ON INSTINCTUAL / SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

Culture and community behaviour are closely associated. Varying cultures of different human societies inflict different patterns of social behaviour from basic animal instincts that we all have and are born with. The result will vary from person to person, with animalistic dominant behaviour in some people, and acquired human personalities more evident in the behaviour of others. This could partially be due to the ‘Neanderthal’ man interbreeding with ‘Cro-Magnon’ man, two early species of humanoids, over 30,000 year ago.

You would have met people who behaved in ways that made you feel welcome, and also people who had left you feeling unwelcome and insignificant; well this is instinctual behaviour working. While cultures differ in many ways, there are certain things that all cultures seem to have in one-way or another. These cultural paths include religions, values, games, music, education, leadership, family units, traditions, beliefs etc.

Humans like all other social animals do not automatically learn how to behave appropriately in a social setting. Sociology recognizes that some instinctual drives, such as hunger, thirst, the need to sleep, and so on, do not need much learning. Such drives like these explain only basic behaviour, it cannot explain the complexity of modern human social behaviour. I believe that human social behaviour is something that involves a great deal of education (filling the empty vessels with data), and little of instincts. A child raised by Apes will act like an Ape same as one living with chickens will act like a chicken (research wild children). So if the parents and in some case society fail to teach the child basic social behaviour, what hope has that child got to be a social being? Some studies have shown that a child still in the womb can be open to social experiences.

Studying a bit about Instinct behaviour might help us understand us, the “greedy” human a little better. For this, we can have a look at animal behaviour, which is mostly controlled by instinct. All an animal lives for is breeding, that is all their purpose in life is to reproduce, and everything they do like eating is based around this one goal. They don’t desire grand homes to live in, nor holidays to enjoy or fancy cars to drive. All animals, including us, have an inbuilt program to reproduce, if we don’t reproduce, our species dies out. This goes against evolution.

 Animals don’t learn about how they are to act as much as we do (we act mostly to please others) they use instinctual hierarchal dominance structures (in social groups such as us). They cannot predict what may happen in the future therefore cannot plan, or innovate new and better ways to do things very well, we can, and that’s the difference. You have to remember that we are “just animals” in the broad sense, but we have evolved many complicated social instructions to follow in our life, but really, in the end, just as it is for all other animals, it’s all to do with propagating.

Today, I don’t think that our basic instincts are enough to insure our survival anymore. We have surpassed this level of basic existence and into a controlled and structured system governed by laws. We have become overly complicated in our means and ways. We now need to have advanced technologies such as what we are seeing in farming practices to see us evolve. An animal does not have the choices in life such as we do and they survive on a very basic social structure, the strongest at the top. In the animal world mutations, unhealthy or the elderly do not survive. This is nature ensuring species stay as healthy and strong as they can.

Life itself has no real purpose and no fundamental meaning other than the need to carry on their genetics. It's the ultimate random numbers game. You are alive because your parents had sex, nothing more and nothing less. There is no more purpose to a human life than the life of a dandelion, or goldfish, dog or a fly. Is there a god who created all this? Is that truly as important as the fact that all this is here? We give meaning to life past basic needs. Our purpose is to impress, too be an idol and be idolised. Most of our life is spent doing things that have no natural requirement. Even eating has become something we take for granted. If we are hungry we simply go to the fridge or fast food restaurant and fill our tanks. In the natural world you have to work very hard to get food. 10,000 odd years ago, almost all of our time was hunting and gathering. If the iphone was invented back them our species would have died out as we would have no time to hunt!

Only the actions you choose in life have purpose or meaning. This is only because we assign them “a” purpose and “a” meaning. For instance, work has a purpose because we make it important. By working we can achieve social and cultural imperatives like hierarchical order (as being the strongest no longer gives us status for a male). Nature is done with us in our current form; we are perfect animals that have reached species perfection. It is only now our stupidity that challenges nature. Sharks are a species that have stopped evolving, crocodiles are another. Obviously is the climate changes and or humans die out they may start evolving again.

The theory that human behaviour is not instinctive is further supported by the observations of humans who did not have normal human company during infancy. There have been many reports of children (called Feral Children) who grew up with animals, or were locked up in solitude and thus being deprived of ‘normal’ human interaction and contact. In many of these cases, it was reported that they had not learned how to be a human. They were unable to speak, and some were unable to even walk upright on two legs, they just did not behave as humans normally do. These humans living with animals ate raw meat, defecated where and when the urge came to them, and so on. If there were any human instincts telling them how to act as modern humans, they should have behaved more like modern humans, even without human trainers. This example can be used, instead of animals use parents, if a child grows up with abusive, neglecting and uncaring parents, the characteristics of that child will most likely mimic it’s parents behaviour.

It is a process of cultural socialisation. It’s in all human societies that we teach human behaviour onto young members. An example I observed in relation to cultural characteristics was while watching a engineering documentary about building a train line across America. When the Chinese helped build one side of the railway that joined America east to west (after Americans who started this side quit to chase gold), they did so without creating towns run by crime, prostitution and gambling. On the other side building the train track to meet the Chinese workers were the Americans whom stayed on to build the line. Their dirty, criminal, greedy ways got so bad in their towns that the government had to bring in the use of law and order to solve the unethical problem. Keep in mind here that laws are imposed onto our culture as many fail to act in moral ways. Simply meaning that if humans cannot do the right thing, then laws have to be enforced.

So why were to cultures so different? One culture was based on greed and disrespect, while the other was based on pride and respect. This brings me to the theory that some cultures have good ethics, and some do not. Cultures take many, many years of development, learning and adapting. America was then a country that had no good long term values because it is based on impatient greed and immoral behaviour from people seeking prosperity.

The human infant is a completely helpless creature that needs the support of older humans for a long time. Children learn to walk, talk, and behave appropriately by observing their parents and guardians, and or by other secondary people with whom they come into close contact with. In addition to observation, they are also actively trained to be humans through a system of rewards and punishments. For example, the mother encourages desirable behaviour by smiling at or hugging the infant if they do something good. Undesirable behaviour may be punished with a frown, a loud shout, smack or otherwise. This process is called socialisation, a process that transforms the infant into a social person.

Not only do we learn physical things like walking and talking, but also such concepts as right and wrong, suitable ways of dealing with people, and so forth. This initial socialisation by those intimate with the infant is the primary training to which exerts a lifelong influence on the person. If a child has no good teaches who are teaching good socialisation skills, how do you think that child is going to grow?

I use this test I thought up when talking to other people to see what they think humans would be like without parental guidance: If scientists put 20 young children, 15 females and 5 males, onto a island and left them alone without any outside contact at all for 30 years (meaning they had no past generations knowledge to learn from) what would you find when you went back after the 30 years? I believe that they would be no more intelligent than primitive cavemen. They would have their own basic language of noises and instinctual social structure, which would be dominated by the Alfa male. I also doubt that they would even be able to develop fire or even create shelter. In reality, most of them if not all would have died in this experiment as they would not know what to eat, how to make shelter etc. The argumentative point I was making was simply proving that with no human interaction or education the human children are as fragile as any other animal left to defend itself in the natural world.

Our children have no idea what they are in for as they face this false un-natural existence!

During a typical person's life, he or she is likely to interact much more with strangers than with family members, school being the prime example here. This would require skills different from those needed for dealing with intimate family members. A process of secondary socialisation occurs when one begins to deal with others such as teachers, classmates, workmates and any other members of society.

Even television, radio and the computer, are now all playing a part in teaching secondary socialisation (which we will start to see the effects of soon by way of losing direct contact). The social conditioning of its members by society is likely to be a completely new experience compared to the socialisation in a family environment. This secondary socialisation is very important because it determines whether we are socially successful or not, whether we can get along well with others of our society and whether we become shy and introverted. If one does not know how to deal with non-family members, their lives could become intolerable, as they will have to deal with much anxiety and social phobias, which can lead to other mental problems like depression.

So, in a world changing fast, and in a world getting smaller, I feel unique culture is rapidly being lost and forgotten. The collective insight I get from my research is that culture and social expectations are quickly being forgotten and replaced with laziness and the inability to support the family unit, and if you lose the family, how can we keep our society. Take the train line example I used. If our world and ways are resembling the USA, then its little wonder why the world needs more laws and control. This is the price of freedom and independence.