Why doesn't everyone just get along?
1st November 2009
Irreconcilable differences are everywhere.
Some people are idealistic, others pragmatic. If you're one, you probably don't get on well with the other very much. Same for conservatives and liberals, pessimists and optimists, and people who like their cornflakes crunchy, or not. One guy has apparently convinced 100,000 people that he's the second coming of Christ, and no logic will defeat him.
No matter how hard they argue and loud they shout, one side can never convince the other they're right. Which all makes perfect sense, if you know why.
Why Utopia doesn't exist
Imagine a far away, Utopian world, inhabited by a people not too dissimilar to ourselves. Let's call them Qwigglers.
The Qwigglers are amazingly advanced race, and have no concept of war, or drugs, or reality television. Most importantly, every Qwiggler is honest, and will always act in the most altruistic manner possible to fellow Qwigglers. This in itself makes crime impossible.
Everything seems perfect in Qwiggle-land.
One day, a Qwiggler called Dave is born. Due to a million-to-one freak mutation, Dave is different from the other Qwigglers in only one way: he isn't automatically altruistic.
Dave soon realises that the world around him is a wonderful place. Everyone will do anything to help him out. "Can I borrow your car?" asks Dave, and sure enough, he can. Unlike everyone else around him though, he feels no compulsion to ever give it back. Bored, Dave drives his new car into a lake and returns the keys to the owner.
"What happened to my car?" asks the owner.
"I drove it into a lake because I was bored."
"Ok, have a nice day!"
Soon, Dave has a fleet of cars, money, and anything he wants. No matter how far he pushes his demands, there is nothing to punish him. Surrounded by a harem of hundreds, Dave dies fat and happy aged 93.
Dave's incredible life inspired many to adopt his bad behaviour. For them, the world is a similarly rich place to exploit, and soon 10% of the planet behaves just like Dave.
Now things get really bad for the good Qwigglers. They're surrounded by so many Daves, that they're virtually guaranteed to be ruthlessly exploited at every turn. Many are rounded up as slaves, or even killed. Soon all the good guys start to die out completely.
The Daves have problems of their own. They lived off exploiting the behaviour of the good, but every day they find themselves surrounded by more of their own kind. Now their own kind are fighting and killing each other, so they start to die out too.
But there's a new breed of Qwiggler - let's call her Alison. Alison is altruistic as a general rule, but she sure can hold a grudge. If abused, Ali would turn against the abuser, and will tell everyone just what a horrible mean Qwiggle they really are. "You wouldn't believe that Dave!"
Alison and her kind would survive almost any mix of good and bad behaviour. She benefits from the altruism of her own kind, yet isn't victim (often) to the mean Dave's of the world. Best of all, the huge advantages that 'pure' good or bad Qwigglers have are useless against her kind. Ultimately, most of the population will behave in this way, some more one way than the other. Just like human beings.
A brief bit of science
The proper name for this is Game Theory, which looks at how an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. Reality isn't as contrived as this example, of course, but the principle is the same: all behaviour eventually has to survive against all other behaviour, because over enough time almost any behaviour will exist.
In the same way, idealistic and pragmatic behaviours both work. They're actually both effective 'strategies' overall, but never definitively so, or one would kill off the other. So they co-exist, endlessly jostling for supremacy.
Pessimism? That's a strategy, albeit a sad one. Assuming the worst can protect people. If everyone was optimistic all the time, someone slightly more pessimistic might have an advantage, say, at not being eaten by lions.
Why people aren't the same
For every variation, there's a continuum of behaviour: left to right, bold to meek, cautious to direct. Nearly every possible type of behaviour will exist, simply because it can.
Most of these behaviours would be useless without their opposite. Alturism isn't much good when sand gets kicked in your face, and being a hard-ass isn't the best way to build relations.
Life has proven very effective at varying safe settings - like our favourite colours - easily, while not messing with qualities that get us in trouble, like believing we can fly. What variation is left is inevitable, and that's a good thing. It gives us the rich diversity of character that makes humanity so adaptive and damned interesting.
With apologies to any Alisons and Daves I know and may have accidentally referenced in this article.
