A common pass time for the human is to watch others. This is called people watching. When in public many people will put there masks on so that they seem normal to the other humans that are watching and analysing them.
This week I sought to investigate why humans have these layers. Granted there are some who do not. They behave how they want to and do not care about what people think. It is in understanding why and when people put on their masks that we can start to understand ourselves a little bit better.
My exploration began by trying to determine whether humans are the only creatures on this planet that do this. I found that other species do this to. As I have said before, we are a social species and exist in groups. Because of this ancient instinct to live in a pack, the human comes packaged with a arsenal of instincts that bolster the functionality of the pack as a whole. For example, most humans will instinctively grab a kid out of the way of a car, even though they might not ever have met the child before. We are programmed to lookout for our young. It is not even something we think about.
We are not the only pack oriented species. One of the most complex is the honey bee. Although these creatures are unintelligent insects individually, together they function as a highly intelligent creature. What makes this possible is the unrelenting devotion that every individual has to the pack. Everyone pulls their weight.
When a bee flies over alcohol and becomes intoxicated, the other bees can immediately tell. The drunk behavior of the intoxicated bee causes the others to single him out and bite off the offender's legs:
(same video but posted twice in case one is broken)
It breaks my heart to watch.
Why did they attack him? It is clear that the bee is having a problem functioning. The other bees notice this very quickly and immobilize him because to them he is a kink in the armor. His clunky behavior is slowing the pack down. For the survival of the pack, he must be killed. These behaviors exist in all pack animals. Should an individual become a radical renegade, he is ostracized from the group. This is also true with monkeys. When a drugged individual is introduced to the group, the group members become violent towards him. Strange behavior is disruptive to the functioning of the group and this is bad for the disruptor.
Similar to the bees and monkeys, humans also harbor this ancient instinct, and as instincts often do, it surfaces in our societal behavior patterns, despite our higher intelligence. When a human becomes defective, he is isolated from the group. This is achieved through jail, mental institutions, and drug rehabilitation centers (having reread that last sentence a month later, I now cannot make up my mind about whether humanity really isolates our defective citizens).
This leads me back to my original pondering. We humans are constantly questioning whether our upcoming actions are going to be socially acceptable. This is where this idea of layers comes in. We base our actions off of what we want to do, and what society wants us to do. We have built into us a need to fit in with the pack. This is because those who don't fit in are considered harmful to the rest of the pack and are dealt with accordingly. We have a need to conform because in a pack we are a more successful creature.
As we break further and further away from the confines of evolution, we are starting to question which behaviors are left over from our past, and why. The majority of us will conform, and be safe and content during our meaningless lives, but there exists in our species the free thinker. These people can be the driving force towards human progression, or can become dangerous and harmful to society. Regardless, their function is necessary for human progression.
Somewhere along the line we stop leaving our free thinkers for dead. Sometimes we isolate, other times we imprison, but these people fill a very important role. They refuse to behave as society wants. They think of the world differently and their ideas have rocked the human race time and time again. These individuals lack the need to conform. It is a wonderful behavioral flaw. Depending on the intelligence of the free thinker, he either sees the world in a negative way and because a harmful person, or sees the world in a new way. A way that humans have not viewed the world before.
Engels, for example, was a free thinker who was very intelligent. He saw the world from a perspective that hadn't been seen before. Whenever a free thinker of this magnitude comes along, he/she changes the way in which all humans view existence. You know many of these free thinkers by name. They are immortalized withing the human mind network. They shatter the old social norms and reconstruct them into something better. These are the heroes of humanity. Lincoln, Gandhi, Jesus etc..
They saw problems with the societal norms and they had the courage to intentionally go against them. There actions electrify all of us.
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