Instinctive Propensities
Who has not had the experience of concentrating very hard for an hour or more? It creates fatigue. At one time, I taught Algebra II and pre-calculus at a rural high school. These student’s minds would give out after a half – hour of thinking hard. The same students would go home in the afternoon to the ranch or farm where they lived. They would do hard manual labor for perhaps three or more hours before calling it a day. The school was so small that over half of the boys played on the foot ball team. They had an endless amount of energy. They never complained about hard physical work at all. They complained endlessly about the rigors of doing brain work.
Clearly the brain has a way of conserving energy. Most of brain activity is automatic.Much of what the brain has you do is automatic. More decisions are made automatically than otherwise. A lot of behaviors are inborn and instinctive. Here are some important examples.
Humans are instinctively driven to exalt themselves. They also exalt groups they are born into and participate in voluntarily. Loyalties are inborn as wall as acquired. Take race for example. White and black people have a degree of loyalty to their race. That seems normal, but does it make any sense? Actually, it doesn’t in the realm of reality. Neither gets a check in the mail from their race. If either has been hurt, it has most likely been at the hands of someone of their own race. There is your country and mine, your state, city and neighborhood as well.
Arbitrary loyalties are cultivated and nurtured. In high school, a kid is deemed as much as a pariah if they don’t root for their home team. Woe to the student that lacks school spirit. Only a reprobate would not support the home team. School is a team effort. Pride in your school is the word.
There are loyal Republicans and loyal Democrats, life long. Their party can go off and leave them but they are still loyal, good or bad to the end. It can boil down to “It is, sure my party has not lived up to my expectations. They will someday…. for sure.” The right words keep the faithful from wandering off or God forbid…. switching parties.
A political party is a public institution. A person can join a party, quit and join the other. That almost never happens.
Where motivations are biologically driven, loyalties are far less common. There is lots of loyalty in marriage but in half of them there is not. Infidelity is extremely common. Sometimes there is loyalty to an employer. That is – provided all is going well for the one who is loyal. Circumstances change…. and all loyalties go out the window. Behavior in the work place is rooted in the survival instinct.
What we find is a loyalty hierarchy, If it gets in the way of survival and reproduction, that loyalty easily goes out the window, when perceived better opportunities come along. There is still loyalty but it can be and often is circumstantial.
A person who is fantasy free, thinks these things through and reasons out when to be loyal and when not to be.
Propensity To Worship
Masses of folk place faith in God, based on a religion. Do they look to God for guidance? Some do in a general sense. When it comes down to difficult issues in life, they place their faith in someone or an institution. That is normally their government or an expert of some kind. Are governments or an expert helpful? Sometimes an expert is. But, who has been helped by the government lately?
Are experts worth what they charge? Sometimes they are but often they are not.
It isn’t all about experts, Look at t – shirts for sale at Walmart. See if you can find one without an icon representing an adorned name or icon on one. People want to display their affection – with respect to those they look up to..This is a form of worship. People are much more prone to worship each other than they are a supreme being.
Human Herding Instinct
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