Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  John Stuart Mill said “If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.” Other people’s expectations are the worst mode because they are not tailored to you and your needs.

  What the people who expect you to go along with their expectations are asking is that underneath it all, they are simply asking you to turn off your conscious rational mind in your cerebral cortex and become a purely instinctual conformist who acts on the emotional impulses originating in the amygdala. Conformity will destroy you because it is emotional and not rational. Animals such as herds of cattle conform to random, unintellectual outside influences. People in general are mindlessly instinctual and expect you to do as they do. This means going along with their tribal image of themselves. This is pure Stone Age thinking found in the amygdala, one part of the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain, not the rational cerebral cortex part of the brain. Conformity is strictly emotional and instinctual, and is not rational. If someone says it is, it is up to them to prove it by strictly rational means. Conformity is based in the animal part of the brain, the amygdala.

  Conformists are primarily instinctual people who do not think rationally. Part of being a conformist is believing that you are right because you are in agreement with other people who are simply lemmings rushing forward to leap over the cliff together. Keep in mind that conformity is an instinct rooted in the Stone Age way of life. People conformed when they went out hunting for animals to catch and eat. Hunting consists of following animals and attacking as a group. Hunters have no special intelligence, because sticking spears into animals does not require any particular degree of intelligence beyond muscular effort. People attacked in groups and killed in groups. They had only a slight regard for their own safety given that hunting has no special margin of safety attached to it. Hunting was dangerous work unless you were in a group of a dozen or more. The group instinct is not intellectual in any way, and neither are instincts in general in any way. It is simply a nonintellectual survival mechanism and nothing more. An instinct that pushes you to take chances is bad for individual survival. Instincts dumb down people to induce them to take chances by overriding the rational part of the mind. When you are in the grip of the group-conformity hunting instinct, you become tremendously susceptible to other people’s expectations in the forms of brief phrases, facial expressions and so on. A group of dumbed-down hunters has no particular regard for your safety and your long term prospects for survival. The only thing that fills their minds is conformity to the lowest common denominator goal – catching dinner. If you lose an arm or leg, conformity will not help you. In the modern era, some people are not particularly individualistic and are thoroughly conformist and group minded, the sort of mental mode that makes them feel important, which they are not. Their instincts overwhelm their rationality, such as safety concerns. The world is full of people who think they are important when they are acting under the influence of their instincts, which do not contain a scrap of intelligence in them. Telling others to conform to the expectations of others is evidence of them being under the control of some sort of group conformity instinct, even if they are not in a group at the moment. What they say is nothing more than their memories of being under the control of other people’s expectations. The only times they think that they are important is when acting in a group as a member of a construction site, or some such group activity where physical conformity to the expectations of others is the key element of the situation. They do not feel important as individuals because they are not important, period. Expectations carry over from the memories of feelings they experience when in the group mode, and they come to believe that being controlled by the expectations of others means more than it actually does. The expectations of other people should not mean anything to a thinking individual because there is no survival payoff for doing what other people expect of you except in the Stone Age hunting grounds. If there is a supposed survival payoff, it needs to be spelled out for the benefit of people such as yourself. A nonintellectual appeal for you to conform to an unsupported flight of fancy is garbage. Other people are not important because they are other people, unless you are in the grip of the conformity instinct. When that happens, you are guilty of thinking with your amygdala emotions and not with the rational cerebral cortex part of the brain. Others people’s expectations are never worth your bother. Whatever little appeal they have does not emerge from the human part of the brain, only from the pre-human Stone Age instincts based in the amygdala, the purely emotional, non-intellectual animal part of the brain. Be an intellectual human, not an emotional animal. An animal can have a cortex, but it is nothing like the cortex of a human being. Animals can not read, write, do mathematics, or do any of the things that thinking human beings, meaning homo sapiens, can do. They are animals because they are purely emotional in nature. Various forms of conformity are also purely emotional in nature. Other people are not important because they have animal emotions and expectations, which do not benefit you in any way.

  Disregarding Group Expectations

  Charles Darwin noted that human and animal emotions are quite similar, and also noted that animals had no rational thinking abilities. “Man and the higher animals, especially the primates, have some few instincts in common. [These include] similar passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion [and include] emulation, gratitude and magnanimity; they practice deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule, and even have a sense of humor.”

  The human race has been around for a quarter of a million years, and the various sorts of pre-human beings from which we evolved were around for a few million years before that. We have been a technological species from about twenty thousand years of recorded history. This means things such as farming instruments and bows and arrows. Human life was nasty brutish and short until we developed agriculture to get control over the food supply.

  Hunting was not a reliable means of having food on a regular basis. Our hunting instincts were an unreliable means of getting food. However, hunting instincts were not based on intelligence, so they provided no means of doing intelligent things, which require individuality and individual thought. Thus, developing beyond hunting and gathering took many millennia of spurts of intellectual leaps forward. Developing agriculture and hunting instruments such as bows and arrows are not instinctual activities. They require the use of the prefrontal cortex to develop new things. Group instincts and expectations do not contribute in any way to intellectual activities such as agriculture and developing bows and arrows. Intellectual developments are based in the cerebral cortex and are at the opposite end of the spectrum from group-instinct hunting and the purely emotional expectations used to coordinate the activities of hunters. No known instinct contributes to intellectual activities related to developing technology. The human race thus wasted a lot of time until about ten thousand years ago, because they had no reliable technologies for delivering a steady food supply, no written languages and most of them died before age forty.

  It may also be the case, though we have no evidence either way, that the instinctual nature of human society back then worked against the development of anything that contradicted the cultural premises of such instinct-based societies. Nothing of an intellectual nature went on. Primitive societies back then may have had, at most, a witch doctor as their most learned tribe member. Anything that would have upset the status quo would have been put down by the witch doctors because they saw no advantage accruing to them personally as a result of change. Primitive people may have observed seedlings growing after being exposed to water, but there would have been no payoff to the tribal witch doctors from encouraging that in any way because they did not control it. An elite sees no advantage accruing to them due to changes they do not control. A society founded upon the primacy of instinctual meat hunting wil
l probably not advance without outside pressures forcing it to do so, such as famines forcing people into agriculture. Hunter-gatherer instincts have value only in pre-technological societies. Modern societies are largely founded upon use of our prefrontal cortex, not instincts. Instinctual societies have never produced a technology above the level of a sharpened stick, and even monkeys can do that sort of thing.

  Hunter-gatherer societies are instinctual, and rarely evolve into anything better, or at least have no done so for tens of thousands of years. They do not become technological societies. They remain instinct-based, and founded upon hunting, as in the cases of Eskimos, African tribes and the Bush people of Australia. They do not go on to develop computer industries. Developing intellectual capabilities is rare. If the only things that allow for success in such societies are instincts and learning to follow the expectations of tribal elders, they will probably not develop technological societies. Nothing in their cultures foster technological development.

  People who go through life led by the ring in their noses placed there by of other people’s expectations have hollow shells in their lives in areas outside the influence of the expectations of other people. People involved in doing what others expect of them do not do much on their own. They are like the people who engage in mob scenes at sporting events. After they leave the stadium, what are they like? People driven by other people’s expectations are at their best doing mindlessly conformist things in groups, such as football riots, street demonstrations and the like, and have no adult lives outside of the spheres where they are psychologically integrated into a lowest-common-denominator group. Their individual capacities are woefully underdeveloped. Keep in mind that such people are not adults in any way. Adults are individuals, not just undifferentiated, interchangeable members of instinctual groups.

  It should come as no surprise that the human race did not develop beyond the hunter gatherer stage for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing in the human-on-human instinctual conformity environment pushed them to become individuals who could think for themselves, so they did not become self-motivated, self-reliant individuals. They did not develop technology or mechanized agriculture. The more they failed to evolve beyond the group-expectations mold, the more they stayed the same. Following group expectations was the survival mode for the Stone Age. Change was required in order for them to become individualistic adults, and that took a very long time. Even afterwards, change progressed very slowly. One thing which held them back for thousands of generations was that people remained under the control of their instincts until about fifty thousand years ago, when we started using writing, which was probably the result of some sort of evolutionary change. Instincts come with a sort of psychological push that induces people to do certain things that promote survival on a very low level. Instincts push people to do things that come to them automatically. There is no intellectual instinct. The problem is that going out in groups every day to hunt and gather food does not lead to anything beyond day-by-day survival. They slowly developed an anti-intellectual culture below the level of medieval Europe, when anything people could not understand in terms of their instinctual programming was branded as the work of evil spirits, and practitioners of anything new were burned alive as evil spirits. Galileo was almost burned alive simply for saying that the Earth moved around the sun, for example. People were still being burned alive as recently as the eighteenth century for such things. Conformity was the problem and did not advance our survival interests. It held us back at every turn.

  Don’t be a team player and a conformist. Team players take orders from other people all day long and their lives go nowhere as a result. They do not think for themselves. And exactly what does being a team player lead to? It leads to you being discarded whenever someone above you feels like it. They never develop their own ideas into something they can call their own, like a small company of their own based on an idea of their own. Team playing always produces stagnation for the team members. The main goal of people on a team is to live to accept the expectations of others, meaning everyone except themselves. These are usually not very good ideas but that is all that team players can expect. Being a team player means that you are not an individual. You are useful to the extent that you suit somebody else’s purposes, or the purposes of a big bunch of other people, and you will be discarded once your usefulness is over. All team members are disposable at any time.

  The key issue here is that other people are not more important than you are simply because they are other people. In fact the ideas of other people seem to exclude you from any sort of importance because you are not supposed to think of yourself first. Always put yourself first. They never tell you why their ideas are important at all, except that the group is more important than any individual because it is a group, which is no reason at all. This is intellectual nonsense because groups are anti-intellectual by design. Groups are not smart because they are groups. Everybody else except yourself is what they say you are supposed to think of first. There is no reason to do as they want you to do. Naturally, because the group instinct is what is in play here, the individual is subordinated completely in favor of lowest-common denominator instinctual mindlessness. Not very surprisingly, groups do not come up with very many new ideas, let alone workable new ideas. They have nothing that will work with except their instinctual emotions, which has nothing whatsoever of an intellectual nature. Groups do not take tests together and do not produce anything beyond muscular efforts. Nobody has ever defined why emotional group effort and emotional team spirit are so important on anything other than a grossly physical level. Instinctual feelings produce nothing. Instinctual enthusiasm for being instinctually enthusiastic is nothing worth talking about. There is less to it than meets the eye. A neo-religious belief that team effort means something special has no real meaning except to people who automatically assume that it has to mean something because they already believe it has some meaning which they are unable to define precisely because it has no intellectual meaning of any kind. A shared belief that being a part of a group is a good thing is an unfounded belief.

  A man who runs his life on other people’s expectations is thus a sort of human shadow. There are quite a few of them, and they may be in the numerical majority. Bacteria may be the most common life form on earth, but that does not make bacteria into anything special. The truth is not determined by the number of believers in that supposed truth. At the time of Christopher Columbus, a poll of the population would have shown that the vast majority thought that the earth was flat. Their belief in themselves and their groups do not make them right simply because they were in the majority. Nietzsche went even further. He wrote that “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” Belief in their own beliefs means nothing and does not make them right on any issue they felt themselves to be in the right about. The majority who think that their expectations make them correct on some level are simply instinctually insane when judging by rational standards. Being under the influence of the group expectations is simply a form of Stone-Age instinctual insanity. Majorities are not in the right because they are in the majority.

  An instinctual majority is always insane precisely because they are instinctual instead of rational. John Stuart Mill wrote “We call everything instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation.” Rational is the opposite of instinctual.

  We are intellectual adults to the extent that we can tune out the call of our instincts such as the allure of comfortable-feeling but wholly-wrong group expectations. Satisfying the allure of instinctual expectations feels good, but is ultimately wrong. The intellectual part of the brain needs to examine all of the calls of group expectations. If they cannot be rationally justified, they are wrong in every way.

  If the allure of instinctual expectations is in the wrong, exactly what is in the right? Start with self-reliance based on rationality founded in the cerebral cortex. Self-determina
tion is also in the right. The same goes for thinking rationally using the cerebral cortex. Self-judgment is another good starting point. Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke out against the conformity and group expectations of the nineteenth century. He described the ideal man of his era: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.....For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.....A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear......the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more.”