Social engineering: Why a technical mindset is a prosocial mindset

Humans have evolved to sometimes work and sometimes make war. That division has been imprinted in our social psychology.

Sebastaien Vrancx, Summer, between 1596 and 1601. Wikimedia Commons 

In a few posts I have, tentatively, tried to outline a concept: the warrior/worker mentality. I started this project a long time ago. In the summer of 2022 I wrote kind-of-a-book-review of Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin. Primates of Park Avenue (2016) describes the social environment among some of the ostensibly most privileged people on the planet: Urban women who are very well provided for by their rich husbands. In Wednesday Martin's account, those women behave more or less like mean and superficial teenage girls. They form social cliques around pointless issues like the choice of work-out method. They compete fiercely over fashion, using unjust methods like wearing summer clothes in February in order to be the first to wear a certain style of dress. And they play a game of chicken where older women with very exclusive handbags run into younger women with less expensive handbags as an act of domination and intimidation.

I concluded that there is only one important common denominator between these women in their 30s and 40s and the teenage girls they are behaving like: None of them work for a living. Both luxury wives and teenage girls are provided for by others. Thereby they have important parts of their days over for nurturing their conflicts.

In two more recent posts - Stress is about cheating and Real workers don't meditate - I have tried to highlight examples of the opposite situation: When work makes people more peaceful. 

Superficially, the principle looks simple: When people work with the material world, they are minding their own business. A person focusing on how seeds are sprouting or how wood is splitting has less mental capacity left for who-did-what and who-wears-what and who-is-with-whom. People who focus on the material world are simply turning their attention away from each other. 

But I strongly suspect that there are also deeper, evolved mechanisms behind the social psychology of people who work and of people who do not work. Throughout history, humans have alternated between making war over resources and working with those resources. During all that time, psychological mechanisms for sensing when to make war and when to work should have evolved.

And now to evolution

Today's humans are the descendants of three kinds of people: Warriors and workers, and of people who alternated between war and labor. 

Within societies, some people specialized in war and some in work. At the most primitive stage men tend to be more of warriors and women tend to be more of workers. At more advanced stages, a ruling warrior class with members of both sexes emerged, with workers of both sexes below them.

Some entire societies are also more warlike than others. In history, when two groups contested an area with good subsistence opportunities, the contestants had a choice: 

1. Stay and fight for the good area. 

2. Move away to an area that is not contested because no one else wants to be there. Make the area livable through working harder and being more innovative than others. 

We are the descendants of both kinds of people. Among the ancestors of modern humans there are both people who won the wars and grabbed the best spots and people who were militarily weaker but could learn to thrive in less ideal environments. Especially, on the male side we stem from warriors and on the female side we stem from less warlike, working populations. 

Infinitely flexible 

All-in-all, our ancestors had to be flexible. Sometimes it was time to fight, sometimes it was time to work. Unusually brave warriors tended  to have more children than average (if they didn't die too young). In a non-growing, Malthusian society those children mostly didn't reach the same social level as their father - many of them were pushed down to the level of the working population. And if not, the grandchildren were.¹

In Malthusian societies, warrior grandfathers tend to sire worker grandchildren. The warrior genomes that were only good for war didn't do very well in such an environment. Instead, flexibility should have been selected for: Genes that make people decent workers when they need to work and good warriors when they need to make war. 

For humans, both on the individual and societal level, fortunes change so rapidly that flexibility is the key to success. Humans should have evolved to go in and out of warrior mode and worker mode. Some individuals inevitably got more adapted to a warrior lifestyle, others more to a worker lifestyle. But most individuals are at least a bit flexible: They can both be part of working crews and troops of fighters.

The stresses of leisure 

In nature, leisure time means an environment where all necessities can be produced in a shorter time than humans have at their disposal. Leisure is the same thing as abundance. And everyone is after abundance. During almost our entire history as a species and even before that, people who had leisure time controlled resources that others wanted. 

There are a few exceptions, like when entirely new continents were discovered or after disasters like epidemics that killed off an important share of all people. But on most occasions the environment was fully populated. (If nothing else, the extinction of the Neanderthal people, the Denisovans and homo floresiensis is a sign of that. If there was plenty of space, different types of humans wouldn't have outcompeted each other.) Then people either had to fight for the good areas or move to the worse areas.

People who lived in a good area sooner or later had to fight to remain there. Over time, I think an instinct evolved: Whenever you have the opportunity to do what you feel like, make sure that you feel like preparing for war. Individuals, and groups of individuals who felt that they had to keep alert for current and future conflicts did better than people who used the leisure they were given to just practice the hobby of their choice. 

In history there are a few examples of members of comparatively leisured warrior classes who actually went all in with their nerdy interests. Notably in ancient Greece, where the (semi)leisured class was unusually broad and inclusive, individuals like Pythagoras and Archimedes and Socrates and Aristoteles could practice their interests and gather their followings. But at most times, in most places, leisured upper class people have had no time for such peacefully contemplative endeavors. They have been too busy competing for who is to remain a leisured exploiter and who is to get killed. 

For that reason I believe that humans have an instinct to use their excess free time to, socially speaking, arm themselves to the teeth. Whenever humans gather day after day with the only ostensible aim of having as much fun as possible and enjoying life as much as possible, an instinct arises among them: They have to defend their privilege of idleness. Some of them, especially young males, start to practice sports in order to keep physically fit and prepared. Others, especially females and older males, focus on creating alliances and fractions.

Social engineering

How to get people out of this arms-race? I think the answer is: Get them into working mode. As I outlined in my recent post Real workers do not meditate: People tend to gravitate toward a calm, peaceful state of mind when they work with the material world. At least as long as they are allowed some autonomy over their working conditions. 

There is no reason to believe that the peaceful working mode is only associated with manual work. The important part is not whether one uses one's hands or not, but where one's focus lies. Engineers who program machines all day still focus on the material world. That, I believe, should send them into worker mode. I have no hard data, but I think there are some loose empirical indications that support this assumption: I'm not alone in observing that workplaces heavy in engineers are comparatively free from drama.

As long as the material world asks something from people, they need to humbly bend their necks and try to achieve that thing. When the material world asks nothing from people, they can use all their resources for intriguing. And the one who intrigues the best, wins.

Nowadays, in high-tech societies, the market has replaced the material world to an important degree. The modern equivalent of working together to get a good harvest is working together to produce a marketable product. 

Working together to achieve a good harvest was not completely conflict-free. Working together to please the market is also not completely conflict-free. It is only comparatively conflict-free compared to when people have no, or only weak and manipulable, outside demands to meet. 

Academia is one example. Academia is supposed to produce good research. Academia itself decides what is good research. It actually does produce some of what society at large would call good research. It also produces an abundance of well-paid and comfortable jobs with rather loose job descriptions. So it is attracting many people who want a comfortable job. The applicant who is the best at colluding with those already on the inside over what is “good research” will get the job. For that reason, academia is known as a hotbed for social intrigues. Especially parts of academia that do not work with materially tangible results, like the social sciences. In the hard natural sciences, results can come and overwhelm researchers a bit, forcing them to adapt. In disciplines like sociology, history and anthropology, that seldom happens. Academics can talk whatever bullshit they themselves make fashionable. And they can use much of their days for fighting over what kind of talk should be fashionable and not.

Mind your own business

If humans have adapted to sense when it is time for war and work, there must be triggers that set in motion warrior and worker mode respectively. Finding those triggers should be the holy grail of social engineering. How much resources haven't been spent trying to make people bicker less and work more constructively together? In particular, enormous resources are being spent on making institutions like schools work as intended instead of being overtaken by conflicts between the inmates.

For that reason, I'm a bit surprised that the warrior/worker distinction is not an established concept in sociology. If humans evolved to be capable of both making war and working peacefully, a very important part of social engineering should be about how to make them choose the latter (because, thankfully, modern high-tech society is the most peaceful in history, which I wrote about in my post Capitalism put an end to systematic warfare).

The things I'm writing about here are far from unknown. They are part of human wisdom. There are many old sayings about the virtues of work. But wisdom is not the same thing as science. As work became more specialized, fewer people were needed in workplaces. In this now, an increasing share of all people are becoming considered more disturbing than useful in the labor market. Young people are especially felt to be a nuisance. I assume that part of the reason for the rise of higher education is that adults don't want to work together with teenagers. They prefer to cooperate with people who are more like them. And the easiest way to discriminate in favor of slightly older people is to convince yourself that a person needs x years of higher education for this or that kind of work.

When a large share of all people are no longer wanted in the labor market, the idea that work is a virtue has faded in our society. As far as I can think of, it has only been consistently kept by one growing minority: The Amish.

I believe it is not a coincidence that the Amish are both staunch pacifists and diligent workers. They simply fill out a niche in human psychology: The worker niche. The Amish chose that niche already in the 17th century. They forbade status symbols and employment in the military or administration, since the latter was seen as part of the military. By that time, they didn't physically stand out much from the rest of the population, because most people were workers. 

It was only in the 20th century that the majority population got the opportunity to strive for anything else than the status of humble workers. In the 1910s, the Amish started to restrict technology. In hindsight, that looks like an ingenious decision. Many other religious groups preached the virtues of humble work. Few of them exist in their former shape today. Technology took away manual work with meditative effects and replaced it with highly cooperative intellectual work with high administrative burdens. That way it became difficult for people to keep their worker mindsets. However much they agreed in theory that the worker mindset is an ideal, it was difficult for them to stick to it once they, and their children, were no longer workers in the traditional sense.

The Amish made their members keep the worker mindset through forcing them to continue working roughly the way humans have always worked. Donald Craybill, ethnographer of the Amish, writes: 

“Their fundamental fear is that a particular technology will alter the bonds of community over time. “What will it lead to next?” Amish people often ask.”²

Amish congregations strive at only allowing technologies that they believe will not destroy their social fabric. I interpret that way of reasoning as if the Amish actually know that there is a worker mode in human psychology. 

I'm just waiting for science to catch up on that knowledge. While machines are changing the landscape of work and leisure, our instincts are stuck in the past. The leisure caused by abundance could be a blessing, if we could use it with regard to our social nature. If we can't do that, abundance will just send us into a mode of mutual destruction.

1. Gregory Clark makes this claim in A Farewell to Alms, 2007

2. Donald Craybill, The Amish, 2013, 61 percent of e-book