Beyond the fact that human beings have emotions and that these emotions play an important role in human motivation, it is clear that we can identify several ubiquitous drives. Among these are things like sex and survival. I doubt that anyone will contest the premise that the drive to survive is paramount. The relationship of this drive to Natural Selection is all too obvious. That we have inherited this drive via the genetic heritage bequeathed to us by our pre-human ancestors seems likewise obvious. On the one hand, I am embarrassed to fill a paragraph with so many statements-of-the-obvious, but I still feel compelled to do so, for human beings have been systematically ignoring the obvious for far too long. It is time to undertake a discussion of human instincts (i.e. innate emotional drives) in the context of our simian emotional foundations.
While the similarities between human and simian behavior are clear, it is also clear that there are significant differences. I attribute these to the effects of the human mental tetrahedron. The existence of a CiFac makes it possible for humans to isolate instincts as concepts. These concepts then give the LogFac something it can work with, and of course, the concepts can be recorded by the MemFac. The tetrahedron makes it possible to build an obsessive mental state around an instinct. This means that humans have the potential to not just mimic the instinctive behavior of chimps but to amplify it and take it to extremes that are not possible for chimps. For example, chimpanzees occasionally kill other chimpanzees, but they have nothing like organized warfare or genocide. I seems to me that the instincts that prompt chimpanzees to kill are being picked up and amplified in humans with the result being organized warfare and genocide.
One of the easiest and most common ways for instincts to be extended beyond the chimp norm is via reattachment. Specifically, the instincts that I have previously identified as solitary interface instincts can be detached from the context of the individual and reattached to the context of the collective. Actions that would be judged as immoral for an individual, are often considered perfectly all right if taken by a collective. I will go into more detail on this point later. All in all, the effect that any given instinct has on human behavior cannot be fully understood until it has been examined in the context of the individual and again in the context of the collective.
To examine the effects of instincts in the context of human collectives means that human behavior in collective situations must be examined. To do this examination in the full context of reality means that no example of a human collective or of collective human behavior can be excluded. This necessarily forces us to contemplate events in the historical and political arenas and hence involves us in topics that cannot help but be extremely controversial. So be it.
There seems no alternative to uttering the truism that human beings have an innate desire to survive. Suffice it to say that the natural selective processes that have given rise to the human genome necessarily make Survivity the fundamental instinct. Conceptually, other instincts can be understood as applications of Survivity to differing circumstances. While this makes an interesting generalization, the subject of Survivity has to be resolved down to a finer granularity if human behavior is to be thoroughly understood. We have to discuss circumstances.
The human ability to isolate Survivity as an abstraction and to reattach it to the concept of a collective means that Survivity in humans involves an extension of the functionality seen in chimps. Chimps pursue collective survival on an intuitive basis, whereas humans pursue it on both an intuitive and on a conscious basis. Whereas chimps simply pursue their own survival, humans pursue their own survival and the survival of cherished abstractions. For humans the survival of my country, my culture, my race, my gang can and does take on ominous dimensions.
In the context of individuals Autonomity in humans takes the form commonly known as individualism or egoism. It is expressed most simply as the desire to be left alone. It manifests itself in sundry intellectual and political movements; among these are Objectivism and Libertarianism.
In terms of tetrahedral algebra, the desire to control one's own body (Autonomity), coupled with some external impediment to that control, coupled with an eagerness to impose one's own preferences (Aggressivity), results in resistance behavior. Or if you will, a desire to control one's own body (Autonomity), coupled with the physical need for food, coupled with a desire to control external resources (Territoriality), results in acquisitive behavior.
In the context of collectives Autonomity interacts with Hierarchity. Perhaps it can even be argued that Autonomity is the precursor of Hierarchity. One of the reasons one engages in hierarchical struggles is to escape having other people's preferences imposed upon one. From there it is a short step to view other people as mere extensions of one's own body (reattachment) and to want to impose one's preferences on them even as one controls one's own body.
In the context of individuals, Territoriality gives rise to the desire for economic gain. Territoriality has been the driving force that has allowed sufficient financial resources to be assembled and funneled into the industrial revolution. Affluence is the most visible consequence of Territoriality's effect on the individual. However not all the effects of Territoriality are positive. Territoriality can be amplified by Aggressivity and boosted by Survivity into a powerful amoral motivational state manifesting itself as a willingness to inflict exploitation and overt slavery.
In the context of collectives, Territoriality can be focused on a geographic area and manifest as the nation. Territoriality can even be detached from the notion of a physical object and reattached to an abstraction like religion or culture. Human history is fraught with examples of human beings going to obsessive extremes in an effort to preserve (i.e. retain possession of) their religion or culture.
In the context of the individual, Curiosity seems to be one of the weaker instincts and one that is easily overwhelmed by other more powerful drives. When the subject is something that can be relatively impersonalized, like math, physics etc., people seem to have an easier time setting aside emotional considerations and letting their curiosity evolve into an obsessive mental state. When the subject is something that involves human relationships or the relationship of humans to their environment, objectivity becomes very elusive. My evidence for these assertions is that the physical sciences have allowed us to develop an effective technology for building bridges etc., but the social sciences have yet to provide us with a viable remedy for totalitarianism, war, genocide and exploitation.
Curiosity does not seem to be very effective at driving collective behavior. My evidence is the amount of money in the U.S. federal budget devoted to pure research compared to that allocated for defense and human services.
We can fairly say that human sexuality more closely follows the bonobo pattern than the chimpanzee pattern. In the context of the individual, Sexuality in humans operates significantly differently than it does in chimpanzees. Human females don't formally go into estrus although, remnants of estrus have survived in the menstrual cycle and in the form of a cyclically variable interest in sex. Sexuality gives rise to an obsessive mental state in human males. It is not just that human males feel the pressure of hormones and are genetically programmed to be sexually enabled on a continuous basis, but it is that with a MemFac they can remember the pressure from yesterday, the day before that, last week, last month, etc. With a CiFac they can predict that they will experience hormonal pressure tomorrow, next week, etc. With a LogFac they can formally identify hormonal pressure via a concept. This concept gets remembered and assigned a high priority so that in addition to the hormonal pressure itself, the concept gets popped onto the human mental network on a much more frequent basis than hormones alone could accomplish. The result is an obsessive mental state that far exceeds anything experienced by chimpanzee or bonobo males. From the viewpoint of human females, human males often seem more than just interested in sex; they seem insane.
In the context of collectives, Sexuality plays a conspicuous role. Clearly things like pornography and prostitution owe their existence to Sexuality. Then too, much of human culture is devoted to protocols involving Sexuality (e.g. laws regarding marriage, polygamy, rape, incest, and sodomy). However I think there is a tendency in pop psychology to attribute nearly every human activity to some obtuse application of Sexuality. I suspect this has a lot more to do with male sexual obsession than with plausible cause and effect relationships.
This concludes the discussion of the solitary interface instincts in humans. Let us now take up the subject of the social interface instincts. This is to say that discussion in the context of the individual is no longer relevant or meaningful.
Hierarchity is the instinct that gives rise to class distinctions in humans. These distinctions may or may not be based on objective reality.
The idea of a hereditary aristocracy is a good example of a social hierarchy that is not necessarily based on objective reality. Another example was set forth by Ayn Rand in her book The Fountainhead. There she advanced an example of this phenomenon which she referred to as the "second-hander" (i.e. a person who lives by and through other people because he feels he cannot deal with reality). Second-handers may be pathetic examples of people living on the fringes of civilization (e.g. lifelong welfare cases), or they may be people who have plunged deep into an obsession so that they develop extraordinary skill in manipulating other people. Often people with a consummate grasp of human psychology can use that knowledge to ascend to the top of a social hierarchy (e.g. Adolf Hitler and Bill Clinton).
The idea of a social hierarchy based upon merit has not been neglected in recent literature. In their book The Bell Curve, Richard J. Herrenstein and Charles Murray put forth the premise that the world has become so technologically, economically, and politically complex that intelligence has become a key factor in determining who is able to get to the top of the hierarchy. Their goal was not to argue for meritocracy but rather to sound a warning that de facto meritocracy is leading to the concentration of power in the hands of a relatively few people, and that this constitutes a threat to egalitarian ideals. Whether egalitarianism is a desirable goal is open to debate, but there are enough other factors that operate so as to further the creation of totalitarian states that this factor deserves some critical analysis.
Hierarchity, in humans, is not simply the desire to ascend within a social hierarchy, but it is also the willingness to acquiesce in institutions involving social hierarchy. It involves a potential willingness to tolerate a lower station. It does not mean that a human relegated to a lower rung likes being there, but only that he is willing to tolerate it, at least in the short term. For example females may be highly resentful of some aspects of male domination, or the less affluent may be highly resentful of the more affluent, but if they are at least temporarily willing to acquiesce in those circumstances, then this acceptance represents the obverse side of the Hierarchity coin without which the coin can not exist at all.
As a practical matter, the willingness of the less affluent to tolerate the more affluent has been fundamental to the success of the industrial revolution. Without the accumulation of resources in the hands of industrialists, the present overall level of human affluence could not have been achieved. Then too, without this acquiescence, the intense taxation necessary to sustain the welfare state would be impossible. Also as a practical matter, the willingness of humans to accept some of the more odious aspects of Hierarchity has been a contributing factor to the creation of police states.
The resentment experienced by those lower in social hierarchies plays a significant factor in human affairs. I will delve deeper into this topic in the chapter on history, but I would like to bring one current event into focus. That event was the massacre at the Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado. Two teenage boys, at the bottom of their social hierarchy, had developed feelings of intense alienation and anger over their circumstances. They tried setting up their own separate hierarchy (i.e. the "trenchcoat mafia") for the purposes of stimulating Alienaity and Frustration in their peers. This effort did not bring them the kind of satisfaction they were looking for, and so they plunged ever deeper into Alienaity. Ultimately they developed an obsessive mental state involving Alienaity that was so intense that it overcame their own feelings of Survivity. They were willing to commit suicide in an attempt to avenge themselves, and they did so. The lesson to be learned here is that Hierarchity can cut very deeply into those who consistently loose the contests for position within social hierarchies. While there is probably no way to rid ourselves of these contests, we can potentially go easier on the loosers by not taunting, denigrating or conteming them. A libertarian spirit of "live and let live" will do far more to stop Columbine style massacres in the future than any prohibition or amassing of defensive weaponry. Metaphorically, the most efficient way to avoid having time bombs explode in our faces is not to build them in the first place.
No discussion of Hierarchity can be complete without formally focusing on the ways in which Hierarchity affects males and females differently. Some discussion of Androgity and Gynecity is in order. Androgity in humans leads to male-dominated institutions. Given the overwhelming preponderance of male-dominated institutions throughout human history, it is fair to say that human behavior follows the chimpanzee model more closely than the bonobo model.
It is possible and even common for individual humans to find themselves confronting a problem for which they can find no easy solution or possibly no solution at all. If some power greater than a single individual existed, the possibility might arise that the greater power could solve an otherwise intractable problem. To a simian or a living being with a simian heritage, the institution of the alpha male seems like an intuitively obvious thing to try. Hence to this very day, large scale institutions like government and business are dominated by males. The fictional character Superman is an all too obvious manifestation of Androgity. Still, there is more to Androgity than this.
The institution of the family is a scaled down version of simian society. Within this microcosm the role of alpha male has historically been played out by the only male (i.e. the "pater familias").
Theism, in its simplest form, is simply an abstraction manufactured to fill the emotional longing for the simian institution of the alpha male. It is no accident that god is usually depicted as a male and often an old male, in so many religions. Theism, on a more complex level, to the descendants of simians, seems like a perfect solution for large problems for which no other solutions exist. If an alpha male is good, then an alpha male with super powers must be very good. Religion, as a manifestation of Androgity, is an attempt by the CiFac (i.e. the creator of god) and LogFac (i.e. the ultimate acceptor of god) to pacify and coexist with the EmoFac. Religion, as a solution to human problems, is often unsatisfactory in that the benefits derived from it are often intangible (i.e. psychologically gratifying but physically non-existent). Androgity can and is pursued by human beings to the point where it does produce tangible benefits but not without tangible costs (e.g. the welfare state and the taxation that makes it possible).
Androgity includes the attitude that male-dominated institutions (frequently involving the use or at least the threat of physical violence) are an acceptable and even preferred way of solving problems. Government, after all, is the old simian institution of the alpha male, and the more recent innovation of a deity, extrapolated into the context of a large scale human society. The human obsession with government as a solution to so many problems and as a means of filling so many needs is essentially the simple minded use of classical male aggression as a means of overcoming obstacles.
The other side of Androgity (i.e. the willingness to acquiesce in the institution of the alpha male) is, of necessity, a factor in human affairs. The all too common submissiveness of wives to abusive husbands is a direct manifestation of the passive-submissive aspect of Androgity. The willingness of people to acquiesce under the rule of bitterly repressive religions and governments is another manifestation. We are dealing here with a simple continuation of the simian imperative that it would be a survival disadvantage to feel compelled to fight to the death over every dispute one had with an alpha male. But more than this, we are dealing with an emotional drive that favors acquiescence.
By all this I do not mean to imply that Androgity necessarily locks males and females into rigid roles. With the advent of industrialism, traditional sex-determined roles are not the necessity they once were. The opportunities for translating the ability to think into a practical survival skill have been multiplied by technology. Increasingly females are escaping economic dependence on males. Then too the inventions of Samuel Colt have essentially cancelled the military advantage of larger size that males have enjoyed for so long. It has become much more possible for females to escape the frustrations of the passive-submissive aspect of Hierarchity and instead practice and enjoy the aggressive-dominant aspect (i.e. Gynecity). Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand and Hillary Clinton come to mind here. While Androgity on the chimpanzee model is the clearly the historically preferred mode of human beings, consciousness and the facilities of the mental tetrahedron make Gynecity on the bonobo model an achievable alternative.
Gregarity is an instinct that impacts males and females in very different ways for very different reasons. Consider the problems of a human female with a child living mostly alone except for occasional liaisons with human males. She would have to provide food, security and all other services not only for herself but for her child as well. She would have to do these things while tending more-or-less continuously to the immediate needs of the child. These chores would be difficult under ordinary circumstances, especially difficult during pregnancy, and essentially impossible while giving birth. However, if she could at times get help from other people in exchange for giving help at times, these difficulties could be reduced to a manageable level. I submit that this is what has in fact happened. Social organizations are a fundamental tool that females rely upon to solve problems deriving from their biology which would otherwise be unsolvable and if left unsolved, would be a severe disadvantage in the context of natural selection. It is no accident that human females often have much better social skills, and become socially adept more quickly, than human males. It is no accident that human females often surpass human males in the area of language skills. It is no accident that human females are attracted more strongly to care giving roles (e.g. nursing and teaching) than human males.
Human males, on the other hand, tend to see social organization as a venue for exercising Hierarchity in the form of Androgity. Then too basic male aggressive preferences tend to manifest themselves in Territoriality, and this instinct can be more efficiently pursued by several males acting in concert than it can by one male acting alone.
In comparison I think it fair to characterize the male implementation of Gregarity as being more delayable than the female implementation. Even if males fail in their pursuit of Androgity and Territoriality today, it does not necessarily result in immediate extinction. The female implementation of Gregarity involves imperatives that are much more immediate. The female who does not succeed in caring for her progeny bears a genome headed for extinction. I think it fair to say that human females, more so than human males, are the primary creators and sustainers of human social organizations.
Thus Gregarity is the instinct that gives rise to collective organizations. Even though organizations often exist for the purpose of achieving some overt goal, there is always the hidden agenda of people simply wanting to get together to socialize. Just as chimps are attracted to chimps, humans are attracted to humans, and for exactly the same reasons.
Gregarity combined with the facilities of the human mental tetrahedron gives rise to abstractions of collectives (e.g. society, nation, culture), and these concepts often become the focus of obsessive mental states independent of any specific goals. Obsession can and often does lead to paradigm blindness in which humans literally cannot question the merits of a collective even when their own lives are at stake (e.g. the nationalism that was a partial cause of WWI).
Human beings experience basic Alienaity as a small pinprick of irritation when encountering another person who is different in some way. At times, this reaction is sought deliberately as a means of exercising Autonomity (e.g. a punk rocker with spiked out hair and a safety pin through his nose). Other times though, when people earnestly want to avoid this reaction, they cannot (e.g. the trials and tribulations of the "new kid" at school).
Alienaity, as a simple simian emotion, can serve as the spark for a series of cascading mental events. The fact that a particular person is irritating in some way can be amplified by the CiFAc by postulating that there is something dangerous or destructive about the other person. This hypothesis can be committed to memory, identified as a concept by the Logfac, and generally cycled around the tetrahedron into an obsessive mental state. I submit that this is how racism and ethnocentrism originate.
Specifically, perceived differences in human beings can be the result of voluntary behavior or of genetically driven appearance. I would like to identify Alienaity that originates as a result of a perceived behavioral difference as ethnocentrism. And I would like to identify Alienaity that originates as a result of a perceived genetic difference as racism.
Fosterity in humans goes far beyond anything seen in chimpanzees and serves as the foundation of the most powerful obsessive mental states experienced by human beings. Human parents have at times sacrificed their own lives in order to save their own children. It should not surprise us that they are at times willing to sacrifice others for the sake of their children. Nor should it surprise us that Fosterity lends itself readily to reattachment. Later in the chapter on history, I will return to the subject of Fosterity and the important role it plays in human affairs. Suffice it to say that Fosterity is considered by many human beings to be the highest possible form of human morality, and they are not shy about using any necessary means to see that everyone fulfills their moral obligations.
Supplicaity is most often seen in human children. Adults tend to find it demeaning and embarrassing. Still it survives in the form of pan-handlers, and politicians are continually besieged by supplicants. The most commonly practiced form among adults is prayer to a deity.
This completes the discussion of the social interface emotions. Let us now turn to a discussion of the integrator emotions. Again, we are returning to the methodology of examining instincts in both the context of individuals and in collectives.
In the context of individuals, Security/Fear is easily identified and targeted by the LogFac. A catalog of concepts that classify and describe all manner of threatening situations can be easily created, and this catalog can be communicated to other humans thus giving the LogFac extended leverage. The CiFac makes it very easy to predict that threatening circumstances that have occurred in the past may quite possibly recur in the future. This creates a unique circumstance in that the MemFac not only records past instances of Fear but also records the prediction that threatening circumstances will arise in the future. These effects working together can and often do produce an obsessive mental state of which the most extreme form is paranoia. Fear in humans goes far beyond anything experienced by chimps and means that humans must cope with psychological stresses far in excess of anything experienced by chimps.
Although the Security/Fear instinct is certainly ubiquitous, women seem to be more heavily impacted by it than men. You can get direct evidence of this by watching the evening news on television. Whether the topic is medicine, food, crime, automobiles, or something else, the news report often revolves around a concern about "safety." Very often the reports seem to be directed at women by women. You will hear the word "safe" and its derivatives repeated endlessly. In her ballad He thinks he'll keep her, a bombastic statement of feminine outrage, Mary Chapin Carpenter echoes a fundamental feminine longing when she sings of "the safest place you'll ever find". From a great many conversations, I have found women to be far more fearful about their own personal safety than men. Male aggression is a primary source of anxiety for women.
Females experience the Security/Fear instinct more often and more intensely than males not simply because they are in general, physically smaller than males, but because of maternity. Female Security concerns typically encompass not only their own persons but the persons of their progeny as well. Thus females tend to be more oriented to "conserve all" rather than "risk all" behavior.
In the context of collectives, Security/Fear has to be a primary motivation for the waging of defensive war. It also plays a significant role in behavior such as socialism.
Probably no other single drive invokes the instinct of Anger more often than Hierarchity. Hierarchity generates intense resentment among the losers of hierarchical struggles. This anger may be directed at something as complex as those persons who have achieved a greater degree of affluence. The Marxist dialectic between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is an example of this. Anger may be directed at persons who have simply inherited their position in the hierarchy. The antagonism of French revolutionaries towards aristocrats comes to mind. Or anger may derive directly from the contemporary struggle to advance within the traffic hierarchy. The "road rage" experienced by those who have been "cut off" in traffic comes to mind.
Clearly anger deriving from hierarchical struggles has the potential to escalate into an obsessive mental state sufficient to unleash Aggressivity with violent force. Instances of "terrorism" are the contemporary manifestation of this phenomenon.
Gratification and Elation are especially important to the mundane functioning of the human mental tetrahedron. Reason, memory and creativity are largely voluntary actions. That these voluntary actions are undertaken is proof of an underlying motivational state. Gratification and Elation are natural selection's mechanism for goading the tetrahedron to move in the direction of life-sustaining behavior. In a word, they are what makes life worth living.
Failure to achieve any kind of Gratification or Elation or the impossibility of obtaining any kind of Gratification or Elation can lead to an overwhelming state of Frustration and Sorrow commonly called despair. This state and these circumstances can lead directly to human extinction. I'm thinking here of the Untermenschen in the Nazi death camps who threw themselves onto the electric fences. Despite the obvious necessity for humans to pursue and achieve Gratification and Elation, people who are conspicuously and consistently successful in achieving those states are routinely denounced as selfish. I submit that this practice is a manifestation of Hierarchity in that it is an attempt to impose one's preferences on others by first engendering a sense of guilt. Also this practice is a manifestation of Fosterity in that resources that are not consumed out of a sense of guilt can potentially be diverted for use by one's posterity.
This is not to say that the unrestrained pursuit of Gratification and Elation is necessarily a good thing. A heroin injection will produce a lot of Elation, but it can also produce death. The human vulnerability to drug addiction and the associated drug trade are obviously direct derivatives of the human need for Gratification and Elation.
This concludes the discussion of the integrator emotions in humans. Let us now turn to the translator emotions.
Aggressivity can be plausibly related to every instance of initiated human behavior. In all honesty this is very nearly a redundant statement or almost a circular argument. Outside the human mental apparatus, Aggressivity as a noun, is initiated behavior. Inside the human mental apparatus, we know that the innate emotion of Aggressivity exists simply from introspection.
Naturally Aggressivity interacts with other instincts. For example Curiosity combined with Aggressivity has resulted in scientific and economic achievement.
Aggressivity in humans is more readily apparent among males indeed, in the U.S. nine out of ten murders are committed by males. Males have historically been the primary executors of war and genocide. These historical facts provide a useful measure of the relative impact Aggressivity has on males versus females.
Aggressivity in the context of collectives is especially destructive. Aggressivity in individuals is often and usually impacted by some degree of moral constraint. In collectives the sanction of the group often serves to subvert these constraints. War and genocide are, after all, collective endeavors.
Even as Aggressivity is most easily observed in the behavior of males, Passivity is most easily observed in the behavior of females. Most of us recall what things were like in the first grade. To the extent that there were behavior problems, the problems most likely originated with the boys. Girls tended to be quiet, even obsequious and generally inclined to try to appease authority figures. For this reason girls tended to do better in school up until late high school.
Even as adults, females generally do not initiate dating relationships. That is left to the males and females will often sit by passively even if it means that they have no social life beyond other females.
This is not to say that Passivity is the exclusive province of females. Males have had to learn how to set lose the instinct in order to put a brake on Aggressivity. Indeed, civilization itself would likely be forfeit without some male capacity for passive behavior.