INTRODUCTION
One man broke out of the herd,
He climbed on the wall, fled in despair.
On top of the wall, he sat, feeling sad ...
Looking down... but no man was there.
On top of the wall, he sat, feeling sad ...
Looking down... but no man was there.
The March of Folly
In her book, “The March of Folly, ”Barbara Tuchman describes decisions made by leaders against their own interests.
She described 'Folly' by quoting Plato: "When the soul contradicts the viewpoint, or knowledge, or wisdom, all of which are natural laws, I call this folly".
The march of folly did not stop with the Vietnam War which was her last example of folly. The march of folly continues until today.
We cannot blame modern leaders for a lack of knowledge when they have the largest database ever - the Internet - and on their side are legions of intelligence personnel whose job is to find information. Despite this, this foolish march continues. Apparently, information, knowledge, and intelligence are of no help in preventing the tendency of leaders from repeating the march of folly.
Some will argue that US President Obama's Middle East policy was a demonstration of a foolish march, causing the “Arab spring” and marking the decline of the power of the US in the world. This folly caused the bitter Shiva/Sunni war and, perhaps, even initiated the clash between the Western/ and Muslim civilizations.
Some will argue that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, brought about the end of Christian Europe, with her invitation to millions of Muslim refugees.
We can argue that we, in Israel, practiced our own self-made folly in the Oslo agreement which brought a defeated enemy, the Fatah organization, into the heart of our land. It resulted in the deaths of thousands of Israeli lives and complicated the Arab-Israeli conflict beyond repair.
We have to ask what makes leaders ignore logic, and act against their own interests?
The answer is that all these foolish decisions have one common denominator: the inability of these leaders to predict how people of a different cultural group will react. Time and again leaders have displayed this inability.
Sadly, this lack of understanding often leads to disaster.
In this book, we argue that all of us, not just our leaders, have a limited understanding of the other person.
It is very important for everyone to understand how other people grasp events, and how they react to them. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. The philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, noted that: “The face of the other is always what I am not and therefore is always an enigma.”
We know very little about the ways in which our brain works, and less than nothing about what goes on in another person's mind.
My interest in exploring to what degree we understand the other person was aroused by realizing that my intelligent friends cannot understand how someone like me remains faithful to ideas that they perceive as utterly unfounded on facts and logic. Of course, I also wonder how intelligent people like them could have illusions that are clearly not based on logic and facts.
Obviously, there is some aspect beyond people’s intelligence that determines our way of thinking. A person can be sure that he has the right ideas while the other person is wrong, whereas the other will think exactly the same of that person.
Before we try to go farther, we need to acknowledge that vast differences exist among people, especially among people coming from a cultural group other than our own.
To all of us, it is clear that there is a difference between men and women, between the slim and the heavily-built person, between a tall person and a short one. Differences also exist in the aspirations and mindsets of different people. But as the philosopher, Levinas, noted, for each of us others are “the other face” and therefore enigmatic.
Allow me to invite you on a research journey into that mysterious terrain of “the face of the other” in the hope that by the journey’s end, we will have at least a slightly better understanding of how others think and react.
Just before we set out, let us open up our mind. It would not be the first time in human history that what was obvious to everyone turns out to be a false idea. After all, none of us believes anymore that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around it.
Some of the premises that we will present on our journey will seem to you as no less distorted than the strange notion that Copernicus had when he told our ancestors that the sun, rather than the earth, is in the center of the universe. After all, people could see with their own eyes, how the sun moved around the earth, which stood still in the center of the universe. Only that stubborn fellow, Galileo, insisted that moves it does). “Eppur si muove” (and yet it moves). And he was right!
In this book, I have attempted to open up our understanding of how the other person, the person “who is not me,” thinks and behaves. Further on, I presume that the way in which we humans think and react is emotion-based, as well as the result of logical thinking. Therefore, understanding the other person requires understanding the reasons for these emotions in a person.
Scientists, busy in their laboratories, try to map the brain and find out which brain cells are responsible for various functions. Were we to know exactly how every synapse in the brain functions while we carry out one function or another, we would still be unable to estimate what the other person feels, and how he will behave.
The primary thrust of scientific research is to understand how the brain is structured and how it processes data fed in by our senses. Yes, of course, this is important information in the overall attempt to understand human behavior but no less important is the information stored in our brains, the mutual impact of community and the individuals in it, as well as the norms of culture which dictate the scale of values by which we conduct ourselves.
Scientists study how the brain works; here we'll try a different approach. We'll try to explore why the brain functions as it does, rather than in some other way.
We will do this by investigating which brain mechanisms were developed to meet the challenges that humans face, in spite of the brain's organic structural limitations.
Then we will study how our culture influences our thoughts and actions since none of us is disconnected from the community in which we live.
In Chapter 1, we explore the basic mechanisms behind the act of thinking and reactions inside the individual human brain.
Chapter 2 presents the impact of our community on our thoughts and responses.
Chapter 3 will delve into understanding human communities. This is important for having some clues about which ideas and feelings the community implants in our brain.
I hope that when you finish reading this book, you'll know more about how people think and react.
She described 'Folly' by quoting Plato: "When the soul contradicts the viewpoint, or knowledge, or wisdom, all of which are natural laws, I call this folly".
The march of folly did not stop with the Vietnam War which was her last example of folly. The march of folly continues until today.
We cannot blame modern leaders for a lack of knowledge when they have the largest database ever - the Internet - and on their side are legions of intelligence personnel whose job is to find information. Despite this, this foolish march continues. Apparently, information, knowledge, and intelligence are of no help in preventing the tendency of leaders from repeating the march of folly.
Some will argue that US President Obama's Middle East policy was a demonstration of a foolish march, causing the “Arab spring” and marking the decline of the power of the US in the world. This folly caused the bitter Shiva/Sunni war and, perhaps, even initiated the clash between the Western/ and Muslim civilizations.
Some will argue that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, brought about the end of Christian Europe, with her invitation to millions of Muslim refugees.
We can argue that we, in Israel, practiced our own self-made folly in the Oslo agreement which brought a defeated enemy, the Fatah organization, into the heart of our land. It resulted in the deaths of thousands of Israeli lives and complicated the Arab-Israeli conflict beyond repair.
We have to ask what makes leaders ignore logic, and act against their own interests?
The answer is that all these foolish decisions have one common denominator: the inability of these leaders to predict how people of a different cultural group will react. Time and again leaders have displayed this inability.
Sadly, this lack of understanding often leads to disaster.
In this book, we argue that all of us, not just our leaders, have a limited understanding of the other person.
It is very important for everyone to understand how other people grasp events, and how they react to them. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. The philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, noted that: “The face of the other is always what I am not and therefore is always an enigma.”
We know very little about the ways in which our brain works, and less than nothing about what goes on in another person's mind.
My interest in exploring to what degree we understand the other person was aroused by realizing that my intelligent friends cannot understand how someone like me remains faithful to ideas that they perceive as utterly unfounded on facts and logic. Of course, I also wonder how intelligent people like them could have illusions that are clearly not based on logic and facts.
Obviously, there is some aspect beyond people’s intelligence that determines our way of thinking. A person can be sure that he has the right ideas while the other person is wrong, whereas the other will think exactly the same of that person.
Before we try to go farther, we need to acknowledge that vast differences exist among people, especially among people coming from a cultural group other than our own.
To all of us, it is clear that there is a difference between men and women, between the slim and the heavily-built person, between a tall person and a short one. Differences also exist in the aspirations and mindsets of different people. But as the philosopher, Levinas, noted, for each of us others are “the other face” and therefore enigmatic.
Allow me to invite you on a research journey into that mysterious terrain of “the face of the other” in the hope that by the journey’s end, we will have at least a slightly better understanding of how others think and react.
Just before we set out, let us open up our mind. It would not be the first time in human history that what was obvious to everyone turns out to be a false idea. After all, none of us believes anymore that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around it.
Some of the premises that we will present on our journey will seem to you as no less distorted than the strange notion that Copernicus had when he told our ancestors that the sun, rather than the earth, is in the center of the universe. After all, people could see with their own eyes, how the sun moved around the earth, which stood still in the center of the universe. Only that stubborn fellow, Galileo, insisted that moves it does). “Eppur si muove” (and yet it moves). And he was right!
In this book, I have attempted to open up our understanding of how the other person, the person “who is not me,” thinks and behaves. Further on, I presume that the way in which we humans think and react is emotion-based, as well as the result of logical thinking. Therefore, understanding the other person requires understanding the reasons for these emotions in a person.
Scientists, busy in their laboratories, try to map the brain and find out which brain cells are responsible for various functions. Were we to know exactly how every synapse in the brain functions while we carry out one function or another, we would still be unable to estimate what the other person feels, and how he will behave.
The primary thrust of scientific research is to understand how the brain is structured and how it processes data fed in by our senses. Yes, of course, this is important information in the overall attempt to understand human behavior but no less important is the information stored in our brains, the mutual impact of community and the individuals in it, as well as the norms of culture which dictate the scale of values by which we conduct ourselves.
Scientists study how the brain works; here we'll try a different approach. We'll try to explore why the brain functions as it does, rather than in some other way.
We will do this by investigating which brain mechanisms were developed to meet the challenges that humans face, in spite of the brain's organic structural limitations.
Then we will study how our culture influences our thoughts and actions since none of us is disconnected from the community in which we live.
In Chapter 1, we explore the basic mechanisms behind the act of thinking and reactions inside the individual human brain.
Chapter 2 presents the impact of our community on our thoughts and responses.
Chapter 3 will delve into understanding human communities. This is important for having some clues about which ideas and feelings the community implants in our brain.
I hope that when you finish reading this book, you'll know more about how people think and react.
Why is it Important?
Throughout the centuries, philosophers, poets, and authors have written on the subject of human nature. There are millions of words describing how people think and behave.
This extensive study into people’s minds has been carried out for a very good reason.
It is important to understand how the other person thinks and reacts since this can guide us as to how we should conduct our relations with that other person. A wise person tries to understand the reactions of other people and takes them into consideration when making decisions. In fact, people are in a constant process of assessing the behavior of others. They do it with consciously or subconsciously considerations, and with rational or emotional considerations.
A couple on their first date will make emotional assessments. Each one will want to know how the other feels toward him or her.
Marketing experts try to assess the reactions of potential consumers to their new products.
A politician will assess the responses of his constituents to his speech.
These are typical of the assessments we all make, day after day. The common denominator is the need to understand how “the other person, who is not me” thinks, feels and responds. We all feel that need to crack these enigmatic aspects, as noted by the philosopher, Emanuel Levinas.
Assessment is so vital to our functioning that nature, in its evolutionary wisdom, has equipped us with a range of tools that helps us to carry out this task. Some of these are direct tools, others are indirect, some are inborn, and some are acquired during our lifetime.
Direct tools include smart reading of body language and even very small facial gestures, which act as lie detectors.
Indirect tools include intuition, and stereotypical patterns engraved in our minds enabling us to reach a speedy assessment of the other.
An example of an inherited tool is the ability of infants to identify their mother's face.
An example of an acquired tool is a combat pilot's skill at identifying the silhouette of enemy planes.
These tools are, unfortunately, limited. They are not effective when the other person masks his feelings, especially if he conducts himself according to rules and habits unknown to our culture.
How Dare I Write a Philosophy book
The first question that immediately comes to mind is this: How can a layman like me have such pretentious aspirations as to succeed in a task where the best philosophers and neuroscientists have failed? Here are some reasons in my defense:
- I do not pretend to explore and understand how exactly the brain works. That task is handled by many scientists around the world. Rather, I attack the problems in another way, as is explained later in this book. In a nutshell, I am confident that evolution has found the best way to develop our brain in order to help us survive. Therefore any trait found in our brain is there for a good reason. All ideas presented here are based on the discoveries that scientists have made in their research. I am merely trying to build a complete picture, using these facts to understand how the human brain works. Over many millions of years, evolution has improved traits that helped humanity survive and thrive. I am like a person who has no idea how television works, yet knows enough to use it by pressing the appropriate button to see his favorite channel. He has no need to know how the data are processed in the integrated circuits inside the box in order to change the channel. Equally, there is no need to know how the brain circuitry works to know what makes a person feel fear. All we have to know that he does his best to survive. I am trying to investigate these kinds of phenomena in the book. This way we can understand better what makes a person react in one way and not another; in short how the other person will react. Here is a hint about the nature of some of the insights that will be discussed in detail later; the other person does not necessarily react the way in which I would, given the same situation.
- The results of studies and experiments conducted by neuroscientists are available on the Internet for anyone to see and use. One does not have to be a scientist to make sense of this research; on the Internet, there are plenty of professors explaining the meaning of such studies. Thus all one has to do is to fit all these pieces of information together into the puzzle to get the full picture.
- Brain research is still in its infancy, and professional neuroscientists do not understand much more than the curious laymen.
- Traits of the human brain have been perfected over millions of years. It can be assumed that many of the traits existing in our mind originated due to the mechanism of evolution, preserving the necessary features necessary for our survival. Understanding of evolutionary processes could help our understanding of the brain ’s function.
- As Newton said: "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants". Since his day, the 'giants' of today have been growing bigger. That is why sitting on their shoulders, we can now see much farther into the horizon.
- Nature tends to develop in simple ways. Therefore it is likely that one can understand the basic mechanisms of the brain even though the brain is very complex.
And one more thing – we must not rely blindly on experts. Studies have found that experts have difficulty in creating new ideas. Sometimes the experts refuse even to accept new ideas presented to them. Most experts are so confident in their own knowledge concerning their narrow field of expertise that they cannot pluck up enough mental courage to admit that they may have been wrong. One example of such an attitude is how the chaos theory was not accepted by the scientific community when it was first presented.
Many ideas that I present in this book contradict our intuition and our beliefs. But this was the case when other new ideas were also presented.
A theory should be valued on its ability to predict all observed phenomena, and whether it can be verified by experiments. Such is the quantum theory. No one really understands the quantum theory: it just is not intuitive. We cannot perceive, for example, the reversal of roles between cause and effect, as this theory predicts. But, until now, quantum theory has proved to be accurate in predicting results. That is why as long as a theory provides answers to phenomena, we have to accept its validity, even though we cannot perceive it with our intuition. It may be that the theory will be explained with some knowledge in the future, knowledge which is not at present in our possession. In the future, we may find, for example, that the flow of time can be reversed, and that this reversal will explain the reversal of cause and effect.
Understanding the essence of time may solve also other mysteries that physicists accept as axioms - for example, the fact we cannot exceed the speed of light, which is the basis of the calculations that Einstein developed in his theory of relativity.
In the same way, one should accept the theories presented here if they can predict human behavior, even if one cannot perceive it in his intuition. It is not wise to rely on intuition; remember how intuition rejected the claim that the earth was moving around the sun!
A taste of what you'll find in this book
Before delving into the task of understanding the other person's mind, I would like to point out the main issues. Our thinking and the way we grasp the reality around us is influenced by many factors. In general, we have to take into account the traits of the individual (in Chapter 1), the community in which he lives (details in Chapter 3), as well as the relationship between the two (as will be expanded in Chapter 2).
I know that these points are not completely clear at this point; they will be discussed later.
I'll present some theories in order to draw a complete picture of the way in which I think our brain functions.
Some of them are known theories, others are my hypotheses. Each one of them can, in itself, be discussed in a separate book, but here they are discussed in short in an effort to understand the main issue of this book, which is to understand how the other person thinks and behaves.
Basic premises
In seeking to understand the laws governing the mechanics of daily life, we can use Newton's empirical laws. There is no need to delve into the laws of quantum mechanics concerning the interactions between the basic particles. In the same way, it is also possible to use the empirical laws of nature to understand the operation of the human mind, without any need to know how the synapses in the human brain are connected.
Here are some of the relevant empirical rules:
- Evolution. We need to assume that the solutions formed by evolution are those that ensure our survival. Other solutions were sifted out by evolution. In this way, if we discover a trait shared by most members of the human race, we might assume that this trait’s existence implies its necessity for our survival in the ancient savannas in Africa where most of our evolution developed. When discussing the brain’s activities, we will rely on this premise as a way of disclosing which traits in the human brain are best suited to answer the challenges that human beings encountered then.
- Simplicity. It is natural for the easiest and simplest solutions to be realized first, in the same way as water finds the easiest route along which to flow, bypassing natural obstacles, shaping the river bed. In the same way, it would appear that complex creatures such as humans have reached sophistication from a far simpler starting point by having to overcome obstacles encountered along our path of development.
- Balance. Newton’s third law is essentially a law of balance. A force exerted by one body on another causes a counter force on the first. In nature, the interaction between elements is vast and diverse, and the reaction does not necessarily have to be direct. It may occur through many other bodies. This law is not limited to mechanical phenomena. It applies to every process in nature, including the way in which people react. For example, when our body is dehydrated the concentration of salts sends a message to our brain. The brain interprets it as thirst and that, in turn, drives us to drink and lower the salt concentration of salts.
- Integration of long-term solutions and short-term solutions. Solutions developed through evolution are not optimized only for the short-term range or are solutions for the specific body. Certain traits that may seem harmful in the short term may actually bring about good solutions in the long term. An example of this is that the brain’s plasticity renders the human baby defenseless, but allows for it to adapt to future changing conditions. Solutions may be well suited to a more complex body of which the original body is a part. For example, some of the features in human cells were developed for the wellbeing of the human body and not for the wellbeing of the cell itself.
- Feedback. Nature prefers feedback systems on 'send and forgets' systems since they enable corrections while in the process to get to the target. It is possible to see how our body is based on feedback systems. The need to preserve the precise demarcation of multiple parameters in the body, such as temperature and blood pressure, is best done with feedback solutions for every parameter. Feedback processes are everywhere, not only in our body. We can also detect them in economic systems and political systems. They are relevant when we discuss maintaining the balance between the individual human and his community.
- Repetitions. A successful process in nature is applied to many seemingly unconnected cases. That is why we can often understand how things function in one case if we know how they function in another. For example, understanding certain features in plants can illuminate our understanding of similar features in human beings.
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