Writing is the great primate equalizer - or should be

A lack of primate-level fear makes the internet awful. But sometimes it can also make it more constructive than reality.

Almost everyone agrees that the internet has made public discourse deteriorate. "Idiot" must be one of the most well-used words in online conversations. Some people are a bit more sophisticated and have made a sport out of insulting each other in more inventive ways.

How did this arrive? It seems simple: In real life, people are a bit afraid of each other. Insulting someone face to face is not completely risk-free. Situations can escalate. People can get violent. Just a few hundred years ago, significantly more people than today were killed in quarrels starting with insults. There were even codexes for how two men were supposed to fight out their grievances. First in the form of judicial duels, then in extra-judicial duels. 

A fear of insulting people face to face should be as ingrained in us as a fear of snakes. As centuries went by, human societies developed new and inventive ways of minimizing the damage caused by insults. A combination of widely observed politeness norms combined with a certain indifference to occasions when insults nonetheless occurred resulted in a society that mostly focused on more important things than insults.

Then came the internet. For the first time in history, insulting people became virtually cost-free. It wasn't like everybody immediately started throwing insults at each other. But the lower cost of insulting people tipped the balance. With the internet, the people who liked to insult others and were good at it got an unprecedented advantage. They could gain much more status advantages online than in the real world, where costs deter them. That way, much of social media tends to be dominated by good insulters.

Unpleasant feeling

There are two reasons to believe that the foremost reason why humans are polite and friendly to each other is fear. 

1. Public discourse collapsed with the internet

2. Family members very often have a hard time being friendly to each other. Spouses and siblings have a tendency to speak to each other like the worst of Twitter trolls as soon as they disagree over anything. They (mostly, hopefully) have one thing in common with strangers meeting on Twitter: They don't fear each other.

Family members, just like strangers who meet online, need to find other reasons to be friendly than primal fear of each other. One of those reasons is that people simply feel better from living in a friendly environment. A feeling that probably has deep evolutionary roots (drawing on my general reasoning about the evolutionary causes behind human happiness): Humans are cooperative animals. Once upon a time, being among friends was one of the most important determinants of survival. Humans evolved an instinct to feel dissatisfied when surrounded by people who don't seem to like them and appreciate them. People surrounded by a lack of appreciation get unhappy and seek ways to situations where they get better appreciated. 

Different people have different degrees of aversion to verbal disputes. Personally, I'm over-sensitive to the degree that for most of my life, I seldom participated in online discussions. Before I made the decision to start a blog, I was the persistent lurker everywhere I went. Although I both like to meet people and discuss things, I rarely managed to do so online. Most of all, I didn't dare to post anything without thinking for at least half a day first; I was too nervous I would offend someone unintentionally. The negative feeling of getting into a you-are-an-idiot conversation was bad enough to deter me from online conversations in general.

The benefits of fearlessness

As I finally, step by step, overcame my fears of discussing things online, I made a much happier observation. The lack of primal fear, and primal feelings in general, has an upside too. A lack of primal fear is bad when people keep on to most other primal instincts. On the internet, people are mostly just as ape-ish as usual, everyone is just more emboldened. But online discussions can also be a partial escape from our ape-ish reality. Online, it doesn't matter as much who is young or old, beautiful or plain, tall or short, male or female.

I guess I appreciate that more than many other people for one reason: I'm not scoring very high in the real-life flock of primates. Primatologist Frans de Waal maintains that people are constantly reading the power relationships of our surroundings, just like any ape. For no rational reason, people are more impressed with tall males than by short males (but much by tall females)¹. Deep voices are more impressive than more shrill voices². And so on.

I assume I get rather few points in that game. I'm female. I'm not tall. I have a weak voice that tends to drown in background sounds. There surely are people with those physical features who are succeeding rather well in making the best of it. But I don't. To the contrary, I mostly give a flimsy impression. Recently, when I went to a prenatal check-up, my midwife said something like: "There really are many thoughts in your little head". I know, it sounds offensive written down like this, but it wasn't. She just said what I assume many people think of me: That I am not to be taken too seriously. Mostly, it suits me rather well, because not being disliked by people is my number one priority. Someone unserious is someone unthreatening.

Still, there is an obvious downside to being perceived as flimsy and almost immature: If I ever think of anything that I consider actually worthy of being taken seriously, I'm badly equipped to transmit it. 

Between equality and authenticity

That is, if I don't write it down and carefully edit out all flimsiness from it. Then it will not be me, really. It will only be the most serious part of me, condensed and artificially free from all the rest of me.

That is, of course, inauthentic. When I read a text I tend to be very interested in the person behind that text. Why do they think like that? How did they reach those conclusions?

Communicating solely through writing is good because it can make serious thinking stand out from our other primate, all too primate, properties. The limits of writing lie in the same place: If any person ever succeeds in thinking something serious, that serious thinking came to being in the body of a primate living in a world of primates. Especially thinking on social issues. All of us who are thinking about humans and society, are doing so at least in part while acting human in a human society. Such thinking will be more meaningful if people can trace that process: What primate is saying this? What is their relation to other primates?

That way, I assume there is an ideal balance between the equality of writing and the authenticity of audiovisual media. Thinking about it, I'm probably currently on the too inauthentic side of that balance myself. I mean, most writers who are not hardcore anonymous actually post a photo of themselves. I haven't done that, for two reasons:

1. My husband and co-blogger prefers to be obscure and inauthentic, thank you very much. 

2. I'm not good at posing for photos and taking selfies, so I'm looking more or less weird on all photos there are. I assume that most people today are rather good at taking selfies, or take many enough that at least one or two look decent. That means that if I publish a photo of myself where I look stupid/angry/confused/depressed/whatever, people will think that I want to give exactly that impression. Otherwise I would have chosen a picture where I look normally social, right? The truth is that I don't have any pictures where I look entirely nice and normal!

With this disclaimer in place, I can catch up a little bit on the side of authenticity and publish a photo of myself.

Never looked more normal

1. Frans de Waal, Different - Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, 2022, 54 percent

2. Frans de Waal, Different - Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, 2022, 60-61 percent