The Sydney Morning Herald publishes: “Rick Morton has won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his non-fiction book [Mean Streak: A moral vacuum, a dodgy debt generator and a multi-billion-dollar government shake down]. He’d trade it all for justice for the victims.”
No, he wouldn’t, unless he was playing a status game.
We did not evolve to give things to non-relatives for no self-interested reason.
UCLA psychologist David Pinsof writes: “There is no Darwinian incentive for an organism to act “for the good of the species.” Instead, organisms evolve to act for the good of themselves and their genetic relatives—and against their rivals.”
So when people talk about their unpaid moral work for people not related to them, you know that they are engaged in a showy performative status game.
The two easiest paths to fame are to give something away and to publish a book.
Rick Morton is on his way.
A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:
I look at a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the pursuit of happiness or the meaning of life. Maybe it’s our desire to change people’s minds or make the world a better place. Maybe it’s the idea that we don’t care what others think.
I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.
If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.
I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”
I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.
I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.
The most important part of this formula is step 3—the part about what does or doesn’t “make evolutionary sense.” This step is rarely taken by anyone who thinks about humans. It’s as if the human psyche emerged from a bolt of lightning and not from millions of years of natural selection. When people talk about why Bob voted for Trump or Jane can’t find a date or Otto is depressed, they rarely reflect on the fact that Bob, Jane, and Otto are animals, and so are they. Whenever people do reflect on their evolutionary origins, they usually aren’t very reflective about it. They think about cavemen hitting each other with clubs or David Attenborough doing a voiceover while a bird performs a mating display.
