Jonathan Haidt has a saying: “People are ninety percent chimp and ten percent bee”. It’s supposed to mean that people usually push each other around selfishly to gain status, but occasionally have an ability to come together into a single unified superorganism working for the common good. He seems to reify this more than a little, treating it as a “switch” that can be turned on by certain situations or rituals. He gives lots of examples, but three that stick out for me are patriotism, team sports, and pep rallies.
They stick out because they’re a pretty good list of the things that most turned me off when I was younger.
I was definitely one of those people who fact-checked patriotism: “America is number one? Really? Then how come Canada has lower crime, lower poverty rate, lower infant mortality, and higher self-rated life satisfaction?” The feeling engendered by an image of an eagle flying in front of the American flag while the Star-Spangled Banner played in the background was a combination of cringing and urge to nitpick.
Team sports always seemed moderately barbaric. When forced to participate, I treated them about the same way I treat being on call in hospital as an intern – desperately pray that none of the activity happens in an area I am responsible for, frantically try to transfer it to some more qualified person when it does, and make burnt offerings of thanksgiving to the gods of every major world religion when it’s over.
So I came out of all this stuff figuring I lacked what Haidt calls “the hive switch”, the ability for the right trigger to take you outside yourself and bring you into ecstatic union with an in-group. And most of the people I most respected felt the same way. It was even a point of pride: “I’m the sort of person who can see through pep rallies and isn’t stupid enough to start screaming with the rest of them.”
I have heard a very attractive explanation for this. Being a nerd, goes the explanation, is sort of like autism. And autistic people are missing a lot of the brain’s normal social machinery. So nerds are just autistic enough to be missing the hive switch.
It is never a good idea to underestimate human variation. But this has not been my experience.
I think the thing with nerds and hive switches is the same. It’s not that we lack the ability to lose ourselves in an in-group, it’s that all the groups people expected us to lose ourselves in weren’t ones we could imagine as our in-group by any stretch of the imagination.
You remember that scene in Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn and his soldiers are marching to the gates of Mordor? And…well…you know the quote:
Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of Men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand! Men of the West!
That was basically a pep rally. And by god, we cheered. Because Aragorn was worth cheering for.
Once I found my hive switch, so to speak, it’s been easier to appreciate patriotism and religion. Team sports still involves a little too much sweat, and pep rallies don’t mesh well with my auditory processing issues, but I can see in principle how someone might enjoy them.
And I guess you would ask why you would want to. But feeling like you’re really connected to other people, not just in a “they share my goals and seem okay” way but in a “these are my people, we form a tribe or a community or, while on horseback, a horde” way is one of life’s greatest pleasures and also a pretty important subgoal to anything that requires cooperation with other people. The only experience I can compare it to was being a kid and thinking I would never be dumb enough to waste time with crushes and romance, and then growing older and having the appropriate genetic payload unpack itself and tell me that this was a big part of what makes life worth living.
So my advice to anyone else who thinks they’re a hundred percent chimp and totally bee-less is to find an in-group that really is their in-group, then try again.
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