuses) will destroy hivishness, trust, and morale. [Dragon boat racing would seem to be an ideal instance of this.]
Political Hives
... [JFK’s “Ask not.” as an example of activating the Durkheimian higher nature.]
p241 The yearning to serve something larger than the self has been the basis of so many modern political movements. Here’s another brilliantly Durkheimian appeal:
{Our movement rejects the view of man} as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country, individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which, suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest . . . can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
Inspiring stuff, until you learn that it’s from The Doctrine of Fascism, by Benito Mussolini. Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights. It’s the doctrine of the nation as a superorganism, within which the individual loses all importance...
(Note 56. Mussolini 1932. The phrase removed on the second to last line is “by death itself.” Mussolini may not have written these lines; the essay was written mostly or entirely by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, but it was published with Mussolini’s name as the author.)
Regardless of who wrote it, I recognized it as an expression of Italian Fascism. I’ve gone into this HERE. Haidt’s theories are just an elaboration of what I suggested about man’s need for purpose and meaning. Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search For Meaning was mostly trying to find non-fascist options for this same drive.
Ehrenreich... [in] a chapter of Dancing in the Streets... notes that ecstatic dancing is an evolved biotechnology for dissolving hierarchy and bonding people to each other as a community. Ecstatic dancing, festivals, and carnivals invariably erase or invert the hierarchies of everyday life. [I talk about Fasching and carnival somewhere but I can't find it at the moment.] Men dress as women, peasants pretend to be nobles, and leaders can be safely mocked. When it’s all over and people have returned to their normal social stations, those stations are a bit less rigid, and the connections among people in different stations are a bit warmer.
...
p242 Fascist dictators clearly exploited many aspects of humanity’s groupish psychology, but is that a valid reason for us to shun or fear the hive switch? Hiving comes naturally, easily, joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, and even love. [I’ve been unusually remiss, so far, in not mentioning “Orgy porgy Ford and Fun” from Brave New World. Aldus Huxley was also very much aware of this aspect of human psychology.] Those bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding -- the nature of group selection is to suppress selfishness within groups to make them more effective at competing with other groups... Might the world be a better place if we could greatly increase the care people get within their existing groups and nations while slightly decreasing the care they get from strangers in other groups and nations?
...
p243 When a single hive is scaled up to the size of a nation and is led by a dictator with an army at his disposal, the results are invariably disastrous. But that is no argument for removing or suppressing hives at lower levels. In fact, a nation that is full of healthy hives is a notion of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls... [Whoa. We just jumped to a very Faustian place there. ] ...research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”
A nation of individuals, in contrast, in which citizens spend all their time in Durkheim’s lower level, is likely to be hungry for meaning. If people can’t satisfy their needs for deep connection in other ways, they’ll be more receptive to a smooth-talking [charismatic] leader who urges them to renounce their lives of “selfish momentary pleasure” and follow him onward to “that purely spiritual existence” in which their value as human being consists.
p244 ...Happiness comes from between. [not from within] It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.
...
p245 It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love -- love within groups -- amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.
Not sure he’s right about smaller healthy hives blocking bigger more dangerous ones. Germany, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was full of little hives and they seemed to act as gateway drugs to the nasty ones. We always want stronger drugs.
Here's a great quote from Mary Catherine Bateson that Haidt could have done something with:
More and more, it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error.
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