twisting darwin - just a bit. 18 min reading.

Summary: We are drafted into various games. Some we are aware of and some we are not and some we chose to not look at like games. What's the nature of these games? Are they truly "survival of the fittest"? And could there be adaptive and maladaptive forms of "survival of the fittest"? The following scribble (18 min reading time) stitches together some concepts and borrows from likes of John Powell (Haas Institute), Joshua Greene (Harvard), Gleb Tsipursky (Ohio University), Niall Fergusson (Hoover Institute), and some more. 

What happened in childhood that invoked Darwin?

Circa 1980s.

Summer afternoons were a treat, no matter the heat.

They were full of vocations and vacations.

They were the days of a yester-child. 

I was playing with Shankar. 

I do not remember exactly what we were playing though.

Suddenly i felt someone twisting my ears badly....reeeeeeeally badly. 

Those were the days when ears had some strange significance.

Hold-ears-and-stand-for-long as punishments.

Holding ears-for-some-seconds to acknowledge mistake.

Someone else twisting the ears, somewhat like tuning up to an "alarming thing", and register.

I had the privilege of experiencing all of them. 

I must admit that i did change my behavior. 

But the twist is that I would continue to do my stuff my ways strategically and hidingly...not in all cases but quite a few of them.

As my ears twisted anticlockwise and started turning hot,

i intuitively turned around to combat the twist.

Try it out...it doesn't work...no matter whether the ears are twisted clockwise or anticlockwise, any horizontal movement only aggravates. The only remedy is to be able to twist one's body vertically in the opposite direction of the twist. Now you know you need to be agile and martial about it.

Anyways,

I met with two wide-as-though-would-not-stop-widening eyes.

I-want-to-teach-a-lesson eyes.

Gopal Uncle screamed at me.

I was still under the pain of the twisted ears ... that remained twisted in his hard finger-tongs.

And then his surround sound exploded.

"One day this kid will bring his rogue friends and strip you and the neighborhood of the valuables", was a huge thing for me to swallow at that age. 

A 7 year old that i was, is an alien to many things and concepts in the world. 

This reminds me that as a child i held several paradoxes in my expanding brain jelly. One of them was that i wanted to magically-leap-frog to be an adult (to have autonomy from all the "No" i would encounter from parents and others), while i also wanted to prolong the play and the care and the warmth handed down to a child. Anyways I am digressing...

Coming back to Gopal and Shankar.

So, Shankar was a kid who stayed in a nearby dwelling (which i used to call home as a child, and i realized that they are called slums when i grew old). 

Gopal Uncle was worried that these "others" would hurt or harm "us".

The "Us vs Them" has a deeper core to it. What is it?

John Powell, Haas Institute

Those were some of my early exposures to what John Powell (Chair at Haas Institute for Fair and Inclusive Society) calls "otherisms". That there are ways in which we sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously start seeing some as "like us" and some as "not like us".  

Gleb Tsipursky, Cognitive Scientist

This is also what is a referred to as family of "attribution error" as described by Gleb Tsipursky, Cognitive Scientist and Disaster Avoidance Expert. The abstract version of this means the process of attributing property of one to the other without reflection. This one to another could be from one person to another, one person in a gender to most other persons in the gender, or one person in a caste to all persons in the caste, or one situation to another, and so on. 

Joshua Greene, Experimental Psychologist, Harvard

and then engaging with them in what Joshua Greene (Experimental Psychologist, Harvard) calls the "us vs them" games. These games involve talking or pitching or fighting on behalf of the group. However, many times its unreflected and also knowingly-unknowingly with biases and or self-serving motives.

That day i deferred to Gopal Uncle.

And I deferred many a times to many Gopal Uncles. 

Sometimes because I was weak physically.

Sometimes because I was weak conceptually.

Sometimes weak legally, racially, morally.

Sometimes because I lacked the spine.

But i kept wondering as to why "they" would harm "us"? 
And even deeply as to "who are they?" and "who are us".
What makes them as "they" and us as "us"?

I do not know much of Darwin, except the popular canonical of variation-selection-heredity, and the famous "survival of the fittest". 

I had begun to parse "survival" and "fittest" separately. And looked for nuance. (we will cover the rest of the threads about this in another post)

There could be the weak fighting the strong for survival, there could be peer-fights, there could be weak fighting with weak and so on. 

But i had begun to feel that there is a twist or a subset to Darwin.

And it is called "living off the weakest". Namely finding games with the weaker and winning them. 

Throughout the days and weeks and life,

we encounter several persons.

Some familiar, some unfamiliar.

We interact with some of them.

Directly or indirectly.

And somewhere in our mind,

we conceptualize of them being

stronger, weaker, equal or mysterious to us.

And these are dynamic relations, depending on myriad factors.

Sometimes the power equations change over lifetime,

sometimes several times during the same meeting,

sometimes on achieving somethings,

sometimes on losing somethings...

We deal with each of them differently.

Our agreements and disagreements with them on various matters, and their demonstrations or expressions to them are different to each of them.

It seems to me that we succumb to the seduction of 

deferring to the strong.

outsmarting the equal,

exploiting the weak

or sheer outcheating all of them through various strategies

So, we are drafted into games or we chose them or an interplay between the two that we cannot put a finger on, and in order to play those games, we have to deal with the power equations. But how does that involve people other than our own self?

One of the many scenarios.

Cub-kills are prevalent in the wild. 

They aren't about "survival of the fittest".

They are about "living off the weakest".

Fast-chasers prey on the slow-runners.

Most intelligent prey on the less intelligent.

High designation prey on the low designations.

Sometimes, when an individual is weak against an individual or group, the weak form clusters but the strong also form their clubs.

Niall Fergusson, Hoover Scholar

Niall Fergusson highlights this beautifully in his "The Square and The Tower".

Where the hierarchies (formal structures) want to self-perpetuate and the networks (informal structures) constantly tug-and-tinker for a rehashed social order.

It started becoming clearer to me that "us vs them" is a strategy for gaining more strength on one's side. 

What is promoted and demoted when we subscribe to "survival of the fittest"?

What could be done to alleviate "living off the weakest"?

There are meditations on these by Martha Naussbaum, Amartya Sen and Johnn Rawls on the idea of building the capacity of the individual. 

There are efforts being made by institutions like the Institute of New Economic Thing, Rethinking Economics, Evonomics, and 50+ more such mechanisms to reimagine to political-economic-social landscape. 

There are individuals (who have been either not allowed by gated institutions or have voluntarily preferred their own medium to communicate) with their interesting podcasts.

All of these and many many more initiatives in-person, on virtual, and other mechanisms, are being worked across the world. There are almost 300+ of them. All of them are using new ways of inquiry, interactions, respectful disagreements, etc in order to look at the various political, economic and social systems.

I am not saying that hurt or harm are simple concepts. 

Sometimes our hurt helps the person...intended or not

Sometimes help hurts the person...intended or not.

Sometimes, these hurt or harm are caused as strategy in the game theory of life. And these hurt or harm are not always caused merely by "us versus them" formulations. They are caused by individuals and groups... by stronger over weaker, by weaker over stronger, by peers. 

I am asking myself that lets look at the affairs of the world.

There would be agreements and disagreements on where we were, where we are and where we want to be. There will be agreements on the reasons behind each of them too. 

So, do we get saddled by the paradise of majority or paradox of majority or in words of Tocqueville "tyranny of majority" and if we expand in current context...tyranny of all kinds which may include tyranny of minority if it is the case. 

I am asking myself that can we look at what makes some people weak.

or even a deeper question that we are all weak in some respect. In different context and different times and in different ways. 

Can we increase the expanse of question from "who is responsible to also include what is responsible?". What kinds of structures and skills would be required to enable the weak? What do we do when the desired outcomes of these too yield different results for different persons? Nuancing the "weak" in the "context in which it is weak" and not just "weak as a blanket label"? What games (incentive systems) can we tweak such that "dignity" is upheld irrespective?

...this article is part of some other thoughts i am putting together...its purpose is to stir the conventions... and its a step in direction of something i am working on to create...will keep sharing as it fructifies...