Why do we allow ourselves to be deceived, or Sad reflections on the irrationality of political life. Column for Computerra #106

← Dmytro Shabanov → Wallace's paradox, or Why we possess such a large brain Why we allow ourselves to be deceived, or Sad reflections on the irrationality of political life The gates of the senses: what the relationship between our archaic sense of smell and our evolutionarily advanced vision tells us Column for Computerra #105 Column for Computerra #106 Column for Computerra #107 I now want to discuss a topic that is difficult for me, one on which I have not reached a feeling of full understanding.

Engaged in politics, I would nonetheless not want this column to have a political character.

Since most of my readers are Russians, it is easier for me to write about Ukrainian politics.

My task is not to draw them into it, but to nudge them toward analysing which part of our political actions is explained by our innate programs (anachronistic, alas), and which is rationally determined. To begin — a statement of the problem. Evolutionary psychology has accumulated much data on the innate determination of many of our political properties. In the previous column I wrote that Machiavellian politics within groups of ancient humans became a powerful factor in their evolution. Special studies have shown that even non-human apes display an innate sense of fairness. The reputation of kin, formed by the history of past interactions, is taken into account not only by primates but also by rats. The ability to track and remember deceptions is "hardwired" not only into the settings of our memory but even into the mechanism of perceiving visual information. The accounting of each of our reputations by other members of our society makes our deeds better: many of our actions are calculated to improve our reputation among potential observers. From the above, one might assume that we are creatures extraordinarily well adapted to political life. Can we hope that the readiness for political interaction we have inherited will make our societies wonderfully governable? How strongly this innate foundation that underpins our political behaviour today actually influences our behaviour is a debatable question. Undoubtedly, learned components make a large contribution to our political manifestations. A multitude of experiments in which people with identical innate qualities are divided into groups placed in different conditions show substantial differences in their political life. West and East Germany, Finland and the Pskov region, mainland China and Taiwan, North and South Korea… In South Korea an effective and dynamic society has been created; in North Korea — a totalitarian and ineffective camp besieged by enemies. Many families are divided between the two societies, so the cause of the differences in the behaviour of a North Korean and a South Korean individual lies not in programs inherited from the past, but in culture and experience. Probably many of the fairly free citizens of the South, had they ended up in the North at the right time, would also have proven capable of publicly shedding tears for many days over a deceased dictator. Yet what we do is still superimposed on our innate structure that underpins our behaviour. Both the motivations of politicians and the reasons for the behaviour of their supporters and opponents inevitably rest on inherited matrices of behaviour. It seems to me that I can convey my thought better if I discuss the things that interest me through a concrete example. For this I will tell of my own participation in political life. Literally a few days after I wrote, in the column about the multilateral conflict, that I am an opponent of parties, I happened to go to an opposition rally held in Kharkiv as part of the nationwide action "Rise up, Ukraine!". No, I did not change my position. I am not prepared to join any party or support group. You know the joke that intelligence, decency and party membership are never found together? I don't know whether it's true, but I was assured that this wisdom was known back in Ancient Greece. But does refusing party allegiance mean the necessity of withdrawing from political life? The actions of our current authorities are unacceptable to me. How am I to express my disagreement with the general line? First, by voting — when its turn comes. Second, by openly supporting the opposition. Does this mean that when the present opposition becomes the authorities, I must support them unconditionally? Of course not. I have just reproduced the reasoning on the basis of which I rationally (the key word) made the decision to undertake certain political actions. The last time before this I had been at a rally was in 2004, during the Orange Revolution. Then both I and a substantial part of the people next to me were in a state of acute emotional uplift. This time my gaze was far cooler. The opposition called the action in Kharkiv a victory. I had no such feeling. There were very few rationally engaged people at the rally — fewer than the party activists, the emotional public and simply chance passers-by… In 2004 both I and many people next to me were emotional. The lie of the political life of the time exceeded both my adaptive capacities and the limit of tolerance of a substantial part of my compatriots (we had not yet seen today's politics). A hope arose for a cleansing of public life, the arrival of a new, moral authority. President Yushchenko came to power on a wave of broad public support. Unfortunately, he perceived the events of the Orange Revolution not as a demand for a qualitative change of politics, but as an expression of support for his unique persona. A country ready for change sank into a swamp. Perhaps the only merit of the former president was the relatively honest conduct of elections. As a result the country returned to a state that proved even worse than it had been before the revolution. What signs can indicate that innate motivations make a large contribution to a particular person's behaviour? Acute emotionality. Motivation reinforced not by logical constructions but by an appeal to archetypes, to vivid images. Blood brothers, vile enemies, the black blood of invaders, the pain of mother-earth, the wise protector, the night thoughts of the father-leader, proud knight-liberators, defiled sisters, thieving freaks, hordes of foreigners, the tears of a grey-haired old mother, the decisive battle of the forces of Good and Evil, the looming cloud of the forces of Darkness, the Bright Hero rising from his knees, and many other archetypes of this kind — these are markers of pathological emotional involvement. Any arguments that appeal to such symbols are a very alarming symptom. They may mean that solving a problem requiring an appeal to these sacred entities will give rise to new problems and merely tangle the situation rather than defuse it. A rational assessment may be correct or mistaken; it is limited by the features and bounds of our intellect, but there is nothing in it that introduces irreparable distortions. A conviction that rests on innate matrices cannot lead to the goal it declares. As we have already said, our innate matrices are anachronistic. They were formed in a completely different world, under different relations between people and groups. I fear that actions based on irrational innate programs will endlessly generate swinging from side to side, eternally rocking the pendulum that pushes society from one extreme to another. The rally I attended was held by the leaders of three parties that together had won a majority of votes at the last elections (which, through the complexities of political mathematics, turned into a minority in parliament). Two of these three leaders, as well as the programs they declared, seem acceptable to me. The third, in my view, is a dangerous nationalist (focused on ethnic aspects rather than on building a political nation), whose coming to power threatens serious upheavals. However, the fact that three different parties and three different leaders demonstrate their unity pleases me. The first task is to create conditions under which the authorities will fulfil their duties and organize a normal procedure for taking account of society's opinion. The next step is to keep totalitarian forces from power and to consistently liberalize the governance of the state. This is a very important step, but today it is second on the agenda… The rally's organizers planned to gather in the city centre and march to the appeals court. There a regular hearing was to take place in one of the cases for which the main rival of our president at the last elections had been deprived of her liberty. Had a few more citizens voted for her, she would be running the state; instead she is kept now in prison, now in a colony, now in a hospital. Our authorities stressed that there is no selective justice here at all — solely the triumph of legality. The city authorities refused to authorize the march, since it might interfere with the city's normal life by causing transport problems. And they themselves organized what can only be called a transport collapse. The streets along which the demonstrators were to pass were blocked by solid columns of trams, trolleybuses and buses. Heavy construction equipment, standing idle, blocked the streets. Pumps drained water from wells, flooding the city with streams of water. The three photographs with which I illustrate this column captured only a small part of the chaos that began on the streets of Kharkiv several hours before the start of the rally. And here I come to the most interesting detail. The mayor of the city declared that no special measures to counter the rally had been taken. The city lived its ordinary life. Everything that hindered the residents was the intrigues of political failures, the leaders of the opposition. The mayor declared this to the whole country, preening himself on the most popular talk show… I returned from a work trip where I spoke with colleagues from every corner of Ukraine. The main thing they asked me was whether a transport collapse had really been artificially organized in our city, and whether the mayor had really been lying when he said he had nothing to do with it. Do you know what conclusion these colleagues, experienced in our life, drew from my affirmative answers? That our mayor would go far in politics… And now the incomprehensible begins. Evolutionary psychology teaches that our innate programs include the accounting of our kin's reputation, which allows us to identify people with whom it is dangerous to deal. An elected politician publicly states something that is a blatant deception, and this is clear to everyone. How do people react to this? "Oh, he's a promising leader, career growth awaits him." Why?! By the way, such irrational behaviour is not characteristic of all countries. In many states (usually well-developed ones) a politician caught in public deception is forced to change profession. People there engage in politics far more rationally. Is it any wonder that "our" people do not like these countries? Another oddity. More than four-fifths of the population is dissatisfied with the country's leadership policy. How do they react to the actions of the political forces opposing this policy? With humiliating, destructive criticism! To try to oppose the policy of the authorities, which my respectable compatriots consider wrong, can — in their view — only be done by pitiful jackals scurrying around foreign embassies. Why?! I have already written about this phenomenon, when I found a fresh example concerning Russian realities. The irrationality of the phenomena I have described is, in my view, evidence of their connection with innate programs. Of course, there are rational explanations too. Humiliating criticism of the opposition is one of the technologies of power. To convince people that our leaders rationally distribute the budget and care about the triumph of legality is a practically unsolvable task. It is far simpler to form a contemptuous attitude toward the weaklings who get in the way under the treads of the bulldozer of power. The thesis "they're all tarred with the same brush" is a tried-and-true means of countering attempts to change anything. But why is this thesis picked up not only by the leadership's paid agitators, but also by citizens who appear unaligned? I do not have a full answer to these questions. Somehow it has come about that the mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to choose trusted kin lead to our being ruled by cynical manipulators. My version is that the cause of this phenomenon is the interweaving of our social behaviour with parochialism (parochial altruism, love of one's own interwoven with hatred of strangers). Their connection is shown by modelling, psychological experiments, and even studies of the hormonal regulation of behaviour. The main message a dishonest leader broadcasts is "I am one of you". And if he proves successful in this, then all his critics and opponents are perceived as strangers.

To lie to strangers, to act unfairly toward them, is quite normal "from the standpoint" of our innate programs. To revile and humiliate strangers was good behaviour for the time when these programs were formed. …perhaps the main line dividing society in Russia and Ukraine is not the line of confrontation between the authorities and the opposition.

The boundary between irrationality and rationality may prove far more essential… ← Dmytro Shabanov → Wallace's paradox, or Why we possess such a large brain Why we allow ourselves to be deceived, or Sad reflections on the irrationality of political life The gates of the senses: what the relationship between our archaic sense of smell and our evolutionarily advanced vision tells us Column for Computerra #105 Column for Computerra #106 Column for Computerra #107