The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think

by Kenrick, Douglas T.

  HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR A ROCK?

  The first known diamond engagement ring was commissioned for Mary of Burgundy by the Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1477. Later, the Victorians regularly exchanged “regards” rings set with birthstones. But diamonds were almost unheard of by most people until the 1930s, when the De Beers group deployed a two-tentacled strategy unabashedly intended to exploit us.

  De Beers was founded as a mining operation in 1888, after an 83.5-carat diamond was found in present-day Kimberley, South Africa. Financed by the Rothschild family, the company began consolidating smaller outfits and quickly grew into a small empire. In 1927, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German immigrant who had previously founded another mining company backed by financier J. P. Morgan, managed to wrest control of De Beers and truly maximize its exploitative prowess.

  Oppenheimer, concerned that new diamond mines were being discovered throughout Africa, worried that the increased supply would swamp the market and force prices down. Some experts today believe that if gem prices were determined by a free open market, a diamond might fetch between $2 and $30. But chances are that either you or someone who loves you has been compelled to pay substantially more for this lump of compressed coal—and you can thank De Beers.

  To keep prices high, Oppenheimer solidified De Beers into a diamond cartel. After gaining control of 90 percent of the world’s diamond production and distribution, De Beers began to artificially limit the supply—thus the “rarity”—of diamonds. This is important because people are inherently attracted to objects and opportunities that are scarce. Robert Cialdini, our mentor and author of Influence, spent several years going underground to study the scams used by insurance salesmen, used car dealers, and cult leaders. He found that many of these hustlers exploit people’s desire for goodies they think are scarce. By manipulating perceived scarcity, the De Beers parasite could now draw people in like flies to a neon light, extracting ever-more money from its human hosts.

  The scarcity ploy was certainly exploitative, but it’s what came next that makes De Beers truly a deep rationality parasite. In addition to controlling supply and distribution, De Beers oversaw another critical part of the diamond business: marketing. “A gemstone is the ultimate luxury product. It has no material use,” Oppenheimer confessed. “Men and women desire to have diamonds not for what they can do but for what they desire.” But De Beers needed to manufacture this desire—to fabricate the yearning specifically for diamonds. To spin a yarn that would turn a rock into one of the most valuable commodities on earth, it turned to Madison Avenue.

  In 1947, Frances Gerety was a young copywriter working for De Beers’s advertising agency, N. W. Ayer & Son. Although Gerety herself never married, she had a big impact on millions of other marriages by coining the phrase “a diamond is forever.” Advertising Age magazine named it the single best advertising slogan of the twentieth century. The eminently memorable phrase was the centerpiece of campaigns featuring ethereal women longing for eternal love, symbolized by a diamond engagement ring. While perpetuating the mythology of love surrounding diamonds, the “diamond is forever” slogan was also cleverly designed to ensure that women hung on to their diamonds for the rest of their lives (“I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back,” Zsa Zsa Gabor once noted).

  The notion of keeping diamonds forever was aimed to prevent a secondary market for used diamonds. The trick was to persuade people that to really have special meaning, your diamond should be untouched by another woman (you try giving your bride-to-be a used diamond ring originally intended for another female stranger). By maintaining that true love could only be expressed through a brand-new diamond ring, De Beers managed to maintain control of the diamond trade at the wholesale level, enabling retailers to sell diamonds at a high price without competition from secondary markets.

  De Beers had orchestrated the perfect parasitic coup. After making its product artificially scarce, its marketing strategy perpetually activated the subself most vulnerable to scarcity: the mate-acquisition subself. As described in an earlier chapter, this subself particularly fancies scarce and rare objects, being drawn to restaurants “off the beaten path” and “limited-edition” goodies.

  Only thirty years after the launch of the “diamond is forever” campaign, a diamond ring was considered not simply a luxury but a necessity in the modern engagement ritual. By the 1960s, 80 percent of American brides-to-be were demanding, and getting, a diamond; today that number remains similar, with the average engagement ring costing $3,200 (De Beers’s original marketing suggested that a man should spend the equivalent of one month’s income on an engagement ring, but it later readjusted the monetary value of a woman’s love, increasing the price to two months’ income). De Beers did not limit its appetite for profit to America. Countries like Japan, which never had a tradition of romantic marriage, made diamonds a tough sell for brides. But De Beers persuaded even Japanese mate-acquisition subselves to part with their money for some shiny coal. Whereas in 1967 only 5 percent of brides in Japan wore a diamond, this percentage had increased to 77 percent by 1990.

  A RING FOR EVERY SUBSELF

  De Beers stuffed its coffers by exploiting our mate-acquisition subself, through both marketing and manipulative business practices. But the jewelry industry today would not be a $150 billion juggernaut if it had settled for only one of our subselves. An engagement ring can be put on only one finger, and jewelry makers couldn’t help but notice that we have ten fingers, nine of which remained unprofitably naked. Thankfully, there is now a different ring—or some piece of jewelry—for every available finger, wrist, ankle, toe, neck, belly button, ear, nose, eyebrow, cheek, chin, nipple, and lip (both above and below the waist).

  Now that a woman’s fourth finger on the left hand was taken, De Beers moved to conquer the fourth finger on the right hand by exploiting women’s status subself. “Your left hand says we. Your right hand says me,” De Beers explains in its marketing. After all, what better way for modern women to show their independence than by buying their own diamond rings? (In addition to, not instead of, the engagement ring, of course.) The jewelry maker Kwiat offers a line of right-hand rings for around $5,000, but you can also scoop one up at Walmart, whose Keepsake Independence (“a shining symbol of your feminine spirit”) retails for $389.

  Of course, not only women express their status through jewelry. Even if a fellow doesn’t yearn to look like Mr. T, who regularly wore twenty pounds of gold chains around his neck, men of all sorts spend serious money on bling fashioned from costly gems and metals. In a professional sports championship, for example, the real trophy is the ring given to each player. One football player described the ideal ring as the “ten table ring,” meaning that people in a restaurant could see the ring from ten tables away in every direction. The Green Bay Packers 2011 Super Bowl rings certainly met this goal—each contained more than one hundred diamonds.

  Now that you have announced your status and your deep feelings for your loved one, you will need to retain your mate by finding a way to ensure that he or she continues to love you. But how? De Beers has a handy suggestion: “Say you’d marry her all over again with a diamond anniversary ring.” If you really want to prove your enduring love, that special anniversary ring comes with a matching diamond necklace, earrings, and bracelet. And if giving your loved one diamonds for your anniversary is becoming too blasé and predictable, De Beers also offers the “eternity ring” (a symbol of continuing affection and appreciation) and the “trilogy ring” (representing the past, present, and future of a relationship). De Beers can really kill a lot of birds with one stone—or rock, in their case.

  Jewelry solves more than the needs of mate acquisition, mate retention, and status. There are friendship bracelets, best-friend necklaces, and forever-friends rings to keep us in touch with our BFFs, not to mention class rings to keep us all connected with the old crowd from County High School or State U. If you’re a parent, what better way to express your love
than with a graduation ring for your child, who should likewise buy his or her parents some jewelry for any one of the many special occasions throughout the year (Tiffany & Co. offers a special Mother’s Day butterfly brooch for $7,900, but if you’re feeling strapped for cash, you could just pick up a Tiffany “Yours Mom” heart charm for only $1,275). And to bling out the self-protection subself, “intuitive jewelry artist” Robyn A. Harton offers a collection of affordable jewelry to protect us from negative energy, crime, radiation, injury, demons, and the “evil eye,” as well as pieces for “all-purpose general protection.”

  Jewelry also becomes a surprising elixir that can fight disease, as when a necklace or bracelet stores important medical information or when we derive special healing powers from an energy bracelet. Zepter Luxury International, for example, offers magnetic jewelry to heal us from “all types of ailments from arthritis to circulation problems, migraine headaches to frozen shoulders.” Although it might seem silly to think that a piece of jewelry can make people healthier or feel better, the reality is that millions of people are desperate to find ways to fulfill the evolutionary need of disease avoidance. And whichever direction they turn, there’s usually some kind of parasite eager to take their money.

  A PILL WITH THAT, SIR?

  Recent decades have witnessed an infestation in American homes. Rather than taking traditional forms like vermin or locusts, these critters take the form of pills. From Abilify, Adderall, and Ambien to Zofran, Zoloft, and Zyprexa, prescription drugs have invaded our bathroom cabinets like squirmy centipedes in basement walls. Whereas in 1929 the average American filled less than two prescriptions per year, by 2006 each child got four, each adult got eleven, and each senior citizen got twenty-eight. The 2012 United Healthcare prescription drug catalog offered choices from among 1,080 different pills, with yearly sales in the United States totaling $307 billion—almost enough money to pave the entire US interstate system in gold.

  Given all the pills people are popping, you’d think there was some serious new affliction going around. And there is! A massive outbreak of pharmaceutical parasites exploiting our ancestral tendencies.

  Part of the dramatic pharmaceutical growth stems from the explosion of direct-to-consumer advertising (the “ask your doctor” ads). These ads attempt to bypass the power of the traditional middleman in the pill business (the doctor) by empowering us regular folks to play doctor ourselves. Instead of waiting for your doctor to diagnose you with something, the ads bait you into performing self-diagnoses and encourage you to prescribe your own treatment.

  This is like sending your disease-avoidance subself—your inner compulsive hypochondriac—to the candy store, where every twitch, hiccup, or social aberration can be alleviated with a scoop into yet another bin full of colorful pills. Tired? Moody? Coughing? Sneezing? Depressed? Anxious? Hyper? Cholesterol too high? Cholesterol too low? Can’t get it up? Can’t get it down? Whatever ails you, there is a pill that promises to meet your need. “Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning?” comedian Chris Rock recalls hearing in one ad, then quips, “Yeah, I got that.” Need help with your sleep? No worries, here’s a little something to help you fall asleep, and another pill to stay asleep, and a little something extra to help you wake up in the morning. And if you’re a little anxious about all the pills you’re taking, here is something else to calm you down a bit.

  It’s true that drug companies produce some drugs that can treat serious illnesses and save or prolong lives. But make no mistake about it: they are in the business of peddling pills. And like our friends in the diamond business, pharmaceutical corporations make money by selling more rather than less of their product. Although purported to help us, prescription drugs are ironically the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States. Adverse reactions from properly prescribed and properly administered drugs cause about 106,000 deaths per year. A person is ten times more likely to die from taking legal medication than from experimenting with dangerous illegal drugs, which kill about ten thousand people per year. Perhaps the war on drugs should be redirected.

  Even if you’re uncertain whether pharmaceutical companies are the good guys or the bad guys, you’d probably agree that those who blatantly counterfeit medicines are definitely on the parasitic end of the exploitation continuum. The malicious fake-meds industry rakes in an estimated $75 billion a year—that’s more money than the profits made from heroin and cocaine.

  Counterfeit drugs look like the real thing but contain no active ingredients. They oftentimes kill by failing to treat life-threatening illnesses, most notably in developing nations where recent setbacks in treating malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis have been attributed to counterfeit medical supplies. But lethal additives and seemingly harmless fillers can also cause drugs to act differently in a patient’s system, potentially resulting in death. Not only is it not much fun when that asthma medicine doesn’t contain any active ingredients, but it’s even less fun when a familiar-looking headache medication lands you in the emergency room.

  WHAT “THEY” DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT

  Given so many shady dealings in the world of modern medicine, it’s easy to become cynical and a little paranoid when it comes to pharmaceuticals. If you’re convinced that real or fake pill pushers are out to get your money, you’ll be glad to know there are like-minded people who can help.

  Meet Kevin Trudeau. Like a growing number of people, Trudeau believes that the drug companies are hiding and suppressing information about natural ways to cure disease. He asserts that even if you’re sick, you don’t need all those pills the drug companies are hawking. What you need instead is Trudeau’s book Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About. The book reveals how you can “easily cure” not only arthritis, acid reflux, phobia, depression, obesity, chronic fatigue syndrome, attention deficit disorder, and diabetes but also multiple sclerosis, lupus, AIDS, cancer, herpes, and muscular dystrophy. This might sound too good to be true, but take a look at Trudeau on television in his infomercials, being interviewed by paid actors who are constantly astounded by the effectiveness of his cures.

  Some naysayers have criticized Trudeau for having absolutely no medical training. But his proponents would argue that this simply proves that he is not a pawn of the pharmaceutical companies. Trudeau has also been criticized for his inability to provide evidence to back up many of his claims. For example, he cites a twenty-five-year research study involving a natural cure for diabetes at the University of Calgary. Critics have been outraged that the study doesn’t seem to exist. What critics fail to understand, according to Trudeau, is that the university had no choice but to destroy its findings to prevent reprisals from the pharmaceutical industry.

  The book “they” don’t want you to know about has so far sold over 5 million copies, and you can receive your own copy for a mere $29.95 plus $11.95 shipping (oh, and another $19.95 handling fee “they” don’t want you to know about, a “free” newsletter subscription that will result in an additional $30 charge, and constant harassment by Trudeau’s henchmen, who will call you daily to sell you additional products, as well as more harassment by all the other swindlers who will get your contact information from a “mooch list” that Trudeau will sell them).

  But wait—that’s not all! It turns out that Trudeau is somewhat of a modern miracle worker, capable of fulfilling many more needs than just curing your medical ailments. His other books include Debt Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About and The Money-Making Secrets “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, as well as Your Wish Is Your Command (a fourteen-CD lecture from an undisclosed location in the Swiss Alps that will give you the “hidden key” to take complete control of your personal and financial wishes). And there is also the perennial best seller Free Money “They” Don’t Want You to Know About. This last book will direct you to a search engine that will charge $18 per search to find your “free money.” And if you earn more than $500 a month, you won’t qualify for 89 per
cent of the programs “they” don’t want you to know about, which are just government grants some people are too lazy to Google.

  Trudeau also doesn’t want you to know about his extensive criminal record. After getting out of prison for fraud and larceny, Trudeau entered the fight against obesity by joining forces with Nutrition for Life, which the attorney general of Illinois together with seven other states successfully prosecuted as a pyramid scheme. Trudeau’s literary inspiration came in 2004, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made him the only person in history to be banned for life from selling anything on television (he had been pitching multiple products that included a “hair farming system” that was supposed to “finally end baldness in the human race” and a “breakthrough that in 60 seconds can eliminate addictions”). The FTC only allowed him to promote his own books via infomercials, which are supposedly under the protection of the First Amendment. But that hasn’t been working out so well either—in 2011 Trudeau was fined $37.6 million for defrauding the public. Trudeau claims that “they” are scheming to keep his books off of shelves, so better get one quickly, because they’re bound to be scarce soon.

  PROTECTION FROM DEEP RATIONALITY PARASITES

  From con men to company men, many conspirators seek to exploit our deeply rational tendencies. Some of us don’t mind being exploited some of the time, especially when the exploiters are symbiotic partners who give as well as take. But many of us are duped into being on the short end of one-way parasitic relationships, which can lead to a loud sucking sound coming straight from our wallets. Like the cuckoo or the saber-toothed blenny, human social parasites take advantage of our ancestrally successful biases.

  How can you determine if you’re dealing with a symbiotic partner intent on helping you or a social parasite bent on exploiting you? It can be difficult. Bernie Madoff’s clients, for example, didn’t know they were being duped until it was too late. Social parasites are expert deceivers, carefully diverting our attention and strategically concealing information. But you can do three things to protect yourself.